England’s biggest academy trust will have to give up more of its schools as it continues efforts to turn its fortunes around, Tes has learned.

Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) is often cited as an academy chain that grew too fast, and has faced criticism from Ofsted over academic performance, and from the Department for Education over its finances.

The trust has already lost more than a tenth of the 77 schools it had at its peak, and now chief executive Julian Drinkall has revealed that yet more will be transferred to other sponsors.

Mr Drinkall, who joined AET in January 2017, said that getting the right mix of schools was the one part of his strategic plan where he “hasn’t really ticked it all off”.

He told Tes that “there are more that we are meant to have rebrokered”.

Asked how many more rebrokerings were in the pipeline, he said: “Three rebrokers have been agreed. One closure has been agreed. Forgive me for being a little bit vague - we have got a handful, shall we say, of other schools that are in that portfolio consideration.”

‘Financial stability’

He added: “The thing that can be a little bit daunting is that rebroker and everyone goes, ‘Oh my God, AET, it’s a catastrophe.’ The point is that it’s all history stuff, and it’s stuff that we are trying to sort out so we get back to a baseline.”

He said the rebrokerings had not happened earlier because of delays at the DfE.

AET’s recovery passed a milestone last July when the DfE lifted the financial notice to improve that it had imposed in 2014, and Mr Drinkall said that on a like-for-like basis AET had halved its deficit in the past financial year, and that in the current year “it will end up delivering a figure that is very close to break-even”.

He reiterated that the DfE is now happy for AET to start expanding its primary and special school numbers, but not secondary schools.

Mr Drinkall said a review of the governance at AET schools he carried out last year had led to all of its headteachers sitting on the governing bodies of one or two other AET academies.

He told Tes: “The initial drive was to make sure we had great governors and then suddenly the benefit emerged: ‘Hold on, we could start to create system help,’ plus it has the benefit of being relatively economical. But the real thing here is that these guys all get this professional experience that is really helpful for them.”

He said it was “not a huge commitment”, and added: “The resistance to it has been negligible. We had the first instance of people saying, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to travel 300 miles,’ and then you just shift it around if it’s an impractical ask.”

This is an edited article from the 9 March edition of Tes. Subscribers can read the full article here. To subscribe, click here. This week’s Tes magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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