The academies system has been constantly evolving for more than two decades.
What started as a small number of city academies at the turn of the millennium has now become a defining feature of the last 14 years of education policy.
Since the massive expansion of the academies programme was launched by the coalition government in 2010, the number of schools becoming academies has grown and a landscape of multi-academy trusts (MATs) has been created.
This system continues to change. The government set the target of all schools being part of a MAT by 2030 and each month schools will be converted into academies or moved between trusts.
But who decides which MATs should be allowed to grow, which trusts should run particular schools, and when is the right time for trusts to merge or dissolve?
Since 2022, the Department for Education’s nine regional directors (RDs) have led the decision making for each area of the country.
These RDs are each supported by a regional advisory board that holds monthly meetings. The DfE describes the boards’ roles as providing a “source of challenge and insight” on academy-related decisions.
What are regional advisory boards?
These groups - spread across each of the nine government regions of England and formerly known as headteacher boards - “advise and challenge” regional directors.
RDs act on behalf of the education secretary, making decisions on schools, children’s social care, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and much more.
Advisory boards consist of up to eight members: four are elected by local academy headteachers; two are appointed by regional directors; and a further two on the agreement of DfE ministers.
Notes from the meetings of the advisory board are published once key stakeholders have been informed of the regional director’s decisions and have had the opportunity to respond. Tes is including analysis of the monthly board minutes as part of its newly launched MAT Tracker.
Regional directors and their responsibilities
Regional directors are senior civil servants responsible for commissioning services and overseeing decision making over the growth of trusts and movement of schools.
They make decisions on the creation and growth of MATs, academy sponsor matches and significant changes to academies, as well as decisions on new free schools.
However, RDs can escalate decisions to ministers in some circumstances, for example, if they are “sensitive”, if they “raise issues of interpretation of government policy” or if they relate to “urgent safeguarding or extremism concerns”.
There are nine regional directors covering different regions in England: London, North West, North East, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, South West, South East and Yorkshire and the Humber.
The role of RD replaced the previous role of regional schools commissioners (RSCs) to “reflect their evolving role” and former RSC John Edwards was hired as the head of the Department for Education’s new Regions Group.
When the DfE first created RSCs in 2014, the department drew up a new regional map of England with each RSC responsible for one of the newly created areas. RSC regions included splitting London into three separate areas and the creation of new areas such as the Lancashire and West Yorkshire region and the East Midlands and Humber region. When the RSCs were replaced with RDs, the system switched to using the main nine government regions.
In its guidance, the department said it expects MATs to take on challenging schools and welcome disadvantaged children from their local area.
Other expectations include that trusts should operate a well-planned reserves policy that provides sufficient money for cash flow and any unplanned, urgent expenditure in schools.
In this, it says that for each of its descriptions of MAT quality, the DfE will break down evidence into three categories:
Headline metrics “to help us build our hypothesis and prompt further questions”.
Verifiers “to provide more in-depth data for a richer understanding of the trust”.
Qualitative evidence, which “enables us to explore areas where data is not easily available or where it does not tell the whole story”.
The DfE guidance says that no single metric will be used to determine trust quality and that it will assess a range of evidence to give a rounded picture.
It also says that the DfE’s regional directors will “assess the strategic needs of the school, of the academy trust, and of the local area” when making decisions about moving schools into trusts.
It will also “use quantitative and qualitative evidence to consider factors relating to the quality of academy trusts and align the strategic needs of the school, the academy trust and the local area with trust quality factors to reach a recommendation”.
What MAT growth is the DfE looking for?
The DfE has also produced development statements setting out its priorities for trust growth in all of the country’s 55 Education Investment Areas.
This revealed that the DfE wants trusts to merge, consolidate or form clusters in many of these identified areas of educational underperformance.
The department is now working to produce trust development statements for the remaining local authority areas of England, setting out the direction it wants to see the school system travelling in in all areas of the country.
