The head of England’s biggest multi-academy trust has said councils should not have a role running MATs, but should be given a say in who takes over schools in their area.
Sir Jon Coles, the chief executive of United Learning, said local authorities should also be able to trigger a process for moving a school out of a MAT into new management if there is sustained underperformance.
Speaking earlier today at a Westminster Education Forum session on the next steps for the school system, Sir Jon said that councils would be conflicted if they had a role commissioning who runs schools but were also running academy trusts themselves.
He was speaking after the government announced plans earlier this year for councils to be able to establish academy trusts, with the Department for Education planning for all schools to be in or moving towards being in a MAT by 2030.
In his speech today, Sir Jon said: “I would argue quite strongly that local authorities need to have a commissioning voice. They need to be able to give some kind of input into the process of deciding who is going to run schools in their area.
Councils ‘cannot be involved in running academy trusts’
“Nobody cares as much about the quality of a local school as the local community. The local authority is the natural voice of the local community. But you cannot have local authorities having this commissioning role, which is essentially a purchasing role, and also being a provider in the system.
“To do these roles well, local authorities must be unconflicted and, therefore, in my view, cannot be involved in running trusts.”
The government’s Schools White Paper launched earlier this year included plans for the creation of council-established trusts.
And the DfE is set to run a trial with a number of local authorities to explore how a council-established school trust could operate.
It has said that 29 local authorities - around one in five of the education authorities in England - have expressed an interest in being involved in the trial.
Sir Jon also said that a school should be moved out of a MAT if it is found to be underperforming - irrespective of how strong the trust is overall.
He added: “If a school is doing badly it should be given to new management and the key point here is that’s got nothing to do with how good the trust is overall.
“If a school is doing poorly for a sustained period of time then there should be a change in management. We need that dynamism in the system.”
Sir Jon said: “If you take us as a trust, we’ve got 78 academies at this moment and, yes, we are doing extremely well overall.
“But actually, if we are doing badly in one place and one of our schools is poor . . . and we can’t improve when challenged then it should be taken from us.”
He added that the natural people to trigger this process are local authorities, “who are the natural representatives of the community”.
At the same event Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, said the government needs “to be addressing teacher recruitment, retention and the supply of teachers coming through the system.”
