Damian Hinds will today pledge to make the secretive system the decides the fate of thousands of schools across England more transparent.

The education secretary is responding to concerns about the eight regional schools commissioners (RSCs) that together oversee the 7,000 academies in England, and the headteacher boards (HTBs) that advise them.

RSCs and their HTBs have grown increasingly powerful since they were introduced in 2014, deciding the fate of schools labelled “inadequate” by Ofsted, deemed “coasting”, or falling below the floor standard, and choosing who takes over struggling academies.

Tes has highlighted concerns about the lack of transparency about how such decisions are made.

Although brief records of HTB meeting are published - sometimes months after the meetings were held - they do not disclose the reasons why decisions were made, or the hundreds of pages of background papers on which they were based.

Tes understands that the new approach will include the publication of more details of the issues discussed, and the reasons why RSCs made individual decisions.

Schools will also be notified in advance that they will be discussed at headteacher board meetings, allowing them to make representations to HTB members.

A DfE policy document published today says: “We will be more transparent about how we take decisions about schools, and the role of headteacher boards in particular.

“Headteacher boards are made up of outstanding system leaders who know their local area. They advise RSCs on their decisions.

“We will make available records of their discussions, and advance notification of which schools they are discussing, in order to make the system more transparent.”

The RSC and HTB system have been the subject of long-running concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability.

A Tes investigation discovered that information considered by HTBs but that was hidden from the public included the fact an academy trust had been investigated for payments made to its directors, the fact the growth of an academy trust a minister had urged urged to expand rapidly had become an “issue”, and that an unofficial Ofsted report was used to justify turning a school into an academy,

Last September, then-education secretary Justine Greening told Tes that she wanted “to see more transparency”, and national schools commissioner Sir David Carter, who oversees the RSC system, told Tes that increasing the transparency of the system was a “priority”.