Department for Education publishes response to academies report

The Department for Education has published its response to the education committee’s report on academies and free schools.

The report stated that there was no clear evidence “academies raise standards overall” and made a series of recommendations to address concerns about conflicts of interest in governance, lack of transparency, inadequate oversight and the dangers of rapid conversion of secondary schools.

In response to this, the DfE has said it will allow Ofsted to “inspect” multi-academy trusts (MATs).

The department said it had launched a consultation on “measuring the performance of schools within academy chains and local authorities.”

The DfE response said “We … commit to publishing both a consultation document on this proposed methodology and the accompanying performance data at KS4 for medium and large chains and LAs before the end of the Parliament. This consultation will invite comments as to the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed methodology.”

The DfE said it would also analyse the relationship between academy status and outcomes at KS1 and KS2.

The response added: “We agree with the Committee that it is important to continue to analyse how well academy status works in the primary phase.

“To carry out such analysis requires a large enough number of primary academies to have been open long enough to have a reasonable time series of results which can be analysed.

“We are only now reaching such a position, and will be undertaking this analysis in 2015.”

Recommendations to give Ofsted a role in grading “innovation”; committing to increase the number of regional schools commissioners, and changing the way transparency is ensured at the Education Funding Agency were rejected by the DfE though.

It also disagreed with the education committee report’s conclusions that it is too early to tell if academies are working.

The DfE said it was “absolutely clear” on the impact academies and free schools have had on children’s achievement, adding: “Recent results show the impact the academies and free schools programmes have had.

“The first wave of primary sponsored academies that opened by September 2012 has seen the proportion of pupils achieving level four or above in reading, writing and maths increase by nine percentage points since opening.

“This is double the rate of improvement seen across all schools.”