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£17 million for academies to support schools
EB News: 19/07/2019 - 09:26
Education Secretary Damian Hinds has announced a £17 million fund to help high-performing academy trusts to grow and support more schools across England.
The Trust Capacity Fund will be used by high performing academy trusts to build on the rising standards in many sponsored academy schools, by ensuring they can provide support to communities and schools that need it most.
The financing will help provide high-potential academy trusts, who have emerging capacity to improve other schools, with funding to meet challenges associated with taking on more schools in different contexts as they develop, deploy school improvement support quickly across a trust, and support collaboration between schools.
Recent figures highlight that there are 380,000 children now studying in good or outstanding sponsored academies that were previously underperforming council-run schools – and that seven in 10 previously under-performing schools, have been rated good or outstanding by Ofsted since becoming an academy.
Hinds said: “Strong academy trusts across the country are already supporting schools in many of the communities that need it the most and this funding will help this to happen in even more areas. Academies are at the heart of our reforms to education and just last week new data revealed that the last year has seen 80,000 more children studying in good or outstanding sponsored academies that were previously run by local authorities which is why we must continue to give these charitable institutions the opportunity to turn around more schools.”
The Department for Education has also announced a new £16.5 million package of support to help 2,400 underperforming schools to improve their leadership. This includes advice from National Leaders of Education to help schools improve.
Ofsted has announced it will be holding a programme of sector engagement events in September to go alongside the final set of education inspection reforms.
Overstretched children’s social care services has led to an alarming number of children leaving the care system and becoming homeless, not in employment or not in education, according to a report by the Education Committee.
A new report suggests the free schools programme in England has generally had positive impacts on pupil outcomes at secondary, including GCSE and A-Level attainment and secondary school absence.
A new report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) finds that the Department for Education (DfE) lacks a coherent plan, suitable targets and sufficient evidence of what works as it seeks to improve teacher recruitment and retention.