£17 million for academies to support schools

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.

On 12 July it was reported that more than 300 primary schools across England have been forced to become academies in the last three years.