School leaders have been offered a glimpse of how the government’s new approach to academies will work, with officials deploying “soft levers” to encourage small schools to convert and build capacity in the system.
But Baroness Barran, the academies minister, this week insisted a planned shake-up of school commissioning would not equate to “a kind of algorithm that sends people to the top or the bottom”.
As part of the academies commissioning review, the government pledged to introduce a new, “more transparent” system of decision-making over school sponsorship, conversion and trust mergers.
Barran said this week she wants an approach that is “as transparent as possible… because what we’ve heard from all of you was it felt like it was at best a black box, and at worst a kind of list of the friends of the regional director”.
