Alternative provision slipping through the regulatory net: a shocking game of bureaucratic pass-the-parcel

Perhaps the most staggering aspect of our tale of the “Aspire” alternative provision service being delivered for some of the most vulnerable children across an entire council area has been the responses provided by those in charge.

Between them, the statements by the academy trust running it, the local authority commissioning and funding the service, Ofsted which is supposed to be responsible for inspecting it, and the Department for Education, overseeing its regulation, make for depressing reading.

Each seems, to at least some extent, to be passing on responsibility for the problem to another agency or agencies.

This appears to make a mockery of government claims that the academies scheme, in particular, offers simpler accountability than that previously operating via a more purely local authority system, far from perfect though the latter of course has been, too.

At the heart of the story seems to be a simple fact: the Aspire AP service for around 30 children seems to have been operating without having been registered with the Department for Education from its inception in 2014 until now. In effect, then, the services for these vulnerable children do not exist in official records.