The academy project with the amazing sliding opening date

A school featured extensively by Education Uncovered last year is now on its ninth proposed opening date as an academy, as a project which has been on the stocks for two years grinds on.

Ormskirk School, in Lancashire, has faced serial delays under the forced academisation project, which was triggered after it was controversially failed by Ofsted following a visit in May 2019, less than three weeks after its then-new headteacher had taken over.

The DfE did not waste time in approving the school’s academisation: Ormskirk’s “sponsored academy” conversion is listed in official data as having been approved in July 2019 – the same month its Ofsted report was published.

When it first featured in the Department for Education’s “sponsored academy pipeline” dataset, which is updated every month, as of August 2019 it was listed as due to open in February 2020.

But by December 2019, the DfE was no longer listing a proposed opening date for the project.