“Perform or else” warning to multi-academy trusts, buried in the white paper

Are England’s multi-academy trusts about to be subject to increasing intervention by the Department for Education, as ministers seek to make the model become ubiquitous across the country?

This week’s schools white paper certainly raises this prospect, with an apparent implicit warning that chains will in future have to achieve good results or, in theory at least was the implication, lose the right to exist.

This was one striking subtext of the white paper, as it gave some hints about changes to mechanisms affecting the control of schools, which I attempt briefly to analyse here.

The detail

On page 47, under “We will shape a dynamic system of strong trusts,” the paper states: “In the future, no one organisation will have the right to run schools indefinitely without delivering excellent outcomes.”

This sentence does beg the question as to whether this happens now: do trusts which take over schools simply keep hold of them, regardless of the quality of education they go on to provide?