Academy chain, set to lose its largest school, hits out at government for way the process has worked

An academy chain has taken aim at the government’s process for transferring schools from one trust to another, after confirming to staff that it is poised to lose its biggest institution following a devastating Ofsted report.

The Griffin Schools Trust wrote yesterday to staff at Stantonbury International in Milton Keynes about the government’s decision, revealed by the Milton Keynes Citizen and followed up by this website yesterday, to transfer the 1,600-pupil comprehensive to a new “sponsor” next year. l

Its letter took aim at the process, arguing that there was “no published process or criteria”; that the trust had not had the opportunity to discuss its evidence with the government; that it had not had the chance of a follow-up Ofsted visit; and that the office of the Regional Schools Commissioner [RSC] had not visited the academy to check on progress.

The 13-school chain, has been running Stantonbury from its base in Catford, south London, since it was academised in 2016. As I wrote in July after the school was put into special measures, its governance appears to have been closely controlled by trust insiders going back several years.

In their letter to staff yesterday, Anne Powell, Griffin’s chief executive, and Trevor Edinborough, its chair, wrote: “I am very sorry to be writing to you to tell you that the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State [Baroness Berridge, the academies minister] wrote to us yesterday to communicate her decision to re-broker SIS to a new sponsor.