Ex-minister’s academy chain scrambles to update its official governance information, after this website asks questions

An academy chain founded and still chaired by the former academies minister Lord Nash yesterday hastily updated information about its schools’ governance –after Education Uncovered pointed out that it appeared not to be fulfilling legal requirements.

Prior to my email to the trust, the seven-school, London-based Future Academies, which is overseen by Lord Nash and his wife Lady Caroline, was as of yesterday providing no information about the identity of the governors of three of its schools to the government’s publicly-accessible “Get Information about Schools” (GIAS) web pages.

One of the schools, remarkably, was the Barclay Academy, in Stevenage in Hertfordshire, which was transferred to Future in February despite a large public campaign in opposition.

There was at that time no information on the Barclay’s governing body on GIAS, despite the DfE site saying that this is a legal requirement.

On the page where the information should be, it was stated: “There is no governance information for this establishment.”