Government proposes to beef up parental rights of complaint against academy trusts –while abandoning any move towards mandatory local governing bodies

Parents are to be given the right to have the substance of their complaints against an academy considered outside of the trust running the school, if government proposals on how its schools bill is to operate become reality.

However, a previous suggestion – in the Department for Education white paper in March which preceded the bill - that local governing bodies might be beefed up through legislation appears to have got nowhere, with the DfE now saying that trusts will remain free not to have governing bodies.

Another suggestion – that all schools including academies would be required to teach a 32.5 hour week seems to be being called into question.

The developments are contained in a DfE briefing document on the schools bill, published last night, which also appears to concede that the legal system under which all academies have been regulated for 20 years has been less than transparent.

The detail

The DfE last night published a host of documents giving more detail on the meaning of the schools bill as it sees it. One of them, on which this article focuses, expanded on the notion of “academy trust standards”, as proposed in the bill.