Governors’ deliberations on school’s choice to join a MAT kept secret –while staff also not given details on what it will get in return for £400,000 “topslice”

Governors’ deliberations about whether their school should join a multi-academy trust are being kept secret, the school told Education Uncovered this week.

The minutes of discussions at Darrick Wood School in Bromley, south London, which have provisionally seen it lined up to join a trust called Impact, are being kept from the public because they were in a section marked “confidential,” the school has said.

The news comes with the community have recently been given just two weeks to consider whether the school, which is currently run as a single-academy trust, should join Impact.

The detail

Impact multi-academy trust currently consists of seven schools: four secondary and three primaries, all in Bromley.

The chain has something of a complicated history, having started out at Langley Park School for Girls, then growing  to five schools by 2022. The trust then absorbed another one, itself called Impact, also in 2022, and taking on the name of that organisation.