Multi-academy trust sees biggest primary drop in pupil numbers across local authority, new analysis reveals

A controversial multi-academy trust controls two primary schools which experienced the biggest drop-off in pupil numbers across their local authority in the three years after they were taken over, exclusive analysis by this website shows.

Reach South saw the two primaries – Marlborough Primary Academy and High Street Primary Academy – lose 37 per cent and 33 per cent of their rolls respectively in the three years to 2020, after they were among eight primaries across the local authority of Plymouth swiftly handed to the chain in 2016-17.

That makes the two schools comfortably the largest losers in terms of primary pupil numbers in the city over that period, based on the 67 schools in Plymouth for which comparative data were available.

Reach South also had another school in the top 10 in terms of declining pupil numbers over the period: Goosewell Primary Academy, where numbers slumped by 14 per cent, while two more of its schools saw their rolls drop by eight per cent and four per cent respectively.

This analysis may increase scrutiny of the highly unusual decision, taken by Rebecca Boomer-Clark, the-then Regional Schools Commissioner for the South West, to approve the academisation of all of these eight primaries under Reach South in a single academic year: 2016-17.