NAO raps Department for Education for confusion on oversight of academies

The Department for Education has not clearly articulated some of the roles and responsibilities of external oversight bodies in relation to academies, the National Audit Office has found.

As a result, there has been confusion about oversight of safeguarding, the responsibilities of academy sponsors, and the role of local authorities in relation to academies, the watchdog claimed.

Other key findings from the report – Academies and maintained schools: Oversight and intervention – were:

• The DfE and the Education Funding Agency did not know enough about school-level governance to identify risks. “The DfE relies on local authorities to oversee governance arrangements in maintained schools, in line with legislation, but does not know whether or how well they do this.”
• The Department has a ‘fit and proper person’ test for governors in new academy trusts “but does not subsequently make checks on new governors to prevent risks, such as entryism”.
• Some academy sponsors were very successful, but the Department did not yet know why others were not. “The DfE relies on sponsors to turn around underperforming schools but it does not collect information from sponsors about the type of support they give.” The NAO pointed out that Ofsted was unable to inspect sponsors and multi-academy trusts so there was no independent source of information about the quality of their work.
• Oversight bodies were intervening more often in underperforming schools than in the past, but this was not always in line with the DfE’s framework. “The DfE does not know the costs of different interventions, and it has not done enough to understand the effectiveness of different interventions.”

Overall, the report accused the DfE, local authorities and other bodies of not tackling underperformance in maintained schools and academies consistently.

The NAO said the Department had “not demonstrated the effectiveness of the different interventions it and others make in underperforming maintained schools and academies, despite investing at least £382m annually”.

The NAO said it could not therefore conclude that the oversight system for maintained schools and academies was achieving value for money.

The watchdog acknowledged that the DfE had “set the tone from the top” by being clear about what constituted unacceptable educational performance.

On a national basis, educational performance had improved. However, a significant number of children still attended underperforming schools.

According to NAO estimates, 1.6m children (23%) were not attending a school rated as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in 2013/14.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The Department for Education’s system for overseeing schools is still developing. The Department has been clear about the need for schools to improve and nationally education performance has done so.

“But there are significant gaps in the Department’s understanding of what works, and the information it has about some important aspects of school performance is limited. Greater school autonomy needs to be coupled with effective oversight and assurance. The Department has made some improvements but has further to go.”