Earlier this week, our co-chairs Tina Emery and Mrunal Sisodia met with the Minister for the School System, Baroness Barran, to discuss the Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review.
The meeting covered the NNPCF’s input into the Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review . This group has been looking at the accountability framework for academies.
The current accountability regime remains very unclear. The division of powers, responsibilities, regulation and enforcement between schools, multi-academy trusts, local authorities and the DfE Regions Group is confused. We hear too often about schools that do not make reasonable adjustments or promote inclusion that parents and local authorities are powerless to hold to account.
We asked the minister to ensure that the Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review closed these gaps and enforce that schools, local authorities and Integrated Care Systems meet needs.
The success of the SENDAP Improvement Plan published last week depends on whether the Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review can address these concerns.
In particular, we raised three main issues with the minister:
- The inability of individual families to seek redress when they believe that a school is not promoting inclusion. For example, if they are failing to make reasonable adjustments. In these cases, parents have to use the school or trust’s complaints process, something that a delegate at our 2023 conference described as “marking their own homework.”
- The need to align the powers, responsibilities and accountability between schools, multi-academy trusts, local authorities, the DfE Regions Group and Integrated Care Systems. There are huge gaps which mean that no-one has the authority to effectively hold schools to account.
- Greater clarity on what inclusive practice is and what good looks like. The Schools Bill defined a strong trust as being “inclusive”. We asked for clarity on what these means and how it will be assessed.
Unfortunately, following the shelving of the Schools Bill, the ability to make regulatory changes may be constrained and we are concerned that the scope of change that the Academies Regulation and Commissioning Review may bring will be limited.
The team promised to meet the NNPCF steering group to further develop these points.
For our previous work on this area please see:
Initial NNPCF response to the Schools White Paper – National Network of Parent Carer Forums C.I.C