Academisation documents

An independent school funded by the state that is outside the “control” of the local authority.  An academy school would have more freedom in tailoring their curriculum, have greater control of their budgets and the freedom to spend money the local authority currently spends on their behalf.

A group of schools that come together to form an Academy is known as a Multi-Academy Trust or MAT.

There is no legal requirement from the government for us to become an academy. However, the government still actively promote academies as being the best way to provide resilient, effective innovation.  Perhaps more importantly, we have seen significant reductions in the support offered to our schools from the Wokingham local authority and are continuing to experience pressure on our funding.  Considering this, moving forward as a group of schools seems to be sensible.  

We are still assessing what the best way forward for our schools will be and therefore what we will recommend.  We have not formally started the Academy process.  As schools enter the process it would take 6-9 months to become an Academy.  An important part of this process is our consultation with parents.

Our key criteria for assessing different options is which will best preserve the essence of the schools.  Therefore, in the short-term we would anticipate very slight change to the day to day experience of the children, for example, we would still have the same uniform, the same admission arrangements and we would still be inspected by OFSTED.  The short-term changes will focus on how we buy-in services more efficiently.

In the medium to long term there may be additional benefits for the children as a larger group can engage more specialist teachers for subjects such as music, languages, sport and science.