Academies
The NGA will continue to welcome membership from individual governors and governing bodies of academies and seek to represent their interests, recognising that they need particular support because the model of governance for Academies is deficient in accountability and representativeness.
The NGA has serious concerns that, on the basis of minimal financial investment and with potentially little or no previous experience of education, academy sponsors are given the responsibility for running state schools. We believe it is wrong for sponsors to be granted the right to appoint the majority of governors in perpetuity. We believe that the governance arrangements for academies should mirror those of maintained schools. The governing body of an academy should be based on a stakeholder model.
We believe that there should be greater transparency with regard to the funding agreements that bring academies into being. We believe that the DCSF should draw up a standard funding agreement summary in plain English, to be used as the basis for the governance of all academies. Academies are publicly funded institutions and, as such, their financial, admissions and governance arrangements should be open to public view.
We believe that academies should, as far as is practicable, have the same admissions arrangements as the school(s) they have replaced.
We are concerned about government pressure on local authorities to support changes of schools to an academy model when there is no evidence of a positive ‘academy effect’.