Michael Gove did even more severe damage during what Polly Toynbee calls his “thunderous four years” as education secretary than she lays out (Too many pupils miss lessons, says Ofsted, and that’s right. Call it the Michael Gove effect, 28 November). He created a radical but unsustainable change to the architecture of the system.
There are now 2,500 academy trusts. Many are individual schools, but nearly half of them are organised into chains, so-called “multi-academy trusts”, containing up to around 60 schools. They are all contracted directly to the government via “funding agreements”, their ownership having been decided without public involvement. In addition, a number of schools still operate under the old local authority arrangements.
