During her first speech in post (see the BBC article here), Lucy Powell told her party’s conference in Brighton that academy chains would be made accountable. In her speech she doesn’t say what this accountability would look like, but obvious proposals would include inspections of the trusts in charge of academy chains and a greater monitoring role of the Regional Schools Commissioners.

Greater accountability, for many of us, often reeks of red tape, paper work and rubber stamping. In short, a waste of time and energy that could have been spent on improving the quality of teaching, driving up standards and strengthening the collaboration between schools in the chain. Accountability can however also lead to greater transparency, greater insight into quality, and improvement of services. Greater accountability of chains can have such benefits, but we obviously need to get the accountability right to achieve such benefits, not just add another layer of inspections, performance league tables or monitoring to an already overloaded system.

So how can we ‘get the accountability right’?

You can read the full article here.

Author: Dr. Melanie Ehren (Reader at the UCL Institute of Education, m.ehren@ioe.ac.uk)