Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she has taken to ensure the accountability of academies to their local community; and if she will make a statement.

Performance data for all maintained schools, including academies, is published on the school performance tables website[1]. This provides information that local communities and parents can use to hold schools to account.

Academies are also subject to independent inspection by Ofsted, which provides an important source of information for local communities and parents.

The Education white paper, ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’, set out the Government’s plans to publish performance information for multi-academy trusts in addition to the continued publication of performance data at individual school level. On Thursday 7 July, we published a statistical working paper[2], using our developing approach, showing the performance of multi-academy trusts at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 using 2015 results.

[1] https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535604/SFR32_2016_text.pdf