Introduction
The Department for Education is accountable to Parliament
for the overall performance of the school system in England. There
are 21,500 state-funded schools, of which 17,000 are maintained
schools overseen by local authorities, and 4,500 are academies
directly accountable to the Secretary of State. The Department's
overall objective is for all children to have the opportunity
to attend a school that Ofsted rates as 'good' or better. To achieve
this, the Department expects school leaders, along with governors
and trustees, to manage resources effectively in an increasingly
autonomous system so as to raise educational standards. The Department
presides over a complex and confused system of external oversight,
sharing responsibility for oversight with the Education Funding
Agency (the Agency, which is part of the Department) and 152 local
authorities. The Department has set up frameworks that specify
how it and other bodies should assess school performance and when
they should intervene. The main formal interventions are: warning
notices to raise formal concerns about a school's performance;
changing a school's governing body; and for local authority maintained
schools and converter academies, turning the school into a sponsored
academy. There are 460 sponsors which support and manage 1,900
academies.
|
