Church of England and DfE agree new rules on multi academy trusts

I recently wrote quite a long blog post about church MATs called Don’t mention the Church, academinsation and church schools. This raised a number of concerns about the academisation agenda and how it affected church schools, particularly small rural ones.

Some of these concerns have been addressed in the newly published Memorandum of understanding between the National Society and DfE. The important thing here is that the church and the DfE have agreed that where a church school wishes to join a MAT that already has church representation similar to its existing character:

our shared expectation is that consent will only be withheld in exceptional circumstances s1(c) page 6

So a Voluntary Controlled (VC) School wanting to join a MAT with other VC schools and even other community schools could do so providing the MAT had Members and a Board with around 25% church control. This makes forming mixed MATs between VC and Community Schools much easier and effectively means the diocese can no longer veto them and insist on schools joining the diocesan MAT.

It is a little tougher for Voluntary Aided (VA) schools. They would need a MAT with a church majority (at least 51% of Members and Directors). The MAT could still include any types of school (possibly church VC schools or community schools) but the need for a church majority might well be unacceptable to community schools and even to VC schools.

All is not lost for a VA school wanting to join a MAT with a minority of church control if there are exceptional circumstances as Section 3 on page 7 makes clear:

3. Church VA schools wishing to convert and join an existing or newly established church minority MAT

The Secretary of State accepts that DBEs will not usually expect to see a Church of England VA school joining an existing or new Church minority MAT and consequently this will only be available with the prior agreement of the DBE and where very exceptional circumstances can be shown to exist. Apart from normal clauses required in the associated Supplemental Funding Agreement the Secretary of State recognises that special changes to the articles including a reference to schemes of delegation to local governing bodies or equivalent and a Members’ Agreement in models agreed with the National Society will be required.

The document does not define exceptional circumstances and perhaps that is a good thing as it could allow for some flexibility in dealing with local circumstances.

It will be interesting to see how this works out in practice but I think this is an encouraging development that should give more options for church schools when it comes to academisation. It will be interesting to see if there continues to be a widely different response across dioceses in interpretation of the agreement.