Schools: Standards

(asked on 2nd April 2025) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what percentage of (1) academy schools which have converted but are not sponsor led, (2) local authority maintained community schools, and (3) local authority maintained foundation, voluntary-aided or voluntary-controlled schools are "stuck"; and what assessment they have made of these figures.


Answered by
Baroness Smith of Malvern Portrait
Baroness Smith of Malvern
Minister of State (Minister for Women and Equalities)
This question was answered on 8th May 2025

The government has defined a stuck school in its consultation on school accountability reform, which was published on 3 February 2025, as a school which was graded ‘requires improvement’ or equivalent at its most recent graded Ofsted inspection and was also graded below ‘good’ at its previous inspection. The consultation also proposes how to define stuck schools in future, subject to the outcome of Ofsted’s separate consultation on improving the way it inspects education.

As at 1 March 2025, there are a total of 566 academy schools, including free schools, which meet the definition of ‘stuck’ schools (5% of all academies) of which 207 are converter academies (2.7% of all convertor academies). Additionally, there are 91 local authority maintained schools meeting the ‘stuck’ schools definition (0.9% of all local authority maintained schools), of which 48 are community schools (0.8% of all community schools) and 43 are voluntary or foundation schools (1.0% of all voluntary or foundation schools). It should be noted that some stuck schools that are now academies were local authority maintained schools at the time of their most recent inspection and subsequently converted as a result of intervention.

The government is committed to high and rising standards for all children, regardless of the type of school they attend. We are already deploying regional improvement for standards and excellence teams to both maintained schools and academies which meet the current definition of stuck and have not had a change of responsible body since their most recent inspection.

Reticulating Splines