How to Run an Academy School: The Essential Guide For Trustees, School Leaders and Company Secretaries 2nd ed

How to Run an Academy School is an essential guide to the legal and regulatory compliance required of academy trustees, school leaders and Company Secretaries.

The book provides insight on all manner of key issues faced by those in charge of schools, including governance, funding, board meetings and minutes, finance, risk and information management.

The text itself is full of features such as specimen documents (e.g. an example of a board meeting agenda), diagrams and summaries and is broken down into digestible chunks in order to present the key issues in an accessible form for those new to the area.

The second edition will respond to changing legal and political context. New legislation will include the Department for Education’s power to force schools in ‘underperforming’ local authorities to convert to academy status.

There will be a significant development of the content to reflect changes in the market and feedback on the first edition. The key changes are:

• existing discussion of the benefits of academy status will be balanced by an examination of risks, with case studies exemplifying both good practice supplemented by those illustrating pitfalls and failures;
• a new chapter on the conversion process including practical and legal issues such as TUPE and stakeholder management;
• a new chapter considering the various routes to ‘academisation’ including partnership and Multi Academy Trusts (MAT);
• a new chapter on strategies to improve schools in the light of performance criteria;
• a greater emphasis on corporate governance, including the role of company secretaries;
• greater consideration of the primary sector and the different cultural and organizational context in which primary schools operate;
• overall the content to reflect the increasing salience of the MAT model in the academy sector