Sector leaders have demanded answers over Ofsted’s role, accountability and capacity in the government’s new improvement drive for specialist teams to broker support for struggling schools.
Department for Education officials set out further details during a webinar this week of how their regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE) teams (formerly known as regional improvement teams) will work.
The teams – made up of civil servants and experienced turnaround leaders – will be rolled out in January, commissioning support from bodies such as trusts, councils or federations.
Ministers have set themselves April 2026 as D-day for providing “targeted” aid to struggling schools.
But the plans have been publicly and privately criticised, with one trust chief executive saying they are “unintelligible. It’s unclear what they’re doing, why or how.”
RISE and shine: who decides?
The RISE teams will be made up of civil servants and four to six seconded school leaders for each region.
The teams will “sit within a new framework of support and intervention” for schools.
This will be broken down into “three tiers”: universal help, targeted support, and intervention. On a slide shown to leaders on Tuesday, this was rated green, amber and red, respectively.
RISE teams will commission school improvement support, rather than do it themselves, with the tiers based on Ofsted’s new report cards, due next September.
But it is not clear exactly who will make the decisions.
The DfE told Schools Week that “report cards will identify schools requiring intervention and targeted support” – stating this will be Ofsted’s job.
But an Ofsted spokesperson was also clear that the DfE was “responsible for whether and how to support or intervene in schools” – the question was a “matter for them”.
When questioned on this on Thursday, Bridget Phillipson said the “conversation is still underway in terms of the shape and nature of report cards with Ofsted”.
Unclear support categories
The support categories are also unclear. For instance, schools with “singular or several issues” would require ‘targeted support’. This would involve RISE teams commissioning “bespoke” support from an organisation such as a trust, federation or council.
But schools with “minimal issues” and strong leadership would fall into the ‘universal support’ category – where they would be expected to “self-identify” areas of improvement and encouraged to share good practice with others (see image).
Sir David Carter, the former national schools commissioner, called on ministers to clarify “what triggers the support” as there was “potentially going to be a real tension between advisers, regional teams and trust leaders”.
“Trusts, which will have set up school improvement teams of their own, are going to end up duplicating that work with someone else”.
Lucy Livings, regional director for the south-west, said that as report cards were developed “[we] will also be developing the criteria” for support.
But policy expert Loic Menzies said the plans could mean the inspectorate “would need to provide a separate, more detailed report to the regions’ group”.
Report cards were “unlikely to provide the right level of detail to inform nuanced and evidence-based decisions about support” if they were “going to be designed with parents in mind and remain simple”.
Who will take responsibility?
There is also confusion around where accountability will sit for ensuring the improvement works.
In a briefing to members this week, Leora Cruddas, chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST), said the new approach “fails to understand or articulate a theory of regulation”.
Questioning “where accountability for improvement sits in this approach”, she wrote: “Who decides? Who is responsible? Who is accountable to whom and for what? These concerns felt exacerbated by the webinar.”
Cruddas said she was told by officials that where a “supporting organisation is being paid to provide support to a school, then that organisation would be responsible for the provision of that support”.
It would also be “accountable for the public money it has been given, but accountability for improving the school will remain squarely with the responsible body”.
But the CST said the plan also appeared to “elide the governance and legal status of a trust. If enacted without amendment, this would be very serious”. It wants written reassurances on the issues.
When asked more generally if accountability would still lie with responsible bodies, Sir Kevan Collins, the school standards tsar, said: “Well, I think that’s correct, but I just get nervous about accountability … for me, the real question is who’s responsible for the effective teaching of these children right now in front of me?
“I sometimes think that you can outsource responsibility to an accountability framework, and I want people, particularly teachers, to take responsibility for the children right in front of [them] today.”
Is there leadership capacity?
The RISE teams will comprise civil servants already in post, with the DfE expecting to employ up to three full-time equivalent school leaders to each of the nine regional groups for about two days a week.
They – or the organisations they will be seconded from – will be paid £600 a day.
In addition to commissioning support, they will work with civil servants to draw up a “coherent set of local area priorities”.
This work will be done alongside local authorities, dioceses and mayoral combined authorities, with priorities set out in the autumn.
But Carter said school leaders likely to make up the new teams were probably “already working at capacity in their schools and trusts. We must not spread the talent pool too thinly.”
Paul Rickeard, the chief executive of the Durham and Newcastle Diocesan Learning Trust, asked: “Who’s going to be seconded two days a week for school improvement from our trust?
“We don’t have capacity for that – those days are well gone because we’ve had to get rid of excess staffing.”
Tom Richmond, a former DfE adviser, also said that “many local authorities have little or no school improvement capacity after 14 years of financial strain, yet they are being asked to take on a formal role”.
John Edwards, the regions group director general, said the advisers would have “demonstrated that they can improve schools and have worked across their areas and elsewhere to provide system leadership”.
But he added: “We know that there are lots of demands on such people’s time… and that we shouldn’t be taking everyone out of their schools and roles at this critical time.”
That is why a flexible approach is being adopted “as we appoint advisers, including part-time appointments, and utilising the knowledge, skills and relationships of people who may have recently retired”.
But Carter also warned: “As many of us learned more than 10 years ago as national of education, advising and seeing advice acted upon rigorously are not always the same thing.”
Matthew Stevenson, the DfE’s deputy director for the south west, said on Tuesday the help offered would be “irresistible”.
But he added: “If a school ultimately refuses to have support, then we would need to consider what further action would need to be taken… But we think that would be very unlikely.”
Schools Week has not received a response from the department to questions on what the RISE scheme means for the future of its national leaders of education programme.
TSI set for scrapheap
The day rate set for the RISE advisers is the same as the one offered to leaders through the trust and school improvement (TSI) offer.
Through this scheme, schools ‘causing concern’ or eligible for intervention “can get up to 10 days of support” from a chief executive or “high-quality MAT”.
But Stevenson said the TSI would “no longer exist” once the RISE teams were “fully established”.
The targeted support is something that is much more significant than the trust in school improvement offer
“The targeted support is something that is much more significant than the trust in school improvement offer. [The targeted support] is something that could be 12 to 24, months of… really working alongside a school in much greater detail.”
Michael Pain, the founder of Forum Strategy, a membership group for chief executives, said the teams would “need to demonstrate credibility early on” while “demonstrating objectivity and transparency in commissioning”.
“They’ve got a huge task for small teams, and one has to ask is it workable? It is clear that the new government sees trusts as just one of a number of options in the school improvement landscape.”
Before the report cards are introduced next September, Livings said the teams would “start working with a smaller number of schools, of those that we deem most vulnerable at the moment, based on both the current judgments and the data that’s available”.
It isn’t clear who will pay. But for the targeted support that is commissioned by RISE teams, Livings said that would be “a funded element of support”.
“There could be a traded services part of that. It will [need] to be worked through.”
‘Welcome the challenge’
Others have been positive. Ed Dorrell, a director at the consultancy Public First, said the teams were an “exciting opportunity to bring together the best elements of the London Challenge and the best elements of the MAT system”.
However others have questioned the similarities with the London Challenge school improvement scheme.
Carter thinks the rejigged regions groups – who the RISE teams will report to – also have an opportunity to “gather an understanding of what works from across the country and the region”, before “holding both the support providers and receivers to account for the progress”.
If they “resist the silo mentality that has brought many education initiatives that originated in the centre to a standstill, then the system will be richer for this shared learning’.”
Phillipson said the teams would ensure schools and trusts worked “together to drive high and rising standards across the board”.
“For too long, support for school improvement has been fragmented and complex. I want to change that.”
Speaking to Schools Week about the criticism, she said: “I welcome the challenge from the sector, making sure that as we set out this process, we do build on the good practice that is already out there.
“This isn’t about upending what works. It’s about putting more support into schools that are facing some of the toughest challenges and where they haven’t been able to make progress in recent years. I don’t think the government should stand back from that.”
