Multi-academy trust to stop running schools in Mid Sussex following dispute over funding and workloads

UoBAT announced on Monday, January 20, that its board of trustees met on Friday, January 10, to ‘consider the future of the Trust’.

The announcement at www.brightonacademiestrust.org.uk said: “Following this meeting, the Trustees have informed the Department for Education of their desire to seek to transfer the academies in the Trust to other Academy Trusts.”

UBAT’s schools in the Mid Sussex district are Blackthorns Community Primary Academy, Lindfield Primary Academy and The Burgess Hill Academy.

The announcement comes six months after members of the National Education Union (NEU) took strike action.

NEU South East Region announced in July 2024 that strikes would take place across five schools in Hastings and Burgess Hill from July 9-11. There were pickets from 7.30am to 9am on these days at Burgess Hill Academy, as well as Hastings Academy, St Leonard’s Academy, The Baird Academy (July 10-11) and Robsack Wood Academy (July 10).

The NEU said the industrial action was over a dispute about ‘excessive workload increases and job cuts resulting from the Academy Trust not funding its schools in full’. Phil Clarke, East Sussex Branch Secretary and Vice-President, said at the time that it had made ‘real progress’ with the Trust over changing the funding model.

The recent message on UBAT’s website said: “The Trustees are committed to improving the outcomes for all young people at every stage of their education and view this significant step as the best way for this to be achieved. The Trust will be working closely with the Department for Education over the months that come to seek the right Trusts for academies to join, and to give stability and continuity to all our stakeholders through the time of change.”

An NEU spokesperson said the union is ‘not surprised’ by the decision. They said that ‘financial mismanagement’ and ‘insufficient funding of frontline services’ had damaged UBAT schools and made NEU members’ jobs harder.

They said: “Future employer’s taking over UBAT schools will have a great deal of damage to repair. They must have an open, fair and transparent funding model that give schools the resources they need. Moreover, they will need to provide cast iron assurances on our members pay, terms and conditions including retaining recent workload agreements reached at UBAT and to formally recognise the NEU for collective bargaining. Any failure to honour such terms would make a further industrial action ballot likely.”

The NEU spokesperson said UBAT’s issues ‘reflect deeper problems with academisation’. They said: “Academies lack local accountability, spend huge amounts of public money on their central teams and executive pay and treat education like a business.”

Ideally, they said the NEU wants all schools to return to local authority control and for the government to ‘properly fund local councils to allow them to provide the kind of education services that our students deserve’.

They added: “It is imperative, that as a minimum, amendments are made to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently going through parliament, to allow a route for academy schools to be returned to local authority control and for greater oversight and regulation of academy executive pay and the amounts trusts take from frontline school budgets to fund so called ‘central services’.”