Three West Kent Primaries Become Academies as New School Year Begins

Three West Kent primary schools formally became academies on 1 September, the first day of the new school year - Staplehurst School in Tonbridge and Malling, St Francis' Catholic Primary School in Maidstone, and St Mark's Church of England Primary School in Tunbridge Wells. Each has joined a different multi-academy trust, and Ofsted's paperwork confirming the conversions was published for all three within a day of each other, on 4 September.

Staplehurst has joined Coppice Primary Partnership, a small trust based at Loose Primary School in Maidstone that until now ran three schools - Coxheath Primary, Loose Primary and St Katherine's School and Nursery. The move was approved by the Department for Education's South East regional advisory board back in February, as a standard voluntary "converter" order rather than anything forced by an Ofsted judgement.

St Francis' has joined the Kent Catholic Schools' Partnership, a much larger operation - 33 Catholic schools and counting, operating under the Archdiocese of Southwark - which described itself as "delighted to officially welcome" the Maidstone school following its "successful conversion". St Mark's, meanwhile, has joined Tenax Schools Trust, whose schools span Kent and East Sussex. Tenax chief executive Mark Cole said the decision to join "followed careful consideration by St Mark's leaders and governors, with the advice and support of the Diocese of Rochester", after a period of listening to staff, parents and the wider school community: "What shone through was a shared belief: that schools are stronger together, and that the right support behind the scenes helps teachers and leaders do their very best work for children."

For parents at all three schools, day-to-day life changes very little at first. As Tenax put it of St Mark's: the school "keeps its name, its uniform, its ethos and its place at the heart of its community" - what changes is who legally employs the staff and runs the budget, along with access to a trust's shared expertise, buying power and professional networks. Ofsted itself is explicit that a newly converted academy is treated as a new legal entity: none of the three schools' previous inspection ratings formally carry over, though Ofsted uses that history to help decide when each will next be inspected as an academy.

Academy conversion has been reshaping who actually runs England's schools for well over a decade, but it rarely makes news except when it happens - three unconnected primaries, in three different boroughs, quietly leaving council oversight in the same week is easy to miss unless you're a parent at one of them. Tenax is itself in the middle of exploring a further merger, with Endeavour MAT, that would create a larger trust still - a reminder that the trusts absorbing these schools are themselves consolidating. Source: Tenax Schools Trust