Brighton and Hove schools foundation wins award for best practice

The charitable foundation that runs two secondary schools in Brighton and Hove has won an award for good governance.

The Aldridge Foundation, founded by millionaire businessman Sir Rod Aldridge, picked up the prize for Innovative and Effective Governance at the Independent Academies Association’s Best Practice Awards.

The foundation runs the Brighton Aldridge Community Academy (BACA) in Falmer and the Portslade Aldridge Community Academy (PACA) in Mile Oak.

A spokesman said: “The Aldridge Foundation has made promoting effective governance central to its improvement and growth strategy for its family of academies.

“Each governing body works to agreed pan-academy goals including reaching ‘outstanding’ status, improve teaching and learning, developing the right curriculum to ensure that all groups of students make equal levels of progress, acquiring the nationally recognised Governance Quality Mark and making entrepreneurship an integral part of learning at the academy.

Peter Kyle

“The success of this approach was recognised in several of the foundation’s academy Ofsted reports.

“At BACA Ofsted stated that governance was a strength.”

The Ofsted report said: “Governors have a clear understanding of how the academy’s results compare with those of other schools and of the progress made by different groups of students.

“The governing body knows exactly what is happening in the academy and will challenge decisions if they feel that students’ achievement is not improving quickly enough.

“They expect teaching to be good or outstanding and know how targets are set to reward teachers or challenge them to improve.

“They check that additional money is spent on things that help students learn and they want to know what difference it makes.”

The award was presented by Tim Campbell, the winner of the first series of the BBC TV programme The Apprentice and now chief executive of the Bright Ideas Trust.

Quoting the judging panel, he said: “It is clear that a well-informed, capable and effective group of governors has been created to the benefit of all (the foundation’s sponsored) schools.

“Furthermore, because each academy is established as an independent trust, local autonomy is maintained within a framework of shared values and goals.”

The award was collected on behalf of the foundation by Peter Kyle, chairman of the governors at BACA, and John Tizzard, a governor of the Isle of Portland Aldridge Community Academy.