The Trust Academy Fund and will build on the success of previous rounds of funding awarded to successful academy trusts to help tackle underperformance and improve schools.

It will:

• Support strong academy trusts across the country to provide assistance to communities and schools are most in need of school improvement.
• Provide high-potential academy trusts, who have emerging capacity to improve other schools, with funding to meet challenges associated with taking on more schools in different contexts as they develop, deploy school improvement support quickly across a trust, and support collaboration between schools.
• Support smaller academy trusts that wish to merge into existing or new academy trusts, creating new clusters of schools.

Grants of between £20,000 to £310,000 will be available.  Applications will close in December 2019.

The Department for Education has also set out a package of bespoke support. A more intensive offer of leadership guidance, plus up to £16,000 in support, will be available to schools with two consecutive ‘requires improvement’ judgements from Ofsted, to help them improve in a sustainable way, forming part of an estimated £16.5million worth of support from the Government to around 2,400 schools nationwide. The Department will be contacting schools throughout the 2019/20 academic year to offer this support package.