Stuck schools will be held accountable even if support brokered for them by the government RISE teams fails to turn them around.

The improvement divisions will instead be charged with making “sure delivery is happening” and “monitoring plans”, Department for Education director general John Edwards has clarified.

Speaking at the Schools and Academies Show on Thursday, he said: “The current responsible body [the school’s trust or council] is accountable for the improvement. The responsible body owns the improvement journey, and this is a process of providing support packages to enable that to be accelerated.”

He said this was a “starting principle” that has “been really important” for education secretary Bridget Phillipson.

Earlier this month, 45 new advisers were announced to join the 20 who have been in post since the start of February.

The expanded team will start working with more than 200 schools deemed “stuck” for receiving a ‘requires improvement’ Ofsted grade following an earlier below-good judgement.

But when the government unveiled plans for the RISE teams towards the end of last year, there was confusion around where accountability will sit for ensuring the improvement works.

Slides shown during Edwards’s talk show that once a school becomes eligible for support, the RISE teams will assess its “capacity to improve”.

If they’re thought to need help, they will be matched with a “high-quality organisation and be considered for funded intervention”. An improvement plan will then be “co-constructed” with the responsible body.

‘Responsible body owns the improvement journey’

Edwards stressed during the event that the “responsible body owns the improvement journey”, and that it will have to ensure the plan “bites”.

“The RISE advisers’ job is not to deliver the improvement; [their] job is to engage in that matching process, making sure we’ve identified the right areas that need support and making sure delivery is happening.”

There is no public understanding of how improvement organisations are chosen. Edwards said they will look at data, inspection outcomes and “understand where the best evidence of provision is” to choose organisations.

“We also use our intelligence on capacity. Then there are also particular specialists, so we will be drawing on  local knowledge we have.

“So, it’s a combination of the sort of empirical data that comes from outcomes, of the outcomes we see in Ofsted inspections, but also from our local knowledge and understanding. Please make contact with your regional team, particularly if you feel you’ve got someone to tell us about your capacity.”