Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this week we have a special Schools Out Forever

Edition about the schools that will be closing down after the summer holidays and the reasons

why. We'll also be talking to privatized technology correspondent Matt Muir about Facebook

and its recent woes. But first, education. Now most school pupils will be going

back to their schools this autumn, but not all of them will. Lots of schools will

have shut down and lots of others will have changed hands. And the whole reason for this is due to the very complicated and bizarre

nature of the school system these days and particularly the new kinds of

school that the government has introduced. So I'm sure you're all familiar with standard comprehensive

schools that are run by the local education authority. However, there are also

grammar schools, there are free schools, there are private schools, and the schools that we're most focused on today

are academies. Now those are a new kind of school introduced by the last labor government and

they are funded directly by the Department for Education so they are independent of any local authority control.

Academies are frequently run by bodies called multi-academy trusts.

Now these are chains of academies that operate all over the country.

Some multi-academi trusts run just one school, others run multiple schools,

some operate in just one part of the country, others are all over the place. And when a multi-academy

trust fails, all the schools in that particular chain are handed over to another one.

Now schools can be shut down because they're doing badly but in the context of education

that can mean a few different things. Here is Jane Mackenzie of the eye explaining a little

more. So a school could be doing badly academically, it could do poorly at an

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