The first application round for the £140 million strategic school improvement fund was neither fair nor transparent according to an independent evaluation of the process.

An evaluation conducted by Aldaba has criticised the government’s approach to supporting and assessing applications to the fund, which was designed to target resources at schools in need of improvement.

The report highlighted inconsistencies in the advice given to applicants by officials at the Department for Education, leaving some schools “in a better position to succeed as a result of receiving support or resources to prepare applications that other applicants did not know were available”.

Although subsequent rounds have been “improving”, its findings on the first round “cannot support the conclusion” that the application process “was entirely fit for purpose, and so we cannot be sure that resources were targeted at the schools most in need of improving school performance and pupil attainment”.

The applications ran from April 21 until June 23 last year, and the report acknowledged that the general election announcement and subsequent pre-election restrictions “inevitably had a negative impact on the process”.

Read the full article in Schools Week.