AN ACADEMY trust that runs two Witham schools is “failing too many pupils,” a new report has said.

The Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) runs 67 schools nationally, including New Rickstones Academy, in Conrad Road, and Maltings Academy, in Spinks Lane.

Schools inspector Ofsted carried out a “focused inspection” of the chain and said 47 per cent of pupils in its secondary schools are not receiving a good standard of education.

The report said: “Children from poor backgrounds do particularly badly in this trust.

“The attainment and progress of disadvantaged pupils, in both the primary and secondary academies, still lags behind that of other pupils, and gaps in performance are not narrowing quickly enough.”

It added: “The performance of AET’s secondary academies is mediocre and has not improved enough since the previous focused inspections in June 2014.

“Only 41% of AET secondary academies are good or better and the trust’s impact on raising standards at Key Stage 4 has not been effective.”

Ofsted can only rate individual schools and not an academy chain, but for the "focused inspection" inspectors visited seven academies and spoke to 18 other schools by phone.

Neither of Witham’s schools were visited and they are both in the best performing bracket.

At its last inspection in January 2015, New Rickstones was rated good after previously being told it required improvement.

Maltings Academy was rated outstanding in March last year, after also being told it required improvement at its previous inspection.

In a statement, the trust said it had made “significant improvements” since 2013 and was “disappointed” that these had not been recognised.

It said: “Through strong leadership at all levels, we have ensured that over the past two years the number of good or outstanding academies in our trust has doubled from 32% to 64%.

“Over the same period we have also focused on reducing the number of academies judged as inadequate.

“As a consequence, the number of academies judged inadequate has fallen from 29% to 6%.

“This is in a context where the majority of our academies have been part of our trust for three academic years or less.”