Academies: education’s Brexit policy

This was a piece originally written for a non-specialist audience. So bear with me as I describe an academies policy with which many of you are, of course, familiar.

It is a huge set of structural changes, embraced by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings and taking many years to enact on a nationwide scale.

It is having profound impacts on the ground, with implications which will far outlast these political actors. It continues to provoke intense for-and-against debate. But you will barely see it mentioned by most of the parties at this election.

Although much of the above applies to Brexit, in fact the phenomenon under discussion here is the academies policy, through which the control of half of the state-funded schools in England has quietly been changed, in most cases over the past 14 years.

The policy was launched under Tony Blair’s government in 2000, as a small-scale initiative aimed mainly at turning round inner-city secondary schools which had struggled for many years. Governance structures were overhauled so that individuals – often wealthy “sponsors” – were given complete charge and handed freedom over curricula and teachers’ pay and conditions. These schools left the auspices of their local authorities, seemingly permanently, to be run via privately-agreed contracts between the Secretary of State and not-for-profit trusts running each academy.