Entirely academy system will take 20 years to achieve, on current conversion trends

It will take around 20 years for England to have an all-academy state school system at recent - pre-pandemic - rates, fresh analysis by Education Uncovered reveals today.

As Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, said he now wants all pupils to be studying in academies, scrutiny of his own department’s data shows just how far off England’s schools system is from this, and how a raft of measures he announced yesterday will have to be transformative for it to be achieved quickly.

Data for academy conversions shows the number of new academies was on a downward trend from 2017-18 to 2020, with that trajectory of course continuing over the past year, as new academisations continued to slow in the Covid-19 era.

The data

Two graphs help to illustrate this.

The first gives a stark sense of just how far the government has to go on academy conversions, in terms of that newly-re-stated ambition of having all state-funded schools leave the auspices of their local authorities.

This graph shows the total number of academies as of the January – the time official DfE census data are published – of each year. (Census data for January 2021 have yet to be released, so I use another DfE dataset for that number).

It is true that the number of schools which have academised, at 9,444 as at January 2021, is a huge increase on the 203 academies that existed at the end of the last Labour government.

However, a close look at the graph shows how the rate of conversion has been slowing markedly in recent years, with the numbers seemingly levelling off at a figure which is still considerably short of half of the total number of state-funded schools in England being academies (it was 44 per cent as of last month).

Compare the recent trend with the total number of state-funded primary, secondary and special schools in England (the final bar in the chart), and this should be clear.

Readers would rightly point out, here that it would be unfair to use the past year as a guide to the overall trend of academy conversions, because it is unsurprising that academisation rates have slowed, given the effects of Covid-19.

However, interestingly the drop-off in conversions in the last year actually just continues a trend going back the previous two. Trends in terms of academy numbers growth in recent years are shown in the following graph.

As you can see, in fact the annual growth in the number of academies has been dropping since 2017-18. This means that, at the time the pandemic hit, academisations had already been on a two-year downward path.

In January 2018, the number of academies had been 1,184 more than that of a year previously. By January 2019, the rate of increase was only 929 schools; in January 2020 (before Covid), it was 643. By January 2021, the annual growth had slipped again, to 403, though as mentioned we should not take this latest number very seriously, given the circumstances of coronavirus.

So, trying to get a sense of how long it would take to reach a full-academy state-funded system in England, given “normal” (pre-pandemic) trends, I looked at the number of new academies created in the last year before the pandemic: over the period January 2019 to January 2020.

That number, to repeat, was 643. Given that there were, at that time, 12,988 local authority maintained schools in England, it would take 20.2 years* at this rate for the entire system to be academised.

That, to remind you, is four full terms of government. And it is possible to wonder, even within the one-party state that England’s national electoral system and voting patterns currently seem to favour, if a different political regime might take charge during this period.

And remember, the conversion rate had been slowing, so this may be an overly optimistic (for the government) interpretation of the likely speed of future conversions, without further policy interventions from ministers.(My assumption was that it would continue at the 2019-20 rate, rather than slowing still further in future years, as had been the trend post 2018).

Secondary schools, many of them seemingly convinced by the perceived financial benefits of converting in the initial years of the coalition, certainly signed up in large numbers in those first years, and latest DfE data show 79 per cent are academies.

But the big gap, in terms of that ministerial ambition of full academisation, has been primaries. As of last month, only 37 per cent of primary schools had academised, suggesting there is still an awful long way to go to convert this sector to the government’s favoured status.

The reality is that in recent years England’s alternative structures of school control have been in a stand-off: yes, the number of academies has increased from forming only a tiny minority of schools in 2010 to something much more substantial by the middle 2010s; but no, on current statistical trends has  seemed little prospect of academy numbers even continuing to grow by much without further ministerial pushes.

Implications

In terms of understanding the implications of what Williamson said yesterday, the first aspect to note is what he did not say.

The Education Secretary, though he said he would like all schools to become academies, is not proposing to try to pull the most dramatic lever he could possibly use: simply to make them take on the status.

That, of course, was tried out five years ago by one of Williamson’s predecessors. Back in 2015-16, Nicky Morgan had proposed that all schools would be either in the process of becoming academies by 2020 or, if that was not the case, they would be forced to do so.

But in April 2016, Morgan was forced into a u-turn on the issue, after a revolt in particular from backbench Conservative MPs and some Conservative councils. In particular, the idea of forcing time-consuming and costly structural reform on primary schools in cases when they were faring well without such change may not have been welcomed on the doorstep.

The Times (£) quoted an unnamed Tory backbencher as describing the policy as “f***ing poison”, which could lead to “parents camping outside popular council-run schools in protest” (not so different from what happens now in some cases of forced academisation, I think, though this would have been on a larger scale), while even the Daily Telegraph said she had been right to decide, in the end, not to force schools to convert.

That Telegraph piece had argued that forcing was unnecessary given that schools would convert voluntarily, suggesting this might happen by 2030. But, as argued above, even that timeframe seems unlikely, on current trends.

So, the upshot is that Williamson appears to have ruled out compulsion in favour of something less dramatic. Measures unveiled yesterday embrace a mixture of, yes, some possible increase in forced academisation, but seemingly voluntary conversion continuing to bear most of the weight of what the government is trying to do.

The new measures

Well, take the “forcing” bit first, Williamson dropped a heavy hint that schools with three consecutive “requires improvement” judgments from Ofsted faced being forced into academy status in all circumstances.

This looks like an attempt to cast the “forced academy” net further, in terms of ministers’ endlessly controversial measures to require academisation even when local communities are overwhelmingly opposed, beyond the usual current requirement that they have to fail an Ofsted inspection first, to merely being repeatedly in Ofsted’s next grade up.

The Conservatives promised back in their manifesto of 2015 that all “coasting” schools would be turned into academies, and that did not happen, with the unpopular “coasting” tag subsequently abandoned. So we will have to see how this latest move on compulsion fares.

In terms of scale, most schools are currently rated good or outstanding. So they do not have even one rating of requires improvement or below on their record, let alone three, so it remains to be seen how many schools this policy lever – if it is pulled - will snaffle up for the government.

Therefore, the main basis of Williamson’s plan seems to be to try to use more subtle levers at the government’s disposal to try to encourage non-academy schools to take on the status it favours.

There was a much-publicised £24m fund to grow “strong multi-academy trusts” – though Williamson’s speech said the figure would be “up to £24 million” and this money is not entirely new: according to Schools Week it currently sits at £17m.

Schools would be encouraged to “try before you buy” by forming partnerships with multi-academy trusts, before actually “joining”– in the government’s word’s – a multi-academy trust (I think the more accurate term, given where power then sits, would be “being taken over by” – a MAT.

However, again as Schools Week also pointed out, such arrangements are not new. And Education Uncovered would also point out that some local authority schools having had management from MATs before being forced to academise have seen staff and parents far from happy; more on this in the coming days, I suspect.

There would also be more cash - £1.25m – for a new “turnaround” Catholic multi-academy trust and a “pilot programme” for new faith trusts, while rather unspecific plans to “make it easier” to join MATs and to simplify the Academies Financial Handbook were also mentioned.

What will be the upshot of all this?

The main question for the government, and for those observing the progress of its flagship structural reform, then, will be: can this new policy intervention from Williamson produce the dramatic change in academy conversions that the existing data show is needed if he is to get anywhere near realising this newly-re-stated ambition of academies-for-all?

I think the odds are against it, given statistically how far the government has to go, as argued above. But there are two points to bear in mind.

The first is to ask whether the specific measures above will have the desired impact, in terms of effecting a dramatic increase in academisations. I think it’s too early to say on that, though as indicated there is a sense in relation to several of them that they are not exactly new, while others will be small scale in terms of their statistical effect.

The bigger question is whether the very fact of Williamson making a major speech saying he wants schools to convert, and promising to make more announcement on the detail, will persuade more schools that this is the way the political wind is blowing, and so to convert voluntarily.

A look back at the data may be instructive, here. Looking back since the arrival of Conservative-led government 11 years ago, the pattern of academy conversions was that there was an early spike, post 2010, with more than 1,000 new academies created three years in a row from 2011 to 2014, but numbers then dropping off until 2016.

They then rose again that year, before peaking in 2017-18. It seems highly likely that Morgan’s intervention, saying all schools would be expected to convert, drove an increase in the number of primaries choosing to do so – to “jump before we’re pushed” – around that time.

Will this happen again? Well, it seems possible that some more primaries will take that view now, although, again, there is still an awful long way for the government to go on this, in terms of numbers.

Primaries have had nearly 11 years to opt, or not, for academy status now. The fact that so many have yet to do so is interesting.

In reality, for most schools the reality that they risk being “pushed” into academy status still seems quite remote. As long as they can avoid that “failing” judgment for Ofsted, or possibly those three successive RI verdicts – which for most schools, will be a long way off – it will not happen.

Finance will continue, of course, to be a factor in decision-making, with local authority budgets – perhaps by design by the government - remaining very stretched, though per-pupil funding in the academies and non-academy sector is meant to be the same and high senior salaries in MATs will continue to excite controversy.

All in all, then, whether the conclusion of school governing bodies, after this speech, will be “that’s it, then, we better jump now” or “we really have better things to do, especially post-pandemic, than engage in permanent changes in structures, which will give our local governing bodies less control over decision-making” remains to be seen.

Final thoughts on all-academy structure: incoherence

I had a few final thoughts on Williamson’s re-iteration of the government’s favoured all-academy system.

The first was to underline comments I have read in at least one union response that the drive was, perhaps predictably but depressingly nevertheless, virtually evidence-free. Williamson mentioned multi-academy trusts being the government’s favoured structure for all schools, but without referencing the empirical detail on which this claim was being made.

He cited data on sponsored academies improving their Ofsted grades within MATs. But statistically this is likely as, in Ofsted terms they were starting from a low base**. Evidence from local authorities has suggested a similar effect with LA schools, no control group has been set out by the government and even the DfE’s then permanent secretary admitted in 2018 that there was no proof that another approach than forcing failing schools to join academy trusts would not have worked just as well.

Second, there was a comment from Williamson which seemed to speak to a striking conceptual conflict between what the DfE has been saying for many years about types of school, and what it is now espousing.

Williamson said: “I want to see us break away from our current pick-and-mix structure of the school system and move towards a single model.”

The argument here was that it was better to have a single structure under which all schools should operate – the MAT – rather than having a mix of local authority schools, single academy trusts and MATs.

And yet successive governments have talked repeatedly about the benefits of a “diversity” of types of schools, in arrangements which have varied from community schools to voluntary-aided, voluntary controlled, city technology colleges, studio schools, free schools, academies…the academic Steven Courtney has charted up to 90 of them.

There is a debate to be had about whether diversity actually benefits pupils and their parents. But to deride one type of diversity as “pick-and-mix” just as you have celebrated the different other types of institution on offer is odd.

And the logical follow-on from Williamson hitting out at the “pick-and-mix” model in relation to academy vs local authority maintained is that if I, as a parent, choose to opt for a school whose governance structures link it more closely to its local community – it is hard to see how that is not the case for LA schools in comparison to academies – then under such uniformity this option would be withdrawn.

Finally, it struck me that the overall drive towards multi-academy trusts of any type being the favoured model is similarly lacking in coherence. The government often appears to promote academisation as a profession-led model, with Williamson here talking about “the strongest” headteachers taking charge of lots of schools.

But in several of the larger multi-academy trusts, in reality businessmen “sponsors” are in control: think Harris, Future, David Ross or Ark, to mention a few which have featured frequently in these pages. These individuals, rather than qualified teachers, are in ultimate charge of these chains’ strategies through controlling their boards of directors.

If professional control is really what ministers want, why do they allow situations such as at Future Academies, as charted endlessly on Education Uncovered, where non-professional “sponsors” are in the driving seat?

Williamson was also keen to promote the benefits of faith-based diocesan MATs. But, here, the model is different again, with centralised diocesan boards of education, rather than teachers themselves and seemingly at the expense of local parishes, in the driving seat.

Do all of these models, then, add up to a system in which the profession is in control? It seems to me that clearly they do not. Thus, MATs seem to be being promoted as an end in themselves, rather than on the basis of what different types of structure might be trying to achieve.

“I am not proposing structural change just for the sake of it,” stated Williamson. You could have fooled me.

Statistical postscript: among academies, are MATs taking over?

Just finally, I’ve had a quick attempt at getting a sense of whether, within the academies structure, ministers’ favoured model of multi-academy status is taking over on the ground.

That is, are more and more academies grouping into MATs, or not?

Well, I’ve only had a chance to take a cursory look at this, comparing DfE data from last month with a similar dataset from roughly two years ago (April 2019). And, while the numbers suggest some trend towards consolidation of schools into larger organisations within the sector, as with academies as a whole there seems a long way to go.

So, if you look at this graph, you can see that trusts have been getting slightly larger, on average, with trust size moving to the right. Some larger trusts have been “merging with” – ie taking over – smaller trusts, and MATs have also been increasing in size by taking on new academies.

In fact, the number of academies in single academy trusts has actually fallen since spring 2019, from 1,616 to 1,410, while the numbers in medium-sized trusts has surged: academies within trusts in the 11-20 school range have risen from 1,378 to 1,990, taking their proportion from 16 to 21 per cent of the total number of academies over this timeframe. The proportion of academies in trusts of more than 30 schools, though, has barely grown.

And it is still the case that more than half of the academy trusts in England control just a single school (that percentage reduced only from 58 to 54 per cent over the period).

As with academisation as a whole, then, ministers’ vision of all academies in large-ish groupings still seems to have a way to go.

“Civic” perhaps an odd choice of word in relation to MATs.

The DfE’s press release on Williamson’s speech came with assorted quotations from academy supporters, including one from Leora Cruddas, from the Confederation of School Trusts.

Multi-academy trusts, she said, were a “new civic structure created with the sole purpose of advancing education for the public benefit”.

The word “civic”, however, jumped out at me as perhaps not quite in tune with the reality of the MAT structure, in perhaps carrying a more locally democratic sense.

The online Cambridge Dictionary defines the word civic: “of a town or city or the people who live in it”. With some MATs operating across regions, rather than just in one place, does the word, then, really apply to them? Are such organisations really rooted in place?

The dictionary also gave examples of the word in use, such as: “The prime minister met many civic leaders, including the mayor and the leaders of the immigrant communities” and “the opera house is a great source of civic pride”. This carried a sense of something more municipal, perhaps. Again, the academy trust model’s having few formal democratic links with local communities – the only small one is the requirement for two parents, who might be elected, on academy trust boards or local committees -  meant this word seemed, to this observer, to jar.

A Collins online dictionary says: “You use civic to describe the duties or feelings that people have because they belong to a particular community.”

And yet the reality is that the academies structure – for good or ill – removes institutional links to a local community, by routing accountability through central, rather than local, government.

That is not to dispute the fact that many MATs are providing a service of value to local communities. It is just that there seems nothing particularly civic about their defining structure.

*Of course, a further 15 months have passed since January 2020, so we may be slightly under 20 years on that calculation by now.

** In fact, when Williamson compared the fact that “75 per cent of sponsored primary and secondary academies that have been inspected are ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’” with the fact that the rate was only one in 10 of their predecessor schools, the second part of that comparison is true almost by definition: many of these schools were selected for sponsored academy precisely because of their low previous Ofsted gradings.