Will the government’s all-academy ambition be rescued by…local authorities?

Will local authorities ride to the rescue of the Department for Education as it seeks to achieve its strange ambition of an all-multi-academy-trust system for England’s state-funded schools within eight years?

This might be the ultimate irony, given that a major factor in the academies policy being pursued at all was surely the marginalisation of local government from influence over what happens in education.

As one unnamed DfE insider put it, in a report published by the Institute for Government last year, “My ministers absolutely hate local government…the whole point of the academy programme is to get schools off councils.”

Yet the proposals for local authorities to be able to set up multi-academy trusts, as predicted in advance, seem to be the one aspect of today’s schools white paper with the potential to raise what have been declining numbers of schools becoming academies every year towards that ministerial aspiration of an all-MAT set-up by 2030.

Make no mistake, that aim will require a step change in the number of conversions, with by my calculations some 1,500 schools per year needing to academise every year, on average, to get to an all-academy system by 2030. This is a much higher rate than has been achieved for any individual year since the academies programme began.

I looked through the entire section of the white paper on academies, and there is no other specific proposal in there with the potential to transform the numbers leaving the maintained sector.

It may be an indication of how difficult the DfE believes it will be to achieve its ambition, without this, that it is resorting to such involvement by local government.

The white paper does state: “We will introduce new powers enabling the Secretary of State to bring a local authority’s maintained schools into the academy system where a local authority has requested this as part of their local strategic plans, working with them and their schools to shape the local trust landscape.”

That looks like the DfE opening up the chance of blanket conversions across the local authority area*, should the local authority choose to trigger this.
 

If this happened, and indeed, if it led to the DfE achieving or getting closer to its all-academy ambition, would this represent a victory for councils, as they sought greater control over this policy, or for the government, in seeking that all-academy system?

It is hard to know, at this stage. From a public interest perspective, it is possible to wonder about whether blanket decision-making by council leadership, presumably acting in consultation with the DfE, would be in line with what grassroots communities might want for their schools.

With seemingly few other incentives, encouraging councils towards blanket academisation, it seems hard to envisage why they would make such a leap, unless there were benefits for the organisation at the end of it.

Without knowing more about how council-created trusts might be constituted – would they be in control through the trust itself (although the white paper does mention “limits on local authority involvement on the trust board”) or just commissioners for the creation of trusts? – it is hard to judge.

The paradoxes seem not to stop with this notion of local authority-instigated MATs, in a system which was set up to bypass local authorities.

For it could be argued that one “problem” that some advocates of an all-MAT system seek to address – that local authorities have a conflict of interest if they act both as “providers” of education, via maintained schools, and as guarantor of the system via for example overseeing admissions – would be exacerbated were authority-instigated MATs and other MATs to exist in the same area.

As indicated last week, this paper presents many questions, with which this website hopes to grapple over the coming weeks.

*This may even be a revival of 2016 plans by the-then Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, for academisation across local authority areas, which had been an interim fall-back when the original compulsory academisation across England plan from that year failed, but which in itself was later ditched.