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.