All schools in England to become academies, DfE appears to confirm
The Department for Education: having another go at mass academisation. Image: Alamy.
Even schools within new local authority “school trusts” will be academies, the department states having been asked for clarity about moves set out in its white paper.
The government is to embark on a third attempt to have all of England’s state-funded schools convert to academies, the Department for Education appeared to confirm last night.
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By Warwick Mansell for EDUCATION UNCOVERED
Published: 25 February 2026
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So, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" is the order of this government. Like all Neo-liberal ones before they talk about choice but then shackle the choices that are actually possible. To. misquote (probably not) Henry Ford, "You can be any sort of school you like as long as it's an academy". Ultimately this reminds me of the actions of the current Labour Party in it's desire for über-control - it wants all schools (as did the previous administration) to be under the control of the DfE and not "those pesky LAs" who might actually know and understand the local conditions. This is a move AWAY from democratic responsibility and accountability to an authoritarian system. There is no evidence that the acadamisation process has been a success - this is about the corporatisation / privatisation of our schooling system which has worked SO well for power, water, telecoms, post etc... the only real winners from this has been the CEOs who have inflated their own worth and wages.
Tucking full academisation into a SEND white paper is not transparent policymaking. Well done Warwick for spotting this, I wonder who else has? The government is proposing wholesale structural change without fixing the well-documented weaknesses in the current academy system: weak oversight, opaque governance, and limited accountability for powerful trust CEOs and boards. Growing this system just grows this problem. Reform without regulation isn’t improvement. When this goes wrong our children will pay the price and taxpayers will foot the bill.
When I chaired a community school GB, our Finance Committee estimated the conversion cost at £100k. We chose not to convert, partly to save the cost, mainly because we had a very happy relationship with our LA and felt the "benefits" of becoming an academy were specious.
Thank you for delving deeper. Some clarity but lots of confusion. There is little collaboration in many of the medium to large multi academy trusts (sorry I should say school trusts as MAT is acknowledged to be a toxic term). Directors of Education usually ofsted inspectors dictate the standards and staff are subject to regular reviews and checks. CEOs may be laughing but they are struggling with the financial aspects as they pretend to run a company. Staff morale is further undermined by restructures, redundancies and even closure of schools or sixth forms. The proposals cannot work because no one would join a trust until they have all had external scrutiny. That is yet to be developed. This surely cannot be led by CEOs (marking their own homework, never!). Many academies have narrow curriculums. Probably a clever move to encourage more parents to use the private school system and pay more taxes! The proposals lack the vision of what impact this will have for the children in the future and society as a whole.
This plan should be seen alongside the current process leading to the reorganisation of local government in areas with dual authorities, such as county and district, forcing them to create unitary authorities. It looks likely to be chaotic, unnecessary, costly and distracting: see the letters in yesterday's Guardian following an excellent article by Polly Toynbee: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/24/flawed-council-shake-up-plans-will-not-deliver-savings?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other If it does go ahead (let's hope it doesn't) it could well lead to a system of local government which is both less capable of having a significant role in school education and more remote from local residents. It will give even more power to national government in an education system which is already heavily centralised.
I would add that the 'trust model' was strongly promoted by New Labour in the Blair years and I'm not aware of any evidence for its success. It significantly reduces local accountability, being run on a model closer to that of independent schools but answerable to central government.
Confirms my decision that now is a good time to retire from education sadly...how much more can we take?!