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.