Church schools lead stampede to academy status ahead of deadline

Church schools led a stampede of institutions towards academy status last month, as governing bodies rushed to take advantage of a �25,000 conversion grant before it was scrapped on New Year’s Day.

Some 206 applications for schools to convert voluntarily to become academies were submitted to the Department for Education in December, newly-released government figures have shown.

This is far in advance of any recent monthly figure for this time of year on record, and nearly four times the number of applications seen in the same month the previous year, exclusive analysis by Education Uncovered shows.

A deadline-day rush also saw 22 schools register for conversion on the day that applications had to be in before the government’s conversion grant, paying schools for academisation costs including lawyers’ fees and rebranding, expired.

Further investigation of the figures shows that they were dominated by church schools, with Roman Catholic primary schools out ahead as the most likely institutions to apply for academy status last month.

Of the 206 applications recorded for last month in the DfE’s “converter [academy] pipeline” data, a total of 129 – or nearly two thirds, at 63 per cent – were from church schools.

Of these, 75 – or more than a third - were from Roman Catholic schools, 53 were from Church of England schools and one was from a Church of England/Methodist school.

A look at the regional break-down of the data shows that church school applications, seemingly co-ordinated by particular dioceses, dominated in particular local authorities.

For example, England’s North-West saw 85 per cent of the 57 applications being from the church sector, including 30 Roman Catholic schools. The latter figure was more than half of the total applications on its own.

England’s second-largest local authority in terms of the number of maintained schools it currently has, Lancashire, saw 14 academy applications last month – all of them from Roman Catholic institutions, with the Catholic dioceses of Salford and Liverpool particularly active.

In London, which remains another area where primary academisation has struggled to take off, all but three of the 25 applications were from church schools, with Roman Catholic schools making up all of the 22 church applications.

This latter list was dominated by schools within the Archdiocese of Westminster, many of which have appeared in recent years to be resistant to academising.

I have listed dioceses by number of schools applying for academy status last month; and the local authorities with the highest number of church schools applying last month, in tables at the bottom of this piece.

The numbers overall

The data released for January 2025, showing the number of voluntary applications for academy status from local authority schools during the previous month, revealed a larger monthly figure for this time of year than for any in my records, which date back to 2014-15.

The figure of 206 applications is twice as high as that recorded in any previous January, with the previous record being 104 in January 2018. A year ago, there were only 53 applications.

Highest monthly academy application totals, 2015-25

Apr-16	227
Jan-25	206
Apr-17	161
Mar-16	154
Aug-17	123
May-16	116
Feb-18	113
Jun-24	110
Aug-16	104
Jan-18	104
Dec-16	103

Source: DfE

Although it is therefore comfortably the highest figure seen for any January in my records, there is one higher monthly total overall in my 10-year dataset. This came in 2016, during what remains the peak year for academy applications in the past decade. In April 2016, with a government white paper which proposed but then failed to go through with plans for all schools to academise, 227 schools applied to convert.

The twin drivers of this latest rush, then, appear to be pressure/encouragement* from Roman Catholic and Church of England dioceses to apply for academy status, and the demise of the £25,000 academy conversion grant which had been in place under the Conservative government.

This had paid schools to, in the DfE’s words, “get legal advice, pay for software licence transfers, get advice on human resources and meeting TUPE regulations, pay rebranding costs [and] pay expenses towards setting up the academy trust”.

All of which, of course, has been money not being spent on children’s education.

The Labour government has now ended this grant, with applications needing to be submitted by December 20^th, and the grant itself having ended on January 1^st.

All but five of December’s applications made it by the December 20^th cut-off, with 22 arriving on that day itself. This may well be a daily record; it was three times the amount received in the whole of September last year. The five applications received after that date came through on December 30^th, from five special schools in Kent, which perhaps were connected.

The surge of academy applications in recent weeks means that there are now 840 schools in the “pipeline” to leave their local authorities, but not actually having converted yet.

This is a high number, compared to the figure of recent years.

However, even with these schools, and the total of 11,321 institutions which are already academies, this still means only 56 per cent of schools overall are either academies or in the process of taking on the status. This leaves some 9,500 schools which are neither academies yet, nor in the “pipeline” to be so.

A completely academised system, then, still seems a very long way off, with church dioceses continuing to drive what energy there currently is behind conversions, to a fair extent.  

It seems unlikely that academy applications will continue at the pace of last month with the conversion grant now gone. But what will be the ongoing stances of the churches? The coming months will be interesting to watch.

*It is difficult to be sure which of these two words to use without knowledge of goings-on in the ground in relation to particular dioceses. A couple of examples coming Education Uncovered’s way suggest in at least some cases it is the former. At the least, it seems safe to say that diocesan offices will have been influential in conversations which have led to swathes of schools moving to academise in particular areas.

Applications last month, by RC or CofE diocese

Archdiocese of Westminster	16
Diocese of Salford	11
Diocese of Lancaster	9
Archdiocese of Liverpool	7
Diocese of Lichfield	6
Diocese of Arundel and Brighton	5
Diocese of Guildford	5
Diocese of Oxford	5
Diocese of Manchester	4
Diocese of Shrewsbury	4
Archdiocese of Birmingham	3
Archdiocese of Southwark	3
Diocese of Chester	3
Diocese of Chichester	3
Diocese of Lincoln	3
Diocese of Liverpool	3
Diocese of Portsmouth (rc)	3
Diocese of Southwell	3
Diocese of Blackburn	2
Diocese of Clifton	2
Diocese of Gloucester	2
Diocese of Hereford	2
Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich	2
Diocese of Carlisle	1
Diocese of Chelmsford	1
Diocese of Leeds (ce)	1
Diocese of London	1
Diocese of Northampton	1
Diocese of Salisbury	1
Diocese of Southwark	1

Source: DfE.

 Local authorities with the highest number of church schools applying for academy status during December 2024

Lancashire	14
Ealing	9
Surrey	8
Warrington	8
Haringey	7
West Sussex	6
Cumberland	4
Tameside	4
Isle of Wight	3
Lincolnshire	3
Liverpool	3
Nottinghamshire	3
Oldham	3
Rochdale	3
Suffolk	3
West Berkshire	3

Source: DfE.