“Inevitable” mass academisation fails to materialise

A government drive for all schools to be in multi-academy trusts by 2030 appears to have failed to prompt any large movement towards the non-local-authority sector, exclusive new analysis by Education Uncovered has revealed.

There has been no great rush towards academy status this year, following only modest numbers of conversions last year – despite a major push by the government 18 months ago, pledging that all schools would be run in chains within eight years.

In fact, at the current rate, with more than half of state-funded schools in England still resolutely unacademised, it would be another 31 years before we reach an all-academy set-up, with new academisations still running below the numbers they were before the pandemic.

The detail

Tracking new academy numbers has been slightly trickier than usual in recent months, as the Department for Education, which had been publishing monthly data on this since 2010, for an unexplained reason has not disclosed any such statistics since early May.

However, it is still possible to dig out figures on this. This is via spreadsheets relating to all schools, and which thus will disclose the creation of any new academies, which are published on the DfE’S “Get Information about Schools” website.

I have to say that these figures have taken even me by surprise. Although this website has always sought to challenge and notion, often put forward by those advocating academy conversions, that all schools academising is somehow “inevitable,” I think that the DfE’s statement in a white paper in spring 2022 that it wanted all schools in multi-academy trusts by 2030 would drive an uptick in schools leaving their local authorities.

But the new data suggest that there has been barely any increase in conversion rates since then.

New academies this year

The table below shows new academies opening by month, in January to September this year, compared to the same month last year, Source: DfE monthly academy updates/Get Information about Schools.

	2022	2023
Jan	33	34
Feb	33	17
Mar	27	25
Apr	47	47
May	20	18
Jun	18	22
Jul	18	14
Aug	4	12
Sep	116	130
Totals	316	319

The data show that there have been 319 new academies opened during the first nine months of 2023. This is barely identical to the figure of 316 for 2022. Those expecting a rush towards academy status following the white paper might have predicted that, with schools taking time to push through conversions, that numbers would have picked up by now. But this is not the case.

Neither were new academy numbers particularly high during 2022, with the number of academies increasing more slowly last year than they had done in 2021, and that 2022 increase running at only just over half what it had been in 2019.

In terms of the number of academies as a whole, this figure has ticked up by only 273* schools during this year. That’s an increase of only 3 per cent in these nine months. As of April, there were still more than 11,000 local authority maintained schools in England.

At this rate, then, it will be 31** years until all schools are academies across the country. That would take us until 2054.

September openers

Data on the number of new academies which have opened in September, this year compared to previous years, underlines the trend that there are not many academy conversions currently, with the number of newly-created academies still substantially down on their pre-pandemic levels.

September is, of course, traditionally the biggest month of the year in terms of new academy conversions.

130 academies in total have opened this month. That compares to figures of 116 in September 2022, 129 and 107 respectively in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, but figures ranging between 171 and 236 in the four years prior to that.

There seems to be, then, no great evidence of any new surge towards academy status in recent years, with new academy numbers having peaked in 2016-17 and levelled off afterwards.

A primary headteacher, working within a successful local authority, who had considered academisation during the past 12 months as it was being heavily pushed by the government, but has not academised, said he was not surprised by the data.

He said: “There has been so much white noise around, whether it’s cuts, or school buildings, or staffing issues, and other huge issues such as special educational needs, we and colleagues I speak to just don’t have any space to think about changing systems, or school structures.

“I think those schools that were going to do it [academise] would have done so by now. So I think this agenda [of rapidly increasing the number of academies] is basically dead, now.”

This head also suggested the current school buildings crisis may also have underlined to some heads why they would not want to leave their local authorities, which were classed as “responsible bodies” in terms of buildings, and thus bore responsibility for the quality of the school estate. Following academisation, this would pass to the academy trust.

With all schools now having had more than 13 years to decide whether to convert or not, and ministers having endlessly promoted the policy, it is striking how the position of an essential stalemate between the two sectors in terms of numbers currently shows no sign of shifting.

-The DfE has given no explanation as to why it has taken more than four months to update its monthly academies data.

The current page has not been updated since March 2^nd, with data published on there now six months old. (It relates to March 2023; a more recent dataset, relating to April 2023, had been posted a few days before the last update, but was swiftly removed).

Asked about the gap in releasing this data, the DfE told me (on Thursday): “An update as of 1^st August 2023 is currently in the process of being published and will be available online in the coming days. We will have regular updates on this from September 2023. The Department will be returning to regular reporting from now on.”

I followed up by asking if there was an explanation on why the data had not been published in recent months.

The DfE spokesperson responded: “There is nothing further to add.”

 *This is a slightly lower number than that of new academies opened this year. I think this must be because a small number of academies will have closed or amalgamated during this time, so the total number of academies as of September 2023 is the number of academies at the start of year, plus new openers, minus closures/amalgamations.

**The small growth in the number of academies used in this calculation includes newly-created free schools, as well as academies created from maintained schools leaving their local authorities. If we just focus on the latter, academy growth rates will be smaller again. So I may be being cautious/optimistic from the government perspective in using that date of 2054.