Revealed: hundreds of schools waiting at least a year to become academies

Nearly 400 schools have been waiting at least a year to take on academy status after initial proposals were registered with the Department for Education, analysis by Education Uncovered reveals today.

In some cases, the wait between official instigation of the process and academy conversion can be as much as six years, with possible reasons for delays thought to include potential academy sponsors being reluctant to take schools on and the complications of private finance initiative contracts. Governing bodies having second thoughts having applied may also be a factor.

And among more than half of those schools lined up for “sponsored academy” status – currently struggling schools, where the change in category is supposed to bring about a transformation – this process is predicted, according to the government’s own school-by-school forecasts on its official spreadsheet - to take more than a year.

The findings will cast fresh light on the debate about “limbo”, or “orphan” schools, many of whose futures are on hold while they await academy status, sometimes under a sponsor. They feature in this, our first of three pieces on data relating to this subject which this website is running this week.

Our analysis is based on the DfE’s database of non-academy (maintained) schools which were in the “pipeline” for academy status, as of the latest version of the spreadsheet, which is dated January 31^st, 2018.