What academies are and how they changed English schools

More than half of England's state schools are no longer run by the local council. They are academies: still non-selective, still free to attend, still inspected by Ofsted, but operated by charitable trusts under a contract, the funding agreement, signed with the Secretary of State for Education. Money flows to them directly from the Department for Education rather than through the town hall. That contractual switch, made school by school over two decades, is one of the largest structural changes to an English public service since 1945, and it happened without most parents noticing the day it reached their child's gate.

The model began small. Labour's city academies, launched in 2000 under Andrew Adonis and opened from 2002, were a rescue device: struggling urban comprehensives handed to external sponsors with new buildings and management. By 2010 there were around 200. The Academies Act 2010, pushed through in the coalition's first months by Michael Gove, inverted the logic. Any school judged good or outstanding could apply to convert voluntarily, and schools rated inadequate could be directed into a trust; the Education and Adoption Act 2016 made that direction automatic. Conversion ran fastest in the secondary sector, where roughly four in five schools are now academies, against a little over four in ten primaries. Because primaries are far more numerous, the halfway line for schools overall was only crossed in the 2020s.

What converts alongside the school is control. A maintained school's land, staff contracts and admissions sit within a framework the local authority administers. An academy's sit with its trust: an exempt charity whose trustees are accountable to the Education Secretary through the funding agreement and to the Education and Skills Funding Agency for its accounts. Most academies now belong to multi-academy trusts, MATs, which run anything from two schools to the eighty-plus of chains such as United Learning, Harris Federation, Ark and Oasis. The trust, not the individual school, is the legal entity; a MAT board can replace a headteacher, centralise budgets, or rebroker a school out to another trust, and local governing bodies often survive only as advisory committees.

The freedoms are real but narrower than either camp claims. Academies need not follow the national curriculum, yet nearly all track it closely, because GCSEs, SATs and Ofsted's inspection framework measure the same content regardless of legal status. They may set their own pay instead of the national School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, yet most shadow national scales, because teachers compare offers across a single labour market. They act as their own admission authorities, but so do faith schools and foundation schools, and every one of them is bound by the statutory School Admissions Code, with disputes going to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. The genuinely sharp differences lie elsewhere: an aggrieved parent complains to the trust and then to the Department, not to a councillor; and when an academy fails, the remedy is rebrokering to another chain rather than intervention by the authority.

Where the accountability argument actually bites

Critics of academisation tend to aim at the wrong target. The scandals that stuck, executive salaries above £200,000 at a handful of trusts, related-party transactions, the collapse of Wakefield City Academies Trust in 2017, which gave up all 21 of its schools, were failures of oversight at trust level, and the Department has since tightened its Academy Trust Handbook in response. The deeper structural issue is quieter: a system of over 2,000 trusts answers to eight regional directors in Whitehall's regional offices, a span of control no local authority ever attempted. Councils meanwhile retain statutory duties, ensuring every child has a place, arranging school transport, overseeing special educational needs, while holding no lever over the academies that educate most secondary pupils in their area. A council must find places but cannot direct an academy to expand or to admit a hard-to-place child without the adjudicator or the Department stepping in.

Defenders overclaim in the other direction. The evidence on attainment is stubbornly mixed: early sponsored academies in London posted striking gains, Mossbourne in Hackney being the emblem, but studies of the post-2010 converter wave generally find little difference once intake is controlled for. What the strongest MATs demonstrably do well is deploy scale, shared curriculum resources, central finance teams, rapid support for a sinking school, which is an argument for good trusts rather than for legal status as such. Successive governments have flirted with making every school join a MAT and backed off each time. The result is a settled hybrid: two parallel systems, one contractual and one municipal, running side by side in every county, with the funding agreement, not the council chamber, as the place where power over most of England's schools now lives.