DfE drops its academisation goal for 2030

The news (reported on 24 February 2023 in https://schoolsweek.co.uk) that the DfE is ditching its key goal for all schools to be academised by 2030 reminds us of the fickle nature of the political world, accentuated in recent years, by the high turnover of education ministers. The current Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, is the fifth in just four months, an extraordinary catalogue of changing personnel at the top! This about-turn in policy is welcome, nevertheless, because it should, at least in theory, enable the remaining 61% of primary schools, which are not academies, to make their own judgements about whether to go down the academisation route. In practice, the context of under-funding from central government to the local authorities, has made it increasingly difficult to provide local services at the level they would want to maintain and financially the loss of schools to academisation has inevitably had an increasingly negative impact on the resources available to the LA. In the face of tightening school budgets and the scaling down of LA provision for schools, it will become increasingly difficult to resist the momentum towards academy trusts.

It is clear, however, that many schools are still wanting to remain structurally autonomous, having achieved great success within the maintained sector and valuing their links with the local authority. Stephen Morgan, the Shadow Schools Minister, at a recent Primary Umbrella Group meeting, asserted that compulsion with regard to academisation would not be part of a Labour Government’s approach and that a future Labour government would want to focus on pupil outcomes and not on structural matters. This flexibility of approach is to be welcomed and one awaits with interest its elaboration of education policies as we get closer to the general election and in particular how it sees the evolving relationship between LAs and schools.

No one would question the potential benefits of collaboration between schools, especially in the area of professional development, and the financial incentives afforded by economies of scale within a multi-academy trust. However, what is critically important for the sector is that academisation is not the result of imposition from above, but is entered into as a facilitating framework for enhancing the quality of pupil experience and achievement. To work effectively, academisation as a process has to be owned and nurtured by the schools involved rather than perceived as the official and universal panacea for school improvement: lets hope that this about-turn from the government actually sticks!