My prediction: the government’s all-schools-in-academy-chains by 2030 target will not be met

Education journalist Warwick Mansell expresses his doubts on whether the government’s target of all state-funded schools in England becoming multi-academy trusts by 2030 has any chance of being hit.

Predicting anything related to politics in the UK currently seems especially perilous, with the country now on its third Prime Minister in the past three months and, in the field of schools, of course, Gillian Keegan now being the fifth Education Secretary of 2022.

However, I would say the probability of the above goal being achieved over the next eight years is vanishingly small, given the state of the data on academy conversions, coupled with the uncertainty of the legislative process which was supposed to help drive it.

This seems significant, with structural control of schools having been an obsession of ministers throughout the past 20 years, and with the detail of institutional governance continuing to exert influence over what goes on in classrooms.

The all-in-academy-chains-by-2030 goal was first revealed in March this year, as a centrepiece of that month’s Schools White Paper. This in turn formed the backdrop to the Schools Bill, which was introduced in May but then, as I wrote in July, faced a torrid time in the House of Lords.

Last month, just before Liz Truss was forced out of Number 10, it was reported that the Schools Bill was to be abandoned. The Times said the proposed legislation was being scrapped, with the government to focus on the perilous state of the economy.

But with the former Prime Minister announcing her resignation the very next day, the current state of the bill is unclear: the TES reported last week  that it was still waiting for a third reading in the House of Lords. That still seems to be the position indicated on Parliament’s website.

I will come back to how this might affect academy numbers later in this piece. But first it is important to consider the recent trends in those statistics.

Government data

It might appear from government pronouncements over many years that a scenario whereby all schools will have left the auspices of their local councils to become part of trusts is an inevitability. But the reality of the government’s data paints a different picture.

While now just over 10,000 schools are academies, this is still just short of half of all of England’s schools. And new conversions have not been happening at any great pace recently.

In fact, the number of schools newly converting to academy status was on a downward trend for years, even before the onset of the pandemic naturally brought conversions almost to a halt. With the publication of the white paper in March, and a sense of a new public commitment to widespread academisation by the government, the hope from supporters of this policy must have been that schools would start to rush for the exit from their local authorities.

Yet any sense of that in the official data has yet to feed through. In the first two months of this academic year, applications by schools to convert to academy status were actually 30 per cent lower than they had been in the corresponding months last year, at a combined total of 40 schools for September and October 2022, compared to 58 in 2021.

And in the seven months since the announcement of the 2030 target in March, the number of schools actually becoming academies – so not just embarking on the process, but completing it – has risen by just 237.

The number of new academies, including free schools, which opened in September this year – September is always the busiest month for new academies to open – was just 116. This was 10 per cent down on the figure of 129 for September 2021 – and less than half of the 269 opened in September 2018.

To put all this in context, as of March this year more than 11,500 schools were not yet academies. For all to leave their local authorities by 2030, some 1,300 a year would need to do so. The rate of academisation would therefore need to increase more than three-fold from that seen since the publication of the white paper, with the DfE on top of that needing to ensure that schools were not just in academy trusts, but each in trusts consisting of several schools.

Are schools waiting?

The riposte to this might be that many schools have been waiting before deciding on conversions. With the government proposing, through the white paper and bill process, that local authorities help it in its academisation drive by giving councils the chance to set up their own trusts, perhaps schools have been holding off to see how their own municipalities would act, before taking major structural decisions.

But this is where the uncertainty over the schools bill seems extra problematic in terms of the 2030 aim. With no indication of any increase in the number of schools converting as of yet, where is the extra push going to come from?

This is leaving aside any consideration of what might happen under a Labour government. That party currently seems not-much-interested in school structures, suggesting it will not scrap academy status, but not indicating any great push on full academisation, either.

Readers might wonder why any of this matters. Schools are currently facing, like the rest of the country, a precarious economic situation, amid a report that 90 per cent will run out of money next year. But if a lack of interest in school structural reform is the view of the public, school governing bodies themselves may feel it even more intensely: faced with structural change, they may be deciding that they simply have more pressing concerns, right now.

The government might always have wanted to portray an academy-chain-only schools system as inevitable. But the data suggest England’s current scenario of a large proportion of schools being local authority maintained, and a large proportion being academies, is likely to persist for a while yet.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist, who founded and writes for the investigative website Education Uncovered.

The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author as an independent contributor. They are not endorsed or necessarily shared by Prospect.