But what are they? Editor Laura McInerney looks at questions about the policy, and tries to answer them straightforwardly. Is this just privatisation of schools?
Academies are schools run by charitable trusts via a contract with the government. The trusts are private, in that the state does not own them, but they cannot run schools for profit. And if the trust does a bad job of running the school it will have to give it back the buildings, the land, everything.
So this is not a school sell-off. Can academy trusts sell off school land and stick the cash in their coffers? Academy trusts are given school buildings, and the land they sit on, purely so they can operate the school.
As with any school, they can apply to make adaptations, or to give the site over to something else. For example, an academy in Oxfordshire with a large site allowed another school to be built on part of its land.
But it can only do this sort of thing in liaison with central government. This is a good point. There are no nationally-agreed maximum levels for CEO pay. As in the charitable sector, where leaders of major charities can earn substantial six figure sums , so can people who oversee academy trusts which may have upwards of 30 schools. Is this value for money?
We want good people to manage schools, and it is true that current CEOs would get paid substantially more to work in private businesses, such as retail chains. But there is a sensible debate to be had about whether caps ought to be brought in. In essence: yes. GCSE exams will also still be based on the national curriculum, so key stage 4 teachers will largely still focus on the same content. The reason for this is that academies have access to money the local authority holds back for things like special needs support for schools throughout the school borough.
Academies: the cons? Another concern is that allowing private companies to sponsor academies is the first step towards privatising the education system. Add to that the worry that academies will lure the best teachers away from state schools with promises of higher pay.
Can academies select their pupils? By law, academies have to follow the same code of admissions as state-maintained schools — the difference is that academy trusts handle that side of things rather than local authorities.
Will I have a say? Where can I get more information about academies? More like this. What is a free school? It better allows underperformance to be tackled when it does occur; and establish a system more likely to lead to long-term improvements in results over the next decade.
Empowering the frontline and moving control away from managers and bureaucrats and directly to the frontline is an effective way of improving performance - holding them to account for the results they achieve, and to much stricter standards of financial propriety than we ever have with local-authority schools. That is exactly what a system where every school is an academy does - providing weaker schools with the expert support they need to improve and giving the best schools the ability, freedom from meddling, money and power to innovate, build on their success and spread their reach further.
Successful, sustainable schools will not be forced to join up in a trust with other schools. As it happens, many academy schools have chosen to join a trust because they can see the benefits. Two-thirds of current academies have chosen to be part of multi-academy trusts. And strong schools that choose to come together in a trust can decide how it should be led.
But to be absolutely clear - we will never make a successful, sustainable school that is performing well join a trust - and successful schools that do choose to set up or join a trust will always be able to decide how it works.
We are not, and never have suggested parents should no longer sit on governing boards and we know that many parents already play a valuable role in governance, and parents will always be encouraged to be governors or trustees. Many parents have skills that make them very effective governors. All boards are and will continue to be free to appoint them as they see fit. But we want to enable academies to move from a model where parents are elected or appointed to governing boards for means of representation to one where they are chosen for their expertise.
That means that academy trust boards should be able to appoint all their trustees for their skills, insight and knowledge rather than who they represent. For the first time we will create an expectation that every academy puts in place arrangements for meaningful engagement with all parents, and to listen to their views and feedback.
We will also introduce more regular surveys of parental satisfaction with schools and display this alongside their examination results in our league tables. Schools will still be able to work closely with good local authorities as most academies already choose to do. The difference is that the arrangements will be determined locally and driven by headteachers deciding what works for their school, rather than functions and responsibilities designed in Whitehall.
What it does mean is the end of the local-authority monopoly on running schools and central government deciding a single approach to what services are delivered, where: schools will now be required to make a conscious choice over what will work best for their pupils.
While there are well run local education authorities, there are also some local authorities that have been allowing schools to underperform, coast or fail for a long time. Academies are actually much more accountable than local-authority schools.
The official headline measures of attainment at GCSE level changed between the two pieces of research, which might explain why the findings were different. The more recent analysis draws upon the current headline measure.
None of this research tells us about the long-term effects on performance of becoming an academy. Research by academics at LSE looking over a longer time frame found performance in sponsored academies increased more quickly than in similar schools in the mainstream sector.
The improvement was greatest in schools that had been academies for the longest, implying that the effect of academy status has a gradual impact on improving performance. Ofsted commented recently that:. It has been updated by Geoff Gee and Karen Wespieser in Image credit: Crown Copyright. News this year has fractured communities, and caused confusion and panic for many of us. No one can control what will happen next.
But you can support a debate based on fair, accurate and transparent information. As independent, impartial fact checkers, we rely on individuals like you to ensure the most dangerously false inaccuracies can be called out and challenged. Bad information ruins lives. You deserve better.
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