Academy (English school)
[update][2] Academies are self-governing non-profit charitable trusts and may receive additional support from personal or corporate sponsors, either financially or in kind.
[3] Academies are inspected and follow the same rules on admissions, special educational needs and exclusions as other state schools and students sit the same national exams.
The current advisory text is the Academy and free school: master funding agreement dated March 2018.
[27] In terms of their governance, academies are established as companies limited by guarantee with a Board of Directors that acts as a Trust.
[30] They were first announced as part of the Fresh Start programme[31][32][33] in a speech by David Blunkett, then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, in 2000.
[42] They were expected to be creative and innovative because of their financial and academic freedoms, in order to deal with the long-term issues they were intended to solve.
[47] This meant that Secondary Schools would no longer directly receive ring-fenced funds of £130K from Government for each of their specialisms.
In March 2022, a report by parliament's Public Accounts Committee found that academy trusts paying a staff member more than £100,000 had increased from 1,875 to 2,245 in 2020–2021 from the previous financial year.
The committee concluded that lack of financial transparency undermined parents' capacity to hold school leaders and the funding agencies to account.
[53] The governors of a school are persuaded to consider academy status, perhaps in response to an approach by a multi-academy trust (MAT).
Assuming they do, the Regional Schools Commissioner approves the decision to join the selected trust and the Secretary of State issues an academy order.
The school can change its mind until documents are sent to the Secretary of State in order to be signed; this is usually around three weeks before the agreed conversion date.
The school pays a proportion of its central funding to the MAT for shared services but can in theory take better measures to ensure best value.
[58] Research from the University of Nottingham into how the academies sector responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic showed how strong and sustainable trusts are a resilient and protective structure for pupils and schools.
[62] Even after several years of operation and with a number of academies open and reporting successes,[25][68] the programme continues to come under attack for creating schools that are said to be, among other things, a waste of money,[69] selective,[70][71] damaging to the schools and communities around them,[25] forced on parents who do not want them,[62] and a move towards privatisation of education "by the back door".
[73] The House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee reported in March 2005 that it would have been wiser to limit the programme to 30 or 50 academies in order to evaluate the results before expanding the programme, and that "the rapid expansion of the Academy policy comes at the expense of rigorous evaluation".
[74] The Select Committee was concerned that the promising results achieved by some academies may be due to increased exclusions of harder-to-teach pupils.
[63] The programme of creating academies has also been heavily criticised by some for handing schools to private sector entrepreneurs who in many cases have no experience of the education sector: such as the Evangelical Christian car dealer, Sir Peter Vardy, who has been accused of promoting the teaching of creationism alongside macroevolution in his Emmanuel Schools Foundation academies.
[25][62] This is also linked to the wider debate in the education sector as to the benefits or otherwise of the growing role of religion in the school system being promoted by the New Labour government in general, and Tony Blair in particular, with many[75][76] academies (one estimate puts it at "more than half"[77]) being sponsored either by religious groups or organisations/individuals with a religious affiliation.
[80] In 2016 a major study by the Education Policy Institute found no significant differences in performance between academies and local council run schools.
[85][86] The Committee also questioned Chris Wormald, then Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, who admitted that the Government had deliberately chosen to remove money originally allocated to support under-performing schools.
"[85] In December 2018, the Sutton Trust published a report on the effectiveness of MATs in improving the performance of disadvantaged children, with its authors noting that "Our five-year analysis of sponsor academies' provision for disadvantaged pupils shows that while a few chains are demonstrating transformational results for these pupils, more are struggling.
[92] At the subsequent election, Academies were supported by all three main political parties,[93] with a further cross-party initiative to extend the programme into primary schools currently being considered.
In May 2010 the then Education secretary Michael Gove wrote to all state schools in England inviting them to opt out of Local Authority control and convert to Academy status.
[98] Monthly updated information on existing academies and free schools, and applications in process, is published by the Department for Education.
