Governance of Academies in England: The Return of “Command and Control”?^*

ABSTRACT

School-based education in England has undergone significant changes since 2010, with a huge expansion of academies, schools outside local authority control, funded directly by central government. Academies and local authority (LA) maintained schools are subject to different legislative and regulatory frameworks. This paper focuses on the governance of LA maintained schools, single academy trusts (SATs) and schools that are part of multi-academy trusts (MATs). The research involved analysing legislative provision, policy documents, and documents addressing the governance arrangements of a sample of 23 secondary schools. Our findings reveal a fragmented state-funded secondary school system as regards overall governance, school admissions, the curriculum, and the use of funding. Significantly schools in MATs, which are governed by the trust board, lack the autonomy of either SATs or maintained schools and are instead under the ultimate control of the trust board. The paper argues that there is a need for greater consistency regarding the governance of state-funded schools.

Keywords:

• academies
• governance
• autonomy
• multi-academy trust
• maintained schools
• faith schools

6. Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

7. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Academies are officially classified as private government-dependent schools (West and Nikolai, 2017).

2 Members can also remove existing members except the foundation/sponsor/related body and any members appointed by the foundation/sponsor (DfE, 2020a).

3 No more than one third of the board can be employees of the trust, and fewer than 20% associated with an LA (DfE, 2020b).

4 The main responsibilities of Regional Department for Education Directors as regards academies include addressing low performance, offering support, intervening where deemed necessary, taking decisions regarding significant changes to academies and establishing, reducing or expanding MATs (Regional Department for Education Directors, 2023).