Abstract
AbstractThe English education system has undergone large‐scale restructuring through the introduction of academy schools. The most salient feature of these schools is that, despite remaining part of the state sector, they operate with more autonomy than the predecessors they replaced. Two distinct periods of academy school introduction have taken place, under the auspices of different governments. The first batch was initiated in the 2002–03 school year by the Labour government of the time, and was a school improvement programme directly aimed at turning around badly performing schools. The second batch involved a mass academisation process following the change of government in May 2010 and the Academies Act of that year, which resulted in increased heterogeneity of new academies. This paper compares the two batches of introduction with the aim of getting a better understanding of their similarities and differences, and their importance for education policy. To do so, we study what types of schools were more likely to change to academy status in the two programmes, and the impact of this change on the quality of new pupil enrolments into the new types of school. Whilst we do point out some similarities, these are the exception rather than the norm. For the most part, our analysis reveals a number of marked dissimilarities between the two programmes, in terms of both the characteristics of schools that became academies and the changes in pupil intakes that occurred post‐conversion.
Highlights
A feature of the evolving nature of education systems in a number of countries has been the introduction of school reforms operating through the creation of new school types
We find that schools in Labour-held councils were slightly more likely to convert during the Labour years, but much less likely to become academies after 2010
Academies were first introduced by the Labour government in the early 2000s as a remedial school improvement intervention aimed at turning around failing schools
Summary
A feature of the evolving nature of education systems in a number of countries has been the introduction of school reforms operating through the creation of new school types. The best-known recent examples of these are free schools (friskolor) in Sweden, charter schools in the United States and academy schools in England These new school types have mostly been introduced from a premise that the pre-existing education system was not delivering high enough standards for children. Whilst there are notable differences between them (in particular, whether they are brand-new schools or conversions from existing schools), they all represent movements away from what can be thought of as the traditional, state-controlled, local or community school. These new schools are typically decentralised from local.
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