Every school to become an academy, ministers to announce
The Department for Education is expected to publish draft legislation as early as Thursday, BBC Newsnight has learned.
The move would end the century-old role of local authorities as providers of education.
An aide to the education secretary has declined to comment.
Back in October, David Cameron said he wanted “every school an academy… and yes – local authorities running schools a thing of the past”.
At the autumn statement a month later, the official document stated that the government wanted: “The next step towards the government’s goal of ending local authorities’ role in running schools and all schools becoming an academy”.
The proposals under consideration by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan owe much to a pamphlet by Policy Exchange, the Conservative-aligned think-tank, which proposes mass-converting the remaining local authority schools into academies.
That document proposed the change for mainstream schools, but did not deal with the future of special schools.
Before 2010, around 200 schools were opened as academies or converted into them.
These were struggling schools that required fast turnaround or were opening in areas of educational weakness. To that end, these “sponsor academies” were given exemptions from the national curriculum and on teachers’ pay to help them adapt to tougher-than-usual circumstances.
From 2010 to the present, however, schools have been allowed to become academies if they wish to do so. These are known as “converter academies” – and were then Education Secretary Michael Gove’s big change to the system.
This was a popular programme (partly because academies got extra cash for converting). So at the last count, there were 3,381 state secondaries, of which 2,075 were academies.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35814215
