“Converting Local Authority schools into Academies: privatising the state school system in England” is the title of my post on ACR on 7 June this year. (See Link 1 below) It said that Academies are state-funded schools in England which, instead of being part of Local Authorities, are funded and controlled directly by central government and run by Academy Trusts which have legal responsibility for the staff, assets and land of the school(s) they run – so staff become employees of the Trust.Schools can now no longer convert to become single academy Trusts – they have to join a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), which controls several schools under a single funding agreement. MATs range in size,but can be very large and are often referred to as academy chains.As of 2025, around 46% of England’s 22,000 state-funded schools were Academies, with a much higher percentage in the secondary sector (83%) than the primary (46%).
The campaign against Academies has been led by the National Education Union and by the Anti-Academies Alliance, but active local and national campaigning has declined. The AAA closed down at its last meeting on 1 February 2025. However, critical analyses of the Academies policy continue, including reports on a virtually daily basis by Warwick Mansell on his very useful website “Education Uncovered” (Link 2).
The election of Andy Burnham as leader of the Labour Government, and the appointment of Lucy Powell as secretary of state for Education in place of Bridget Phillipson, appeared to open up new possibilities for the end of the Academies system and their integration into a new and democratised Local Authority-based school system.But this year’s Labour Party conference confirmed the opposite: this Labour government will continue the policy of previous Labour and Tory governments of replacing state schools as part of elected Local Education Authorities with Academies run by private Trusts.
I am now going to quote in some detail from extracts about the Academies issue from two reports about the Labour Party conference.
“Labour Confirms The End of Public Control of Schools”
That is the title of a report from by Dr Jane Coles on contradictions between Andy Burnham’s stated aims and the drive to a wholly Trust-based service. Jane Coles is the Co-Chair of the Socialist Education Association, which is the Labour Party’s only education affiliate but has its own independent policies. Her report was published on Education Politics, the SEA’s blog, on October 4. (Link 3)
A welcome feature of Andy Burnham’s key speeches from the Makerfield by-election to his Leader’s speech at the recent Labour Party Conference has been his repeated pledge to reverse the past 40 years of neoliberal ‘wrong turns’. Devolution and regaining public control of essential services from private hands form a central plank of his policy framework.
Therefore readers of this blog might, with some justification, expect Burnham and Lucy Powell to quietly drop the rogue clause contained in the Starmer/Philipson-era Schools White Paper (‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’) that requires all remaining local authority schools to transfer into a wholly trust-led system. This controversial and unexpected policy shift – never a part of Labour’s election manifesto – will directly affect the 8,600 primary schools and nearly 600 secondaries across England which have so far stood steadfast against academy conversion. However, last week’s Labour Party Conference with its legions of corporate lobbyists in attendance clearly exposed the significant political influence and access enjoyed by MAT CEOs, education ‘charities’ and diverse think-tanks.
Many of the 8600 primary school headteachers who still belong to a local authority are likely to be represented by the NAHT (the National Association of Head Teachers), a union which, according to its General Secretary Paul Whiteman, has never favoured academisation. Nevertheless the NAHT co-sponsored a well-attended fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference entitled: Building a Trust-led system that works for all: what is needed from schools’ policy? Whiteman’s introductory remarks indicated a position of submission rather than challenge: he said he favoured a ‘mature’ and ‘nuanced’ response which would help his members ‘understand how to make the White Paper pledge work’. Issues he suggested that need resolving include how to avoid loss of identity; retaining local headteachers’ agency; whether LAs can form a trust; concerns about excessive top-slicing; and collaboration in a market-led, inherently competitive system.
All of the platform speakers, including a representative of the National Governors’ Association, adopted a position of acceptance that trusts would become the primary operating system. Unsurprisingly, the MAT CEO on the platform mounted a hard sell of the policy, enumerating the advantages of being part of a MAT set against a critique of dysfunctional LAs. She added that greater geographical coherence is likely to arise over time with schools switching trust membership once all are part of the same system, though there is no provision in the White Paper for this to happen. Both the MAT CEO and the NGA speaker suggested that regional mayors would have a role to play.
Perhaps the clearest indication that this dystopian future is about to become a reality was communicated by the Labour MP on the platform. Darren Paffey, MP for Southampton Itchen and a current member of the Education Select Committee. He confirmed that it remains the government’s ‘ambition’ to move to a wholly trust-led system. In his contribution he fell back on the politically dishonest ‘standards not structures’ argument adopted by politicians, who are ironically pushing hard for structural change.
The enormity of this move cannot be overstated. The shift to a wholly trust-led system would mark an end to state education in England as we have known it since the epoch-making 1944 Education Act. And it will be ended by a Labour government.
The SEA has long campaigned for a reversal of academisation as a policy. We welcomed the Starmer government’s initial, although modest, steps to trim MAT power. We might have reasonably expected the Burnham leadership to follow this up with further legislative change, at the very least enabling academised schools to transfer back to their local authority.
Where does this apparent capitulation by Labour (and, by implication, the NAHT) to the MATs lobby leave the SEA and others opposed to academisation? We might profitably look to other union mobilisations around privatisation and outsourcing. The NASUWT, for example, has stepped up its campaign against corporate waste and profiteering endemic to the current educational landscape (see its well-researched publication, ‘Where has all the money gone?’ at https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/static/3faf0a25-1c73-414d-82eb36adc30c42c4/Where-Has-All-the-Money-Gone-2026-England.pdf.
It’s also significant that two union-backed motions on public services and insourcing were passed unanimously at Labour Party conference. The first (Composite Motion 7), proposed by Unison and ASLEF, starts by congratulating the government on its commitment to support ‘the greatest wave of insourcing in a generation’, but argues that the strategy to achieve this is lacking. On the basis that ‘profit extraction has no place in public services’, this motion calls on the government to work with trade unions to bring various public sector contracts back in-house. It’s striking that rail, local government and health are mentioned but not education. The second motion (Composite 12), proposed by Unison and GMB, focuses on the pay, conditions and rights of care workers and school support staff – but also calls for the government to reject ‘forced academisation’ as a ‘failed education policy’. Our SEA delegate, James Whiting, indicated he wanted to speak when this motion was debated, but sadly was not picked by the conference chair.
Because none of the teaching unions are affiliated to Labour, it means that their voices are confined to the fringe at the annual conference and education-focused motions rarely make it onto the final conference agenda. But surely the push for the removal of extractive private interests from rail, mail and all utilities by Unison and other trade unions, along with campaigning groups such as We Own It, offers an opening for those of us who continue to voice our demands for schools to be returned to some form of local democratic accountability. We should also make contact with the significant number of Labour councillors who must have their doubts about the benefits of mass academisation.
After all, the part-privatisation and fragmentation of the state school system combined with the removal of democratic accountability represent the very definition of the neoliberalism that Burnham so eloquently denounces.
“No debate on academisation—the Tories’ largest outsourcing project of local-authority services“
The second extract is taken from “Labour, Teachers and the Education Unions”, a post on the SEA’s Education Politics Blog on 9 October by James Whiting, the SEA Secretary, who considers the relationship after another Labour conference in which education was barely mentioned on the conference floor. (Link 4)
Unlike other groups of workers, teachers have no direct representation at the conference.
There has been no conference debate on the curriculum, testing or university funding. Most strikingly, there has been no debate on academisation—the Tories’ largest outsourcing project of local-authority services.
…the way left education campaigners are effectively being snubbed by all wings of the party is a serious concern.
At a fringe meeting organised by four unions, Powell [the Secretary of State for Education] asked with some surprise, ‘Where is the cavalry?’, apparently expecting a wave of progressive support in response to the attacks she received from Gove et al. The answer is that we have dismounted and left our horses in the stables. Isolated and despondent, we are reduced to talking among ourselves in the stable yard while nobody appears to be listening.
This stands in sharp contrast to the backing for right-wing education ideology from the press, Conservative politicians and the ‘new establishment’ of academy leaders and Ofsted that Gove helped to create.
Unions express concern about academies and, in the NEU’s case, fund organisations and campaigns such as More Than a Score, Arts and Minds, Anti-School Cuts and Comprehensive Future. Yet there are no campaigns for change that actively involve members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, unions have focused on pay and conditions. However, they have not adequately connected those issues to the outsourcing of the education service.
In spite of our splendid isolation, we have no choice but to carry on the campaign and promote our ideas for a better education service found in our manifesto,[including] Support initiatives in the teaching unions which seek to shift the dial on academisation by involving members at school level e.g. Educators Against Privatisation in the NEU.
The question now is whether the anti-academies movement can be rebuilt to challenge the Labour government’s sell-out. We need a campaign both within the Labour Party, involving local branches and the Socialist Education Association, and outside it, with a key role played by the NEU, rooted in local campaigns to defend the existing LEA schools which are all now under threat of privatisation as Academies.
LINKS
Link 2: https://educationuncovered.co.uk/analysis/the-academies-policy-is-crying-out-for-further-reform