Academies

I have been very sceptical about academies, ever since they were invented by the last government. My argument has been that, since 1988, schools have been locally managed, and that there has been nothing important that academies have been able to do that local authority schools could not do.

While that remains true, I'm becoming increasingly uneasy about this argument,  because some academies do seem to have been able to achieve genuine transformation. Not all academies have succeeded in this way, and it may only be a minority who do. But some academies really have changed the local education paradigm. I'm not saying that the organisational changes I'm going to describe can't happen within a local authority framework, and in the best cases I am sure that they do. But some academies have made huge improvements over a very short timescale, and it's not just the effect of flashy buildings and more exclusions.