Andy Burnham: Yes it's time for radical change in education

The growth of Multi-Academy Trusts in England has accelerated in recent years. The number of academy schools that are part of a MAT has soared from 7,971 in 2020 to 9,806 in 2024 - a 23% increase across the four-year period. And the number of schools per MAT is also increasing, with an average of 10.3 schools per trust in 2022 increasing to 11.7 in 2024. The shift towards larger multi-academy trusts appears increasingly inevitable, particularly as financial management within education grows more complex and resource-intensive. The smaller trusts are merging, and standalone academies are joining larger groups. Andy Burnham has championed the concept of ‘Public Control’. Will he apply it to our fragmented and privatised system?

Tory governents have tried over the years to take all schools away from local education authorities (LEAs) – part of elected local government – and re-brand them as ’academies’ . Previous attempts under the former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan in 2016, and her successors Gavin Williamson and Nadhim Zahawi from 2021, were later abandoned.

All state schools to become Academies, including Local Authority schools

But now Labour, under Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, has launched a new attempt to finally remove all schools from LEAs in her White Paper “Every child achieving and thriving”, published in February this year.

‘We will put collaboration at the heart of the system by moving to all schools joining or forming high-quality school trusts, including enabling new local authority established trusts. This is an opportunity for schools to come together in new partnerships to take on challenges and bring further innovation to the system.’(p85)

The name is changed but legally the status of all the schools within these ‘school trusts’ will be academies. Existing local area partnerships of schools will be transformed into chains of academies, called multi-academy trusts (MATs). Not only newly-formed local area partnerships of schools but also local Councils will be given the power to launch their own chains, but they won’t be under their control.

The DfE says ‘Schools in trusts established by local authorities or other bodies will have the legal status of academies – this is how they will be funded and regulated – but they will continue to be referred to as schools.’

‘To help manage potential conflicts of interest, restrictions on local authority involvement in the day-to-day running of their trusts will be introduced.’ In other words local authority trust schools will become academies in all but name.

This would be a huge transformation of the school system, so you might expect a detailed and evidence-based justification of it, intended to open a public debate about the pros and cons of LEA schools and academies. Also you would expect such a policy shift to have emerged from Labour’s National Policy Forum or from a motion to Labour conference. It has not and no public debate will take place. The decision has already been taken by Government in private. The White Paper presents it as agreed without developing the argument for it. In her 16 page Executive Summary at the beginning of the White Paper it occupies just one sentence on page 15, and in the 106 pages of the White Paper text it doesn’t occur till pages 85 to 90 of chapter 6 of the 7 chapters.

The Government has formally abandoned the previous goal of forcing all schools to become academies by 2030 and has not set a new deadline, but ‘Consultation and support will begin with schools and local authorities in the next academic year’, ‘moving to all schools joining or forming high-quality school trusts’. The government says it will prioritise ‘quality over pace’ when moving schools into trusts. Church schools and other faith schools are able to retain their specific statutory freedoms and protections. However, schools that have received two consecutive ‘needs attention’ judgements from Ofsted may still be moved into strong, often large, multi-academy trusts (MATs).

An all-academy system and the end of schools as part of elected local authorities

Labour’s new policy represents a huge transformation of the school system. The result would be an all-academy system and the end of schools as part of local authorities, which are governed by elected local Councils. This largely reduces, if not removes, local accountability. It is a form of privatisation of the state-funded school system in England.

Are academies more successful at raising standards than local authority schools?

What is the justification for the Government’s all-academy policy? Is it claiming that academies are more successful than LEA schools at raising pupils’ achievement? The evidence has been definitively researched by Stephen Gorard, Professor of Education and Public Policy at Durham University, and his conclusion, published on 14 January 2025, is this:

‘Academies haven’t raised pupil achievement – there’s no need for them to have privileges that other schools do not.’

‘Overall, there is still no evidence that academies produce better results than schools with equivalent intakes.’

Academies over-paying top managers

The people who run academies and Multi-Academy Trusts often over-pay themselves. The March/April 2026 issue of Educate, the journal of the National Education Union, reports how one Academy Trust planned to make staff redundant while “top-slicing” 20% of its budget:

Hundreds of members at a financially troubled multi-academy trust that runs 24 schools are celebrating after their nine days of strike action saved more than 100 jobs at risk of redundancy. The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP), in the West Midlands, dropped plans to cut jobs and downgrade others after industrial action by members, which was strongly supported by parents. […] Members said the scale of “top-slicing”, or central spend, was 20 per cent, well above the average 5.5 per cent for a trust the size of ATLP.

Warwick Mansell, a freelance education journalist and founder/writer of the blog educationuncovered. co.uk, regularly reports other examples. He also wrote a report commissioned by CASE (Campaign for State Education) showing how expensive academies are to run compared with local authority schools.

Community involvement and the democratic deficit

Schools Week is an independent news publication covering schools in England. On 23 February this year it published its report of the Schools White Paper.

Trusts will be judged on community work. A new ‘pillar focused on community collaboration’ will be added to the commissioning guidance. The DfE will encourage trusts to provide updates on ‘how they have supported stronger outcomes in their community role through annual public benefit reporting’. They will be held to account on this through MAT inspections. The DfE will also consult on requiring trusts to have governance structures that ‘include all their schools, hold annual parental forums, and ensure boards hear directly from parents and school communities’.

The white paper argues that it is ‘only through collaboration between all the local services that touch on a child’s life that we can expect to deliver the improvements we want to see’. But until now this ‘has been seen as optional rather than essential’. The government plans to create a new model of local partnership and shared accountability that binds the likes of councils, schools, integrated care boards and police ‘around the aim of delivering shared outcomes for children’

Trust commissioning guidance will be updated. Among other things, a new ‘pillar focused on community collaboration’ will be added.

It will also consult on requiring trusts to have governance structures that ‘include all their schools, hold annual parental forums, and ensure boards hear directly from parents and school communities’

These proposals point in the right direction and should be supported, but they don’t go nearly far enough because they are blocked by the managerial power embodied in the multi-academy trust structure. Currently, trusts compete for pupils and staff in a flawed marketplace. In order to maintain and improve their position they have to raise results and satisfy OFSTED. Any attempts at collaboration are likely to be cursory to tick the box. The London Borough of Bromley as to deal with 30 different trusts within its boundaries. Herding cats is more likely to be successful than getting genuine collaboration from them. If collaboration is so important to a child’s life then why not reform the system to deliver it rather than try and bolt it on to the fragmented one we have now?

How parental involvement can be achieved with MATS set up as they are, is not spelled out. The largest MAT is the United Learning Academy Trust, which has 109 primary and secondary schools spread across the country from Kent to Carlisle. Would the whole trust set up a Parents Forum from across the country, highly improbable, or would individual schools with little to no influence over trust policy hold these forums? Academic research about parental involvement in school academies and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) frequently critiques a “democratic deficit,” noting that corporatised governance often sidelines parents. In the neo-liberalised school system parents function as “commodities” in the school market-place, not as empowered participants represented in a democratised and collaborative context with teachers and school managements. Especially those parents from poorer working-class families and racialised ethnic minorities.

Power to autocratic MAT leaderships or democratised Local Education Authorities?

And there is another fundamental structural cause of this ‘democratic deficit’. Meetings of the Trust Board of an individual academy school could all be open – though they aren’t - to representatives of parents and of the teacher unions to enable at least some democratic participation in decision-making. But many Trusts contain a number of academy schools and are often spread out across a large geographical area. It is completely impractical for the leaderships of these multi-academy trusts to operate on any sort of participatory democracy basis with parents and teachers, in terms of both their geography and their centralised management structures and decision-making processes.

Democratised Local Education Authorities, bringing all schools together in a local area with the full involvement and democratic participation of parents and teachers, are the alternative we should campaign for as potentially the far more democratic alternative to Phillipson’s community aspirations, which don’t challenge the neoliberal capitalist power structure of the academy system which her policies reinforce.

Some proposals for the new Burnham government :-

· Abandon Phillipson’s ‘all schools to be part of a trust’ policy’.

· Cap MATS leaders’ pay

· As a first step use either funding mechanisms or legislation to ensure all schools in trusts on governing bodies, with specific designated powers, have democratically elected parents and teachers on them

· Allow schools to return to LA control

· Set up a review of the service which sets out to make all schools locally democratically accountable to local democratic bodies, improves local planning and collaboration to meet the needs of communities and secures better value for money in governance and leadership as well as more resources for teachers and classrooms

Richard Hatcher

7 June 2026

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