For more than a decade, academisation has been sold to the public as a route to greater freedom for England’s state schools: liberated from local authority control, empowered headteachers would innovate, tailor curricula and respond swiftly to local needs. Yet emerging evidence, including new research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), suggests a very different reality.Far from ushering in an era of autonomy, the rapid expansion of academy trusts and centralised oversight may have tightened control over what happens in the classroom, narrowed the scope for professional judgement, and reshaped who really holds power in the education system. This article examines how a reform framed around independence has, in practice, often reduced the very freedoms it promised to deliver.
Centralisation behind the promise of autonomy in England’s academies
Far from empowering individual institutions, the growth of multi-academy trusts (MATs) has quietly shifted power away from classrooms and communities towards distant executive teams. Decisions once taken in the staffroom or by local governors – from choosing exam boards to shaping the school day – are now frequently standardised across entire chains. Heads are increasingly recast as middle managers, obliged to implement group-wide policies on curriculum, assessment and staffing rather than exercising professional judgement. For many teachers, the rhetoric of “freedom” has translated into tightly scripted practice, enforced through central data dashboards and high-stakes performance monitoring.
This reconfiguration of power is visible in the everyday experience of school leaders and staff, who describe a narrowing band of genuine discretion:
- Budgets pooled at trust level, reducing local say over spending priorities
- HR policies centrally imposed, homogenising conditions and pay structures
- Behavior systems rolled out chain-wide, limiting pastoral innovation
- Branding and communications controlled from head office, muting local identity
| Aspect | Before Academisation | Within Large MATs |
|---|---|---|
| Curriculum design | Led by school staff | Set by central team |
| Budget control | Held by headteacher | Managed by trust finance |
| Governance | Local governing body | Board several steps removed |
How multi academy trusts reshape decision making and local accountability
As schools are absorbed into larger structures, key strategic choices migrate upwards from staffrooms and governing bodies to central trust offices. Decisions over curriculum models, staffing levels, procurement and behaviour policies are increasingly standardised across dozens of institutions, producing efficiencies but also narrowing space for local experimentation. Headteachers, once described as “chief executives” of their own schools, now operate more like regional managers, authorised to implement centrally prescribed frameworks rather than to craft distinctive educational visions. Local authority oversight has receded, replaced by trust boards and executive teams whose members are often geographically dispersed and less rooted in the communities their schools serve.
- Funding flows controlled by trust headquarters
- Policy templates rolled out across multiple schools
- Performance data monitored by central analytics teams
- Local voices redirected through appointed advisory groups
| Level | Who Decides? | Community Role |
|---|---|---|
| Trust-wide | Central executive & board | Indirect, via consultation |
| School | Head & senior leaders | Limited, frequently enough advisory |
| Local | Advisory councils | Voice without clear power |
This reconfiguration blurs conventional lines of accountability. Parents and local councillors who once turned to elected representatives or local authority officers now face trust hierarchies governed by company law and charity regulation, with minimal formal obligations to local electorates. While some trusts create parent councils and community forums, these mechanisms rarely carry decision-making authority, functioning more as sounding boards than levers of change. The result is a system in which power is both more centralised and more opaque, with formal accountability channelled through performance contracts and regulatory inspections rather than through direct, democratic scrutiny at neighbourhood level.
Impact of reduced school level freedom on teaching innovation and community needs
As decision-making migrates upward to academy chains and central offices, classroom experimentation is increasingly squeezed into the narrow space left by trust-wide policies, branded curricula and standardised assessment regimes.Teachers who once adapted content to local histories, languages and labor markets now find themselves working from pre-approved scripts, with limited room for co-designed projects, cross-curricular themes or risk-taking pedagogies that might not yield immediate gains in test scores.This shift shapes not just what is taught, but how teachers see their own professional identity: more implementer than designer, more data technician than community intellectual.
- Locally rooted topics sidelined by chain-wide schemes of work
- Teacher-led partnerships with local employers replaced by centrally brokered offers
- Community languages and cultural knowledge underused in everyday teaching
| Before | After Academisation |
|---|---|
| Projects built around local issues (housing, air quality, youth work) | Uniform STEM challenges rolled out across the trust |
| Flexible timetables for community mentors and artists-in-residence | Central approval required for external visitors and partnerships |
| Rapid curriculum tweaks in response to neighbourhood events | Change cycles aligned to annual trust-wide planning rounds |
For families, this loss of versatility can mean that schools no longer feel like civic institutions woven into the life of their neighbourhood, but branded outposts of distant organisations. Opportunities to incorporate parent expertise, respond to local economic shifts or develop tailored support for vulnerable groups are constrained by one-size-fits-all frameworks.In the pursuit of system-wide consistency and performance metrics, the subtle, negotiated relationship between school and community risks being flattened, and with it the capacity of education to respond creatively to the needs of the places it serves.
Policy recommendations to restore genuine autonomy within a mixed education system
Rebalancing power in a fragmented system requires shifting autonomy away from distant trusts and back towards those closest to pupils. This means reinstating meaningful local oversight that is advisory rather than coercive, alongside clearer statutory rights for headteachers and governing bodies to shape curriculum, staffing structures and community partnerships. Crucially, funding rules and accountability frameworks must be redesigned so that they do not push schools into uniformity through fear of sanctions. Instead, regulators should focus on safeguarding, financial probity and equity, while allowing pedagogy, assessment approaches and organisational culture to be resolute locally. In practice, this can be supported by lightweight, obvious agreements between schools, local authorities and trusts that set out shared expectations without prescribing one-size-fits-all models.
- Guarantee core curricular freedoms within national standards
- Protect the legal authority of governing bodies and parent voice
- Cap central trust charges and require disclosure of services provided
- Audit accountability burdens and remove duplicated reporting
- Support collaborative networks over competitive market logics
| Current feature | Proposed shift |
|---|---|
| Top-down trust control | Shared school-trust compacts |
| Data-driven compliance | Evidence-informed professional judgment |
| Isolated academies | Local civic partnerships |
Restoring genuine autonomy also demands new safeguards against the quiet centralisation of decision-making inside large trusts and the Department for Education. Mandatory publication of internal decision chains, transparent consultation with staff and families on major changes, and independent mediation when disputes arise between schools and their trusts would make power visibly accountable. At the same time, investment in leadership development and peer review networks would equip school leaders to use autonomy well, not simply absorb additional risk. Rather than privileging a single institutional form, a mixed system could be anchored by common democratic principles: voice, transparency, and shared responsibility for the public good of education.
In Conclusion
As ministers continue to champion academies as drivers of innovation and improvement, the evidence emerging from England’s schools tells a more complicated story. The academisation project has undoubtedly reshaped the landscape of state education, but not always in the way its architects promised: formal freedoms have often been replaced by new forms of control, and institutional autonomy has been traded for the demands of centralised accountability and multi-academy trust governance.
Whether this trajectory is desirable is ultimately a political question. What is clear from the research, though, is that the debate can no longer rest on the assumption that academisation naturally equates to greater freedom for schools. If anything, the English case suggests that who holds autonomy – and to what end – matters far more than the legal status of the school itself.
As policymakers ponder the next phase of reform, the challenge will be to move beyond structural fixes and confront the underlying tension at the heart of the system: how to balance democratic oversight and standards with genuine professional discretion for those working in schools. The future of state education may depend less on new legal frameworks than on answering that unresolved question.
