Unexpected school reform: Academisation of primary schools in England

Abstract

The change of government in 2010 provoked a large structural change in the English education landscape. Unexpectedly, the new government offered primary schools the chance to have 'the freedom and the power to take control of their own destiny', with better performing schools given a green light to convert to become an academy school on a fast track. In England, schools that become academies have more freedom over many ways in which they operate, including the curriculum, staff pay, the length of the school day and the shape of the academic year. However, the change to allow primary school academisation has been controversial. In this paper, we study the effect for the first primary schools that became academies. While the international literature provides growing evidence on the effects of school autonomy in a variety of contexts, little is known about the effects of autonomy on primary schools (which are typically much smaller than secondary schools) and in contexts where the school is not deemed to be failing or disadvantaged. The key finding is that schools did change their modes of operation after the exogenous policy change, but at the primary phase of schooling, academisation did not lead to improved pupil performance.

Contracting Out Schools at Scale: Evidence from Pakistan

“…In the UK, contracting out the management of government schools (through the academy programme) was most successful in its first stage, when particularly weak government schools were targeted for academisation. The more recent opening of the programme to more successful schools seems to have been less effective (Eyles et al, 2017) (Eyles et al, 2016). A similar interpretation can be applied to results found in evaluations of US charter schools -where charter schools appear to be most effective in urban areas then they are being compared to particularly low-quality traditional public schools (Angrist et al, 2013) (Clark et al, 2015).…”

“…We use a standard difference-in-difference strategy similar to that used by (Abdulkadiroğlu et al, 2016) and (Eyles et al, 2017) in the context of US Charter school and UK Academy converters, respectively, comparing the change in outcomes for early converting schools with the change in outcomes for slightly later converters. We treat schools converted in Phase 1 as treatment schools, and schools selected later in Phase 3 as control schools, focusing on the difference in outcomes for the one school year when Phase 1 treatment school had already been converted and Phase 3 control schools were not yet.…”

“…Another looks at the Pakistan 'Adopt a School' programme with around 1,000 schools in Punjab and 500 schools in Sindh but presents only descriptive analysis without making claims for causal inference (Malik et al 2015). In higher income countries, there is a wider literature on similar programmes, which have grown to around 7,000 charter schools in the US over 26 years (Epple et al, 2016), and around 5,000 academies in the UK over 16 years (Eyles et al, 2017).…”

Changing How Literacy Is Taught: Evidence on Synthetic Phonics

“…On the English academy schools programme see, for example,Eyles and Machin (2015) andEyles, Machin and McNally (2017).…”

Academies 2 – The New Batch: The Changing Nature of Academy Schools in England

“…Note that we focus on secondary schools as there were no primary academies during the Labour period. See Eyles, Machin and McNally () for a study of primary school academisation post‐2010.…”