Academy school what is

What is an academy? They can decide on their own curriculums, term dates, school hours and much more. Primary, secondary, middle, all-through, , alternative provision and special schools can all be academies.

Multi Academy trusts are charities that have responsibility for running a number of academies. They cannot, as charities, be run for financial profit and any surplus must be reinvested in the trust. By working in partnership with each other, the schools within a trust can share staff, curriculum expertise and effective teaching practices, and work together to deliver the best outcomes for pupils. While other types of school partnerships can be effective, the key difference with academy trusts is that there is shared accountability for standards across the trust; all schools within the trust support each other and the trust is accountable for them all.

Explore the topic Schools and education School admissions and transport to school. Is this page useful? Maybe Yes this page is useful No this page is not useful. Thank you for your feedback. Report a problem with this page. What were you doing? What went wrong? Email address. But he also acknowledged that great progress has been seen in many academies. Academies, like all schools, are inspected by Ofsted, but because of changes to the inspection regime, those classed outstanding are no longer routinely inspected.

Regional School Commissioners were introduced in to approve academy conversions and monitor standards at academies and free schools in their areas. There are eight regional commissioners, who each work with a small board of head teachers. They cover quite a large geographical area and act on behalf of the Secretary of State for Education.

For example, 25 local authority areas are covered by the Regional School Commissioner for Lancashire and West Yorkshire. If all schools become academies, it will mean each regional commissioner over-seeing thousands of them. Plans announced by ministers in Westminster do not apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where education policy is devolved, and where academies do not exist. In Wales, school governing bodies set their own start and finish times - although local authorities can override them.

In Northern Ireland, the law states that the school day must be at least three hours for pupils under eight, and four and a half hours for pupils over eight. In Scotland, education authorities set hours, but the school week is commonly 25 hours for primary schools and Scottish councils were banned from cutting the length of the school day to save money in December.

Academies plan and longer school day. Academy plan 'a huge political gamble'. Department for Education. Registered independent schools are independent of the local authority LA , and are fee-charging.

Sponsors and the DfE provide the capital costs for the Academy. Running costs are met by the DfE in accordance with the number of pupils, at a similar level to that provided by local authorities for maintained schools serving similar catchment areas. City Technology Colleges: all ability independent schools, which do not charge fees, and are not maintained by the local education authority.

Their curriculum has a particular focus on science and technology education see West and Bailey They were established by sponsors from business, faith or voluntary groups. Voluntary-aided schools are maintained by the local authority.

The foundation generally religious appoints most of the governing body. The governing body is responsible for admissions and employing the school staff. Land at voluntary-aided schools is usually owned by trustees, although the local authority often owns any playing field land Department for Schools, Children and Families Foundation formerly grant-maintained schools are maintained by the local authority.

The governing body is responsible for admissions, employing the school staff, and either the foundation or the governing body owns the school's land and buildings Department for Schools, Children and Families Voluntary-controlled schools are maintained by the local authority. These are mostly religious schools where the local authority continues to be the admission authority. Land at voluntary-controlled schools is usually owned by trustees Department for Schools, Children and Families Community schools are maintained by the local authority.

The local authority is responsible for admissions, employing the school staff, and it also owns the school's land and buildings. In the time period under study, the main impetus of the programme was to replace failing schools with academies by moving away from the conventional school type that had populated the English secondary sector in the past.

The key feature was the need to sign up a sponsor, who worked with the local authority LA where the school operates, and to complete a formal expression of interest this made the case that an academy in the proposed area was both needed and feasible.

The phase is completed when the LA and sponsor send the expression of interest to the Secretary of State for Education for his or her ministerial approval.

After approval the process moves on to the feasibility stage and beyond that to actual conversion of the already existing school to an academy. The change in the composition of schools is modest relative to the vast post expansion of the programme. Author's calculations using Department for Education data.

Includes middle schools. Excludes special schools. Noncommunity schools are city technology colleges, foundation schools, voluntary aided schools, and voluntary controlled schools. See Table 1 for more detail on these school types. Table A. Because of the research design to be implemented, the focus is limited to schools that convert from an already-existing school; furthermore, the analysis is based upon schools that enrol pupils at age 11 and have students sit their final compulsory schooling exams at the school this corresponds to the conventional secondary school in England.

Although there is a sizeable body of research on the impact of different schooling systems on pupil performance, there are fewer studies that look at what happens when the type of school attended by pupils changes. One study that looks at schools changing status in England is Clark He looks at what happened when schools became grant-maintained GM —a school type that enjoyed substantial operational autonomy.

As narrow GM vote winners experienced a significant improvement in pupil performance of about a quarter of a standard deviation compared to the narrow GM vote losers, his results suggest that increased school autonomy can bring about performance improvements. GM schools were introduced in the late s and conversion to GM status involved little turnover in management; indeed, the process was voluntary and often instigated by the school's governors.

The granting of greater autonomy to already successful schools contrasts with the initial academies programme, where managerial changes were imposed on schools deemed to be struggling. In this respect, the United States work on charter schools is more relevant to the analysis undertaken in this paper.

Initial findings from the literature on charters, based upon quasi-experimental research designs, produced mixed to negative results. For instance, Betts et al. Concerns with nonrandom selection into charters subsequently led researchers to begin to look at lottery based estimates of the effect of charter attendance. These studies exploit the fact that some schools use lotteries to allocate places when the school is oversubscribed.

An exception to the above is Gleason et al. However, they do find performance improvements for disadvantaged children defined as those on free school meals. Similarly, Angrist, Pathak, and Walters find that when splitting their Massachusetts sample between urban and nonurban charters, gains are positive in urban schools but negative for nonurban charters.

As the majority of the lottery studies are based upon charters serving disadvantaged children in urban areas—such as New York and Boston—these latter studies shed light on seemingly disparate findings between lottery and nonlottery based studies. Charters differ from academies in two important dimensions; first, charters are often newly built or set up schools; and second, applications to charters tend not to be co-ordinated with applications to other local schools.

A small number of US studies have looked at conversions of already existing public schools to charters as in the study of school takeovers in Boston and New Orleans by Abdulkadiroglu et al. Alongside these, Abdulkadiroglu et al. In a school choice setting similar to the one studied here, they find positive effects of charters on performance. On academies themselves, there remains little rigorous work. Very early work by Machin and Wilson looked at differences in pupil performance between a small sample of the first academy schools and a matched group of schools, finding modest, statistically insignificant, relative improvements.

A PwC Report reported higher percentage point increases in the results of academies compared to the national average which is not a good comparison since academies are well below average performers in their predecessor state , whereas a National Audit Office report on the labour academies looked at their performance compared to a selected group of maintained schools, with similar pupil intakes and performance to the academies pre-treatment, finding a significant improvement in pupil performance in the academies.

There is also some largely descriptive, noncausal school-level empirical work in the education field. For this paper, only use the year-on-year January collection is used because this collection is the most available and consistent over time.

In England, compulsory education is organised around four key stages for years of schooling from ages 5 to These are key stage 1 in grades 1 and 2 and key stage 2 grades 3—6 in primary school; and key stage 3 grades 7—9 and key stage 4 grades 10 and 11 in secondary school. In studying academy conversion impacts, the two outcomes of interest are pupil intake and pupil performance.

The impact of academy conversion needs to be analysed at the pupil-level. This is because the underlying composition of students attending schools may change over time and, indeed, it turns out that pupil intake does change post-conversion.

It is important to devise an empirical strategy that is not contaminated by the changing quality of post-conversion enrolees. A causal effect of academy attendance on pupil performance is therefore identified by focusing on pupils who were already enrolled in an academy pre-conversion.

These pupils are referred to as being legacy enrolled. Because they had been enrolled in the school prior to conversion this avoids the endogeneity of the post-conversion enrolment decision that would contaminate estimates obtained from also looking at newly enrolled students. The research design combines difference-in-differences with instrumental variables. Before going into specific details, first the comparison schools are defined.

Table 2 compares pre-treatment characteristics of academy schools and other types of maintained English secondary schools. The academies who have both a grade 7 intake and grade 11 exam takers very clearly have significantly different pupil characteristics and levels of pupil performance than other state maintained secondary schools. Notes: Standard errors clustered at school level reported in parentheses. The fact that these schools show higher signs of disadvantage and record lower achievement in school leaving tests is not surprising as labour's academy programme was aimed at poorly performing schools.

Thus, a naive comparison between academy schools and all other state-maintained schools is likely to suffer from significant selection bias. There is one exception here, as the 12 conversions from City Technology Colleges CTCs were already highly autonomous schools that were performing well. These are therefore omitted and the treatment group defined as the 94 new academies that converted from the four groups of state maintained schools: community, voluntary controlled, foundation and voluntary aided schools.

Finally there is also scope for mean reversion, as academies were badly performing schools in their predecessor state. Panel B of Table 2 shows the pre-treatment characteristics of both the 94 schools that become academies in the sample period and schools that become academies later after the study sample period ends.

It is further legitimised in the empirical findings described in what follows where there is no sign of differential pre-conversion trends between treatment and control schools in test scores, thus allaying concerns of mean reversion.

To first study the issue of changing pupil composition post-conversion, a brief analysis of the impact of academy school conversion on pupil intake is first presented. For some of this analysis, intake is measured in terms of ability composition by the end of primary school standardised KS2 average points score 19 of pupils who enrol into grade 7, the first year of secondary school.

Alongside this ethnicity, free school meal status, and gender of the incoming cohort are also considered. For the main analysis—the impact of academies on pupil performance—the outcome of interest is the KS4 performance of pupils, measured for the majority of the analysis as the standardised best 8 exams points score of individual grade 11 students. In terms of the timing of academy conversion, an academy is designated as starting for the first whole school year when it has academy status. One can define c as the number of academic years before or after conversion.

Limiting the sample to pupils in schools that either convert or are set to convert after the sample period enables implementation of the treatment-control comparison across conversion cohorts that is described in what follows. The main empirical question of interest is the impact of becoming an academy on end of secondary school examination performance. To clarify the research design it is useful to first introduce some notation.

The year of conversion for school j can be defined as CY j. Finally, conversion cohorts are sets of schools— S t —that convert in the same academic year t. The estimates of 1 reported in what follows show that pupil intake did change after academisation. This change in composition means it would be misleading to study pupil performance effects for the children newly enrolling post-conversion. This is dealt with by using legacy enrolment as an instrument for academy attendance.

In other words, pupils are legacy enrolled if they are enrolled in an academy in the year prior to conversion and are not in their final year of compulsory schooling grade Estimates are pooled together across conversion cohorts in the presentation of the results.

Because pupils selecting into schools after the point of conversion are removed from the sample, the LATE estimate corrects for the fact that not all legacy enrolled pupils remain in the academy until grade Equation 6 is the reduced form regression of KS4 on the instrument. The former are informative about differential pre-conversion trends. All time periods 5 or more years before conversion comprise the omitted category that is set to zero.

Table 3 shows results from the analysis of changing composition for grade 7 enrolees at the start of secondary school. The table reports differences-in-differences estimates based on equation 1 , with the following four dependent variables: the end of primary school KS2 test score, and dummy variable indicators of free school meal status, being of White ethnic origin, and being male.

In each case, and in all that follows, standard errors are clustered at the school level. Notes: Robust standard errors clustered at the school level are reported in parentheses. It is then averaged across the three before standardising to have mean zero and standard deviation one—see the Data Appendix for precise definitions.

The estimated coefficients in Table 4 show that academies, post-conversion, did alter their intake in a number of dimensions. They were less likely to admit free school meal eligible pupils, and they admitted pupils with significantly higher KS2 scores. Column 1 shows that, on average, pupils enrolling in an academy at grade 7 have a KS2 mean points score that is 0. Column 2 shows a 3. By contrast, the gender and ethnic composition of their intake appear unchanged by a school becoming an academy.

Control variables included are dummies for whether the pupil is male, the pupil's ethnicity group, and whether they are eligible for free school meals, entered together with end of primary school KS2 test scores and a dummy variable for pupils for whom KS2 data is unavailable. The dependent variable is the standardised best 8 examinations point score of the pupil—see the Data Appendix for precise definitions.

These results are shown simply to make clear the need to study the legacy enrolment cohorts in the main pupil performance analysis. They indicate that the composition of newly enrolled children, beginning their secondary school years, did change differentially in treatment versus control schools before and after academisation. Hence, for the pupil performance analysis that comes next, to avoid biases from changing composition it is necessary to focus on legacy enrolled pupils.

The first set of results from the analysis of the main question of interest—the impact of academies on pupil performance—are reported in Table 4. It shows OLS, reduced form and IV estimates of the impact of academy conversion on end of secondary school Key Stage 4 pupil performance for grade 11 children.

Columns 1 — 3 show estimates of the impact of academy conversion on pupil performance from specifications without control variables. Columns 4 — 6 show estimates from value added specifications that net out end of primary school pupil performance and other pupil characteristics. Columns 1 — 3 show that being in an academy school increases pupil's KS4 test scores by a statistically significant 0. Adding the prior achievement measure KS2 and control variables in columns 4 — 6 reduces this by a very small amount to a range of 0.

The interpretation of the legacy enrolment estimate in column 5 is of a 0. The IV estimate in column 6 corrects for the fact that not all legacy enrolled children sat their KS4 examinations in the school. In fact the vast majority— Because of the high rate of compliance, the IV estimate rises only a touch compared to the reduced form estimate, increasing to 0. This is the preferred baseline average causal estimate of academy conversion. Aside from the fact that pupil achievement is significantly higher on average for pupils attending schools that converted to an academy, a further point stands out from the results shown in the table—the estimates are similar regardless of estimation method and the set of control variables used.

This reflects two aspects of the data; first, the treatment and control pupils are well balanced in terms of covariates, including end of primary school KS2 test scores; and second, there is a high rate of compliance for legacy enrolled students.

Because of this, the reduced form and IV estimates broadly align with each other. Figure 2 plots the event study D-i-D estimates from the IV specification including control variables.

However, there is a significant positive, and rising over time, impact after conversion. Conversion year test scores are 0.

Event study instrumental variable estimates of pupil performance and academy conversion, end of secondary school test scores, grade 11 pupils.

Event study estimates, from specification in column 1 of Table A. The outcome measure is the best 8 capped point score. Figure 3 plots IV estimates from the models separately by conversion cohort. The gradually rising positive performance effects are seen across the three cohort groups of conversions shown in the figure. Furthermore, the lack of differential pre-treatment trends for all cohorts is highly supportive of the research design that is implemented.

Event study instrumental variable estimates of pupil performance and academy conversion, end of secondary school test scores, grade 11 pupils, by groups of academy conversion cohorts. Event study estimates, from cohort specific specifications comparable to column 1 of Table A. For pupils that attend academies four years after conversion, these impacts of academisation are quite large.

To contextualise this, it is worth comparing them with some of the results found in the US charter school literature. Dobbie and Fryer exploit lottery admission in New York City charters and find gains of 0. The research designs most similar to our own Fryer ; Abdulkadiroglu et al. Although these correspond to a slightly different age range, and a broader measure of achievement—to reflect to the nature of KS4 exams—is used, the results fall in line with the high achieving charter school findings.

Although there are positive estimates of performance effects for pupils attending academies, it is possible that substantial heterogeneity is obscured by a focus on average effects.