Leader: Schools out – for ever

Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove.

Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove. The Education Secretary may well be about to bring the whole catchment area game to an end. Quietly, but at a surprising rate, schools are fleeing the control of local councils and becoming academies: independent, but within the state sector. What was a trickle under the Labour years is turning into a flood. This time last year, just one in 16 state secondaries had this ‘academy’ status. Now, it is one in eight. By Christmas, it should be one in four. And by the next election, most state secondary schools in Britain — about 1,600 — should be free to run their own affairs.

Had Gove suggested such an expansion before the election, he would have been laughed at. The last time the Conservatives sought to give state schools independence was under Kenneth Baker; just 50 took up his offer in three years. What a difference good legislation makes. Gove spent years preparing his Academies Act, calling in an external team of lawyers to make it watertight. At first, the teaching unions sought to intimidate would-be academies, bombarding head teachers with Freedom of Information Act requests and threats of judicial reviews. But now the unions have too many targets. Gove has approved 357 schools, with 470 applications being processed.

This matters because, in Britain, the fastest way to improve a school is to liberate it from the control of incompetent local authorities. It was demonstrated by Labour’s city academy project.