Aren academies a controversial change? How successful have they been?
Academies are relatively new, and most of them have been open for less than 15 months, so it is a little early to make definitive judgments about the programme as a whole. However, we do know that academies have proved extremely popular with parents, and the numbers of students recruited has jumped in almost every instance where an academy has been introduced. There have been many independent reviews of various aspects of the performance of the early academies and there is strong evidence that that standards, discipline and staying-on rates are improving at a faster rate than other schools. Most academies have been created in areas of economic deprivation and in these early days their ‘raw’ results are below those of more successful schools. Ofsted has introduced a new framework for inspecting schools, and the first school in the country to have been inspected and achieved a ‘perfect’ score of Grade 1 (‘Outstanding’) in every one of the 30 criteria is an Academy in South London.
