The ‘schools revolution’ in England: a configurational comparative analysis of academisation across local authorities

ABSTRACT

The academy concept has recently been subjected to significant academic scrutiny. However, this research has focused on assessing the success of this reform drive with regard to its outcomes, as opposed to its implementation. On the basis of the extant research, this paper identifies several factors that could plausibly be linked to variances in the extent of academy uptake across local authorities in England. The paper employs Fuzzy-Set-Qualitative-Comparative-Analysis (fsQCA) to analyse the relationship between these potential explanatory factors and the outcome of interest across 150 local authorities in England, up to November 2017. The findings support the paper’s hypothesis that higher levels of academisation are associated with different causal combinations, unified by the fact of both a ‘promoting’ agent and a conducive context being required to underpin reform in this respect. We conclude that those interested in pursuing academisation should broaden its appeal to a wider range of social actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Academisation
• schools revolution
• free schools
• coalition government
• qualitative comparative analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that whilst research shows that a majority of free schools have been established in the 50% most deprived Lower Super Output Areas (Higham, 2014a), it could be that they are located in deprived areas of otherwise relatively affluent local authorities, which is compatible with the relationship posited in this paper.

2. Except for the ‘Conservative’ indicator, which reflects the period as a whole.

3. As grammar schools could have a similar effect to private schools in this respect, the authors ran an additional analysis that included the presence/absence of such schools as a separate condition. This analysis generated a solution coverage and consistency score that hardly differs from the one presented in the current paper. Moreover, its output was exceedingly complex, including many combinations with three or four conditions. This, we felt, obfuscated rather than contributed to the development of theoretically useful propositions with wide applicability. We therefore decided to omit grammar schools from the ultimate analysis. The output of this additional analysis can be obtained from the authors upon request.