Nigel Gann - The Great Education Robbery

This book is about the widespread corporatisation of state-funded schools in England.

Corporatisation is the removal of state schools from the overall responsibility of their local authority and the transfer of their leadership and governance to independent trusts accountable directly to the government department overseeing English education. That existing schools should become corporate academies, either voluntarily or compulsorily, and that all new schools would be free schools with similar independent status, became the policy of the new Conservative-led coalition government in 2010, and continued throughout the following decade. It was a distinctive twenty-first century Conservative policy, although the seeds had been sown in the early 1990s and watered and fertilised by the Labour government from 1997 to 2010. By 2020, the large majority of secondary schools and a substantial minority of primary schools in England had become academies. Initially, some of these were free-standing independent schools, but in the latter half of the decade, schools were encouraged or required to join existing multi academy trusts. Academies are literally independent schools funded by the state, so academisation is often referred to as privatisation. However, I prefer the word corporatisation because the schools become the property of corporate bodies rather than private individuals although in some cases it is difficult to see the difference.