As another teacher said to me recently, one of the scariest words in the jargon of school managers is ‘support’. The government’s plan to ‘support and challenge’ English state schools – the Education and Adoption Bill, which has now passed the committee stage – is very scary indeed. There are 21,500 state-funded schools in England; nearly 5000 of them are academies. Each one is under the control of a trust or private limited company, and each trust has an individual funding agreement with the education secretary to establish and maintain academies. When a local authority school is converted into an academy, once the contract is signed, local government stewardship, with its bothersome requirements for consultation and public oversight, is at an end.

Since 2010 there has been a massive centralisation of the English education system, with thousands of schools now under the direct supervision of the secretary of state. The 2010 Academies Act – rushed through Parliament using a procedure normally reserved for counter-terrorism laws – made possible the forced academisation of schools that had been identified as ‘eligible for intervention’. These were usually schools that had been inspected by Ofsted and placed in special measures, or found to be requiring ‘significant improvement’.
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The parallels between TKAT’s ‘school improvement model’ and the management methods of private equity firms are quite striking, though perhaps not surprising. The Trust’s non-executive directors include Ian Armitage, a venture capitalist and private equity investor, and John Kelly, the former CEO of Gala, ‘the largest private equity betting and gaming business in Europe’. The vice-chair of the Board of Directors, Aruna Mehta, was a senior manager at JP Morgan Chase. TKAT claims to have ‘a more business-like approach than might be seen anywhere else in the academy chain world’. But the make-up of the TKAT board is by no means untypical. One of the most powerful and influential chains, ARK Schools, has seven trustees. Five of them are hedge fund managers.
The thousands of funding agreements between academy trusts and the education secretary are, as Peter Newsam has noted, ‘at the heart of the privatisation project’. The nationalisation of English state schools (removing them from local authority control) opens the way to full-scale privatisation. Sooner or later, one of the individual, transferable contracts will be made over to a for-profit provider, even if the Conservatives made a manifesto pledge not to allow schools to be run for profit. England’s disintegrating education system will then have its Hinchingbrooke Hospital. The vultures that descended on Hinchingbrooke – the hedge funds and private equity firms that backed Circle Health – have been circling schools for some time.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/07/30/matthew-bennett/the-schools-privatisation-project/