Stephen Machin and Joan Wilson present the first evaluation of the impact of academy schools on pupils' performance.

Joan Wilson

Stephen Machin

English

Research Papers in Economics

CentrePiece Spring 2009
6T
he government’s flagship
education policy of
academy schools represents
a distinct departure from
the way state education has
traditionally been offered in England.
Academies are publicly funded institutions
that are largely run in partnership with
private sector sponsors ranging from
individuals to businesses and faith groups.
Unlike traditional community and
voluntary-controlled state schools,
academies are independent from the local
authority, and are instead run by a board
of school governors consisting in the main
of delegates appointed by the private
sector sponsor. Governors are responsible
for the employment of staff and for
contractually agreeing their levels of pay
and conditions of service.
Originally designed to replace failing
maintained secondary schools located in
socially disadvantaged urban areas and
characterised by a very poor track record of
GCSE achievement, academies were seen
as a strategy for improvement and reform
in city schools. After their inception, the
definitions of school academies have
widened and they have begun to take on
several different forms, with their coverage
spreading geographically and, more
recently, into the primary school stage.
In terms of deciding on the
curriculum, academies are specialist
schools for which the sponsor chooses the
subject specialisms. National curriculum
teaching in academies is only required in
the core subjects of English, maths,
science and information and
communications technology.
In terms of management and school
governance, the academy sponsors were
granted autonomy in return for a capital
cost contribution of the lesser of 
£2 million or 10% of building costs. 
These finances were to be put towards 
the remodelling of a pre-existing
predecessor school or as an outlay to 
go towards the development of a brand
new academy school.
More recently, sponsors have instead
been required to set up an endowment
fund of equivalent value, the payments
from which go into counteracting the
effects of local deprivation on education.
Sponsorship has also started to take place
in public sector organisations such as
universities and colleges, including city
technology colleges that are converting
into academies. And in a much more
recent development, independent schools
have been invited to become involved in
partnerships with failing schools.
Following the initial announcement of
the scheme in March 2000, the first
academies opened in September 2002. 
To date, 133 academies have opened, and
the government is committed to having a
further 67 open or in the pipeline by the
end of 2010. The overall target for the
unspecified future has recently been scaled
up to the establishment of 400 academies. 
The academies scheme has its roots in
the 1988 Education Reform Act, which set
the scene for a ‘quasi-market’ in
schooling. The major provisions of the act
were to introduce the national curriculum,
to establish testing and league tables, 
to offer local management of schools 
and to increase school accountability
through measures such as a regular
inspection regime.
The act also created both city
technology colleges and grant-maintained
schools, which were allowed to select up
to 10% of their pupils on the basis of
How effective are academy schools in achieving
improved pupil performance in GCSE exams?
Stephen Machin and Joan Wilson have
conducted an initial evaluation.
Academy schools 
and pupil performance
CentrePiece Spring 2009
7
Academies have
improved their GCSE
performance after
changing status – but 
so have comparable
schools that did not
become academies
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ability or aptitude. City technology
colleges formed the first attempt to bring
the private sector into the state sector as
they are partially funded by private sector
business. It is on the legislative grounds of
these institutions that the academies
programme is based. 
As a public-private initiative, the
academies programme is expected to drive
up educational standards through the
innovative nature of the academy culture
and the expertise and experience that a
private sector sponsor is presumed to
bring to a school. It is argued that this will
facilitate better management and
governance, which in turn will lead to
improvements in educational attainment.
Much media attention has focused on
the performance of academy schools, with
their distinct level of autonomy compared
with traditional state schools often
questioned as a necessary characteristic of
their set-up. In a first attempt at gauging
the effectiveness of academy schools in
achieving improved pupil attainment, we
concentrate on a sample of four cohorts
of 27 academies that opened in England
between the school years 2002/03 
and 2005/06.
Methodologically, the impact of
academy status on pupil achievement
could be evaluated by looking at two
identical schools (in terms of levels and
trends in achievement), only one of 
which is given academy status (and the
associated funding and autonomy). Even if
they are poorly performing schools, the
scope for ‘mean reversion’ (performance
returning to the average for the local area)
is the same, and a comparison of relative
pupil achievement in the two schools
before and after one became an academy
can provide an estimate of the impact of
becoming an academy on educational
achievement.
The issue is finding the matched
schools. In our initial study, we adopt two
strategies. The first matches each academy
school with the nearest performing school
via a one-to-one match on pre-policy
exam levels and trends in pupil
achievement. The second uses all other
secondary schools in the academy’s local
authority as a comparison group. 
Looking at the final pre-policy year of
GCSE performance in schools that become
academies, and comparing this with exam
outcomes across all years in which the
academy policy was in effect, we find that
academies did improve their performance
after changing status. This is the case for
all four cohorts, with their improvement in
GCSE performance rising between 9.6
percentage points (academies opening in
2005/06, the fourth cohort) and 14.1
percentage points (academies opening in
2003/04, the second cohort).
These improvements look less
impressive when benchmarked against
other poorly performing matched state
schools that did not become academies
but were also prone to mean reversion.
This is because standards rose for the
matched schools as well, by between 
6 percentage points (academies opening
in 2004/05, the third cohort) and 
14.5 percentage points (academies
opening in 2002/03, the first cohort).
Overall, these changes in GCSE
performance in academies relative to
matched schools are statistically
indistinguishable from one another. The
same pattern emerges if all state schools
in the academy’s local authority are used
as the comparator group.
To control explicitly for pre-policy
trends in GCSE scores for several years
before academy status (rather than a
single level, as in the above case), we
make use of school-level data on GCSE
performance going as far back as
1995/96. We find a pattern of no short-
run effects of becoming an academy on
GCSE performance when long-run
differences between the academies’
predecessors and matched schools are
taken into account.
To conclude, the academies
programme is still at too premature a
stage for GCSE performance
improvements to be fully appraised. The
scheme is evolving rapidly and it is likely
that children may need more exposure to
it for there to be substantial beneficial
effects on achievement. Indeed, the
evidence that we present here is based on
a small fraction of the future number of
academy schools.
It is evident that a very important
future research exercise on the role of
private sector collaboration in the state
school sector will be to evaluate the
impact of their more widespread
introduction on pupils’ academic
performance.
This article summarises ‘Public and Private
Schooling Initiatives in England’ by 
Stephen Machin and Joan Wilson, a chapter
in School Choice International: Exploring
Public-Private Partnerships edited by
Rajashri Chakrabarti and Paul E. Peterson,
MIT Press, 2008.
Stephen Machin is research director of CEP
and professor of economics at University
College London. Joan Wilson is an occasional
research assistant in CEP’s education and
skills programme and a PhD student at the
Institute of Education.
The academies
programme is
still at too
premature a
stage for GCSE
performance
improvements 
to be fully
appraised

Academy schools and pupil performance

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp280.pdf

Academy schools and pupil performance

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