Our incoherent school system is getting in the way of reform

The biggest unresolved question in English education policy may well be: how should the school system be organised?

For Andy Burnham, a great deal rides on having an answer. The incoherence of England’s school system threatens to derail not only his government’s education priorities but also its flagship public service reforms.

For 40 years governments have tinkered with how schools are run, gradually shifting power from local authorities towards more autonomous groups of schools.

The story began in 1988 when reforms gave schools greater independence from local authorities, and it accelerated after 2010 when Michael Gove, as secretary of state for education, opened the route for all schools to convert to academy status.

Four decades on, academy trusts have become the dominant vehicle for organising schools.

A school system built on ad hoc reforms

But the proliferation of trusts has not been guided by a clear vision for the school system as a whole.

The current structure is not the product of any blueprint but the accumulation of layer upon layer of ad hoc reform, as our recent Performance Tracker 2026 report on schools, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, shows.

At the start of 2026, just over half of England’s 21,600 state-funded schools were academies (55 per cent), including 84 per cent of secondary schools and around half of primary schools, special schools and alternative provision settings.

The rest remained under local authority oversight. But this apparent two-way split hides an even more complicated picture.

Scattered across the system are remnants of reforms past: three city technology colleges, introduced in 1988, which operate as limited companies under the direct oversight of the Department for Education; and around 600 foundation schools, which are funded by local authorities but enjoy greater freedom over how they operate.

There is no more uniformity when it comes to the size of these school groupings.

While eight per cent of schools in trusts are in single-academy trusts, 27 per cent are in trusts with more than 20 schools, with one trust containing close to 100 schools. Some local authorities still oversee nigh-on 500 schools; others just one.

Geographical disparity

Perhaps the most striking point of incoherence is that the system now includes both tightly clustered local groups and national organisations spanning hundreds of miles.

The six schools that make up one trust are an average of 160 miles apart - the widest dispersion of any trust in the country - while the five schools in another are just 0.4 miles apart on average. The range is also dramatic among large trusts.

The question of school structure matters because it affects how easily the education system can be governed.

Currently, every time DfE wants to alter schools policy, it must navigate several different funding mechanisms and legislative frameworks.

The fragmentation also complicates tasks for frontline services, such as ensuring that there are enough school places to meet local demand.

Why a split system matters beyond education

But the question of school structure is especially pertinent for Burnham’s government.

This government’s education priorities require a level of coordination that, simply put, England’s incoherent school system cannot accommodate. Special educational needs and disabilities reform, for example, depends on schools working closely with local services to identify needs, share resources and provide support.

Equally, if education funding for 16- to 19-year-olds is devolved to strategic authorities as planned, many schools will need to build a relationship with their mayor for the first time.

The incoherence of the school system may cause problems beyond education. In its first weeks in office, the Burnham government made clear its ambition to create a “single coherent system [of public services] built around the priorities of people and places”.

To achieve this, it intends to align the footprints of public services, arguing that mismatched boundaries make it harder for services to work together and for power to be devolved effectively.

Few public services currently have the same geographical boundaries but, unlike most other services, the school system does not even have a consistent organising structure of its own.

If Burnham wants public services to work together, the structures behind them need to work together, too.

The government should develop a clear, long-term vision for how the school system should be structured, including which functions should be controlled locally and by whom, and which should be controlled more centrally or delivered at scale.

Otherwise it risks falling short of its ambition for joined-up public services.

Amber Dellar is a researcher at the Institute for Government and the author of the Performance Tracker 2026 report on schools, funded by the Nuffield Foundation