Less than two months ago, one of the most powerful figures in England’s school system unveiled his vision for the future.

Actual education - teaching, the curriculum, assessment, exam results, even - was barely mentioned. Instead, Sir David Carter, the government’s new national schools commissioner, outlined a world of trust-led accountability, chief executives, chairs of boards, procurement and human resources directors.

It may have made sense to the secondary and academy chain heads gathered in a packed Association of School and College Leaders fringe meeting at the first of the year’s teaching conferences. But, back then, it would have seemed irrelevant and incomprehensible to many of England’s teachers.

Today, as the conference season draws to a close, we now know that this is a world all schools, big or small, primary or secondary, must get used to, if the plan for all schools to become academies by 2022 goes ahead.

It means that every state school - no matter how busy they are coping with teacher shortages, squeezed budgets, and chaotic exam and assessment reform - must spend the next six years severing ties with local authorities and working out where to go next.

Their focus will be on structures. Standards, therefore, could end up taking a back seat, as schools wrestle with the financial and political considerations of going it alone or, as the White Paper Educational Excellence Everywhere suggests, becoming part of multi-academy trusts (MATs) and losing their independence.

‘If’ or ‘when’

The important word here is “if”. Tomorrow, as education secretary Nicky Morgan stands in front of the NAHT heads’ union conference in Birmingham, the big question is whether she will see through what is rapidly becoming one of the government’s most controversial policies. A swell of disapproval has grown in the weeks since chancellor George Osborne announced the academisation plan in his Budget.

The jeers at classroom union conferences were of course only to be expected - perhaps even encouraged. They enabled Morgan to proudly state that her education reforms had “no reverse gear”. The words were - presumably deliberately - an echo of the slogan that the original academiser, Tony Blair, used in 2003 to justify public service reform and the Iraq war. Today, the education secretary may already be regretting them.

The stony silence from Tory backbenchers when David Cameron attempted to defend wholesale academisation during last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions must surely be giving Morgan pause for thought.

But the fact that a policy Osborne clearly believed was a winner when he announced it last month has so swiftly become a potential vote-loser tells us about more than just politics. It represents a disconnection between how the media and political elite view the state school system in this country and how it actually operates on the ground.

There appears to be a belief at the heart of government that full academisation was an inevitable process, and that it was simply a matter of when - not if - it happened. Last week, Morgan said that, even without coercion, “three-quarters of secondary and a third of primary schools would have converted to academy status by 2022 anyway”.

Her assertion appears to be based on the assumption that academy creation will continue at the existing rate. But the government’s own figures show that, despite rises every year from 2010-13, the number of new sponsored academies has started to fall dramatically - from 305 in 2014-15 to 168 in 2015-16.

Schools minister Nick Gibb has justified the policy by saying that there shouldn’t be two systems operating alongside one another.

Cameron said last week that universal academisation was about wanting to “finish the job”. But, in vast swathes of the system, it has barely started. Tory shire councillors are waking up to the fact that their links with high-performing rural primaries are about to be severed, in a big-bang experiment in school governance.

Morgan could be forgiven for feeling slightly aggrieved at the way that the discontent has suddenly surfaced. After all, it’s not as though people didn’t know that this was coming.

In October, Cameron made it very clear that he wanted “every school an academy, and, yes, local authorities running schools a thing of the past”.

But there was little fuss, no early warning of the controversy that has now emerged. Even when Osborne announced compulsory academisation in March, the press coverage focused more on the end of parent governors than on this massive change in the structure of the schools system.

Tory infighting

That means that it has taken time for the full implications to seep out to the grassroots Conservatives who may scupper it. The reason could have a lot to do with the London-centric nature of England’s media and political class, as well as the academies programme itself.

The genesis of the movement was the Blair administration’s concerns about a decidedly metropolitan issue: the chattering classes’ desertion of the capital’s state schools for the independent sector. A similar phenomenon existed to an extent in England’s other big cities, but academies began as a London response to a largely capital-based problem.

Similarly, the obsession with taking schools out of local authority hands is rooted in the battles that Labour moderates fought against the so-called loony Left and the Inner London Education Authority during the 1980s.

So London-based politicians and journalists, who so influence the national debate, are not only very familiar with academisation but also understand the rationale behind it. The same cannot always be said for the heads, parents and teachers in outstanding rural primaries, who are quite happy to be supported by local authorities - or for the Conservative politicians who often run these councils.

So where does that leave Morgan? Full academisation must have seemed like an easy win: a chance for her to put her stamp on education. Now, along with exam reform, school funding, teacher shortages, and primary assessment, it can be added to the growing list of simmering problems at the Department for Education.

There has already been a shift in tone, if not policy. Last week, Morgan stressed that “there is a place for successful and sustainable stand-alone academies”. Will that reassure the heads of small primaries who will be stripped of local authority support but will be reluctant to cede their independence to a MAT?

Tomorrow, she may find out. Picking a fight with union activists is one thing. Taking on the country’s heads is something else.

William Stewart is news editor of TES @wstewarttes

This is an article from the 29 April edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow TES on Twitter and like TES on Facebook