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The government’s sets out an ambition for every school in England to be part of a “strong” academy trust.

But it will take at least another 16 years for all of England’s schools to be academies without a major new incentive or push, ����Vlog analysis suggests.

So is the government’s aim unrealistic? And is it based on sound evidence?

How long would full academisation take?

Unlike with the , which was eventually abandoned but included a target for all schools to be in a “strong” multi-academy trust by 2030, Labour has not given a timeframe for achieving its ambition.

But historic trends can give us an idea of where the school system is heading.

Over the past decade, the number of academies has more than doubled, reaching 11,737 in September 2025.

Academies now make up 54 per cent of state-funded schools, increasingly sitting in large MATs as smaller trusts merge.

However, while 84 per cent of secondary schools are academies, the proportion drops to 48 per cent for primaries, and around half of special schools and alternative provision settings are academies.

The fastest growth of academies came between 2015 and 2018, when more than 1,000 were added each year. This expansion slowed during the Covid pandemic and fell to fewer than 350 schools in 2022.

There was no marked increase in new conversions the year after the Conservative White Paper was launched, though there was a slight increase in academy applications.

Across the full decade 2016 to 2025, the average annual increase was 671 academies - a rate that suggests England’s schools will be fully academised in 16 years without any additional levers being implemented.

However, over the past five years, the average annual conversion rate was only 487. Based on this rate, full academisation would not occur until 2048.

The size of trusts

The Conservatives’ 2022 plan, which was ditched the following year, included an expectation that most trusts would comprise at least 10 schools or 7,500 pupils.

The Labour government has been less prescriptive, with its White Paper this week simply stating that trusts should be “large enough to optimise benefits”, including educational improvement, estate planning and financial resilience.

It adds that local authorities, religious bodies, schools and trusts will need to work together to “build the school landscape that is right for their area”.

Academy trusts with a national footprint, for example, “could achieve coherence through local hubs or clusters”, the White Paper says.

But even without a fixed target for the size of trusts, MATs have been getting bigger, driven by consolidation as existing trusts have taken on more schools and absorbed smaller trusts.

This has led to a 22 per cent decline in the number of trusts since 2016, down to 2,113 in September 2025.

The number of trusts with 11 to 20 schools has increased almost sevenfold in the past 10 years, and the number with 21-30 schools has also grown from 11 to 48.

The largest trusts, those with 41 or more schools, have almost tripled from 5 to 14 in the same period.

As a result, the combined share of trusts with more than six schools has risen from 6.6 per cent to 32.3 per cent, and the average number of schools per trust has more than doubled from four to nearly nine.

Regional differences

However, further growth depends on converting schools. And while Labour’s White Paper implies a national ambition, academisation has never happened evenly across England.

The South West, for example, has consistently been the most academised region and was the first to reach 50 per cent academisation in 2020-21.

The North East experienced rapid academisation after 2020, surpassing the 50 per cent mark by 2023-24.

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The North West has been the least academised region over the past decade, and London has seen the slowest growth of any region, with trusts’ sector share increasing from 20 per cent to just 33.8 per cent over the same period.

These variations raise a key question: can a single national policy deliver full academisation everywhere at the same pace?

Taking the latest five-year averages, the North East would be fully academised by 2036, followed by the South West in 2038, Yorkshire and the Humber in 2043 and the West Midlands in 2044.

The slowest regions to fully academise would be the South East and London, with full academisation not expected in the South East before 2050 and as late as 2085 in London.

What part could federations play?

Instead of becoming an academy and being part of a MAT, some schools have joined a federation - a formal structure between two or more local authority-maintained schools, sharing a governing body.

There are 738 federations in England, ranging from two to 10 schools.

Although a federation is not a permanent structure like a MAT, meaning schools can leave if they wish to and it can be dissolved, it may provide a good starting point for the government’s ambition.

However, in order to be “large enough to optimise benefits”, some federations may need to merge or be absorbed into MATs to meet the government’s ambition.

Local authorities and partnerships

The White Paper also states that academy trusts will be established by local authorities and local area partnerships - localised companies that represent schools in an area and work together.

Some local authorities have already expressed an interest in forming MATs.

The number of local area partnerships is growing, and they are represented by the Area-based Education Partnerships Association (AEPA), which says it represents 30 groups.

One group, Learn Sheffield, has 184 members. If all of its settings were to merge into a single MAT, this would have twice as many schools as the country’s biggest academy trust, United Learning.

What about single-academy trusts?

The White Paper argues that the “challenge to the best standalone schools” is to join larger trusts in order to “spread excellence more widely”.

And to some extent, this is happening already.

The number of single-academy trusts (SATs) has declined steadily since 2016, nearly halving to 848 by September 2025.

Over the past five years, the system has lost an average of 81 SATs per year.

Based on the 10-year trend, there will be no SATs remaining by mid-2035.

But the government’s White Paper doesn’t include any incentives for SATs to join larger trusts - so what will motivate the last ones to move?

Manny Botwe, headteacher of Tytherington School, a SAT in Cheshire, says that schools like his are not ideologically opposed to MATs and they are already collaborating locally.

“We’ve always been clear that collaboration is at the heart of school improvement for us,” he tells ����Vlog.

Botwe says concerns about joining a MAT were often about capacity rather than principle, particularly in areas dominated by small trusts.

“There are some really small MATs [in our local authority] where we’re not necessarily convinced the support is there yet,” he says.

Botwe adds that the government could accelerate academisation by addressing the practical barriers to joining a MAT, including resourcing and staff capacity. “You actually need people on the ground with the time and energy to make this happen,” he says.

����Vlog analysis has previously shown that many remaining SATs had the strongest academic performances nationally, complicating the narrative that scale alone delivers better outcomes.

This raises a further question: is Labour’s push towards larger trusts about educational impact, financial resilience or system manageability?

Do MATs perform better?

The White Paper claims that “over time, the performance of secondary schools that have joined trusts has tended to improve”, although the evidence base for this is contested.

published alongside the White Paper, examined the percentage of students achieving grades 9 to 4 in both English and maths GCSEs in academies, compared with the national average.

It says that, in general, the performance of sponsored academies - schools forced to academise after underperforming as LA-maintained - rapidly improves after joining a trust.

Converter academies, which are former LA-maintained schools that have chosen to academise, performed on average significantly above the national average both before and after conversion, with those in trusts for the longest time performing best.

However, because converter academies were likely to be high-performing before they joined a trust, this does not prove that schools within MATs perform better.

The DfE’s analysis also covers fewer than 8 per cent of academies nationally, making it difficult to draw any firm conclusions.

Jon Andrews, interim chief executive and head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute, says the evidence shows that structural reform alone, such as wholesale academisation or the opposite, is unlikely to deliver better outcomes.

He adds that the relationship between trust size and performance is “complex”.

Andrews welcomes proposals for local authorities to create trusts, saying that this recognises “high performance in both the academy and maintained sectors”.

Separate ����Vlog analysis of GCSE outcomes since 2020-21 shows that overall performance in academies and local authority-maintained schools is broadly similar, with the attainment gap between converter academies and maintained schools narrowing over time.

The DfE has that direct comparisons are complicated by the different composition of each group, as lower-performing schools are more likely to become sponsored academies, while higher-performing schools are more likely to become converters.

The groups of schools in each of these categories also change every year, so headline performance figures reflect the changing composition of the groups rather than changes in performance alone. It is difficult, therefore, to make firm conclusions as to the relative merits of either structure based on performance data alone.

Overall, while the MAT system continues to expand, it is doing so more slowly and more unevenly than headline ambitions imply.

This raises questions about whether the goal of every school being in a trust can be delivered on current trajectories without a clearer plan for when, where and how further academisation will occur.

Full academisation, therefore, remains a long-term prospect rather than an imminent reality.

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