One of the main aims of the government’s education policy is to make local education authorities a thing of the past by removing all schools from their control and establishing them as free-standing, self-governing academies. What was once ‘a national service, locally administered’ is being transformed into ‘a local service, nationally administered’. 

Donald Naismith argues that there is no inherent contradiction between the government’s academy programme and the retention of local authorities, that, on the contrary, the government’s...