Introduction

Peacehaven Heights and Telscombe Cliffs Primary Schools were in the news in spring 2021 because parents and staff are campaigning to stop the schools being academised and run by a MAT. The parents want the LA to keep running the schools but the LA want to hand over the schools to a MAT. The first take-over attempt by a MAT was in 2019, and following the rejection of academisation by the schools, both school governing bodies were removed and replaced by Interim Executive Boards (with no parent or community membership), and this was approved by the Regional Schools Commissioner (DfE 2020). In response to the second attempt to hand the schools over to a MAT, a parent stated: ‘East Sussex County Council have sacked our governors, they have shut our swimming pool, they have stood in the way of consistent leadership at the schools and put the interests of academy chains above those of our children’ (Stringer 2021: NP). At the same time as this campaign was underway, Gavin Williamson, the UK Secretary of State for Education in England, gave a speech where he demanded that more schools should become academies: ‘I want to see us break away from our current “pick and mix” structure of a school system and move towards a single model, one that is built on a foundation of strong multi-academy trusts, and I’m actively looking at how we can make that happen’ (Adams 2021: NP).

Oligarchic occupation of the state determines the reality of what parental consumer choice actually means – parents may not want academisation and may distrust the consultation process as rigged, but depoliticised club alliances between oligarchic sovereignty in government with private oligarchies enable national policy to both marginalise local democracy and to outflank demands for citizen forms of participation. The irony in Williamson’s speech is that the ‘single model’ of the LA system from the 1970s was attacked by the ERC, where the argument was made for the diversity of school place provision as being integral to the choice process and experience.