Policy Gymnastics: the case of Multi-Academy Trusts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Academies Act was passed in 2010 by the newly elected Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. It made provision for Local Authority (LA) maintained schools in England to convert to academies, which are funded and overseen by national (rather than local) government. 14 years later, the landscape is transformed: two in five primary schools and four in five secondary schools are now academies. However, whereas academies were originally positioned as highly autonomous, with additional ‘freedoms’ compared with other schools, most academies have now been subsumed into a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), meaning they cease to exist as a separate legal entity. This chapter examines the evolution of policy on academies and MATs. It argues that policy makers have engaged in policy gymnastics as they have sought to evolve the academy reforms in ways which address legitimacy concerns and offer scope for efficiency and effectiveness. These gymnastics have involved strategic, linguistic and regulatory contortions, often driven by competing values and logics. Drawing on Stewart’s (2006) work we argue that these contortions have relied on four mechanisms: establishing a new policy paradigm; technicisation; cycling and structural separation. These policy-level gymnastics have impacted on front line leaders, who have needed to continually stretch and flex in order to lead schools and educate children even as the system has contorted around them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it