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Grant-maintained school

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Grant-maintained schools (or GM schools) were state schools in England and Wales which, between 1988 and 1998, withdrew from local education authority (LEA) control and were instead funded directly by a grant from central government. A number of them operated selective or partially selective admissions.

The status was introduced by the Education Reform Act 1988 as part of a wider Conservative government programme intended to widen the range of educational provision and to reduce the influence of local education authorities. In place for a decade, grant-maintained status was abolished by the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. Although its supporters pointed to the schools' examination results, later analysis suggested that any apparent advantage owed more to their intakes than to the status itself. It is now chiefly remembered both as a vehicle through which some schools moved towards academic selection, and as the direct forerunner of the modern academy system, with which it shares much of its design.

Background and creation

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Under the Education Act 1944, England and Wales had operated a national system in which primary and secondary schools were funded and overseen by local education authorities. The Education Reform Act 1988 broke with that settlement by allowing a school to "opt out" of its authority altogether and receive its money straight from Whitehall. The same Act introduced the National Curriculum and local management of schools, which gave all schools control of their own budgets.

A school could move to grant-maintained status on the initiative of its governing body or following a petition by a sufficient number of parents. In either case the decision rested on a ballot of parents at the school.[1][2] Once converted, a GM school was owned and run by its own board of school governors rather than by the local authority, giving it control over its buildings, its staff and, significantly, its own admissions.

Skegness Grammar School was the first school both to apply for and to be granted the status, while Castle Hall School in Mirfield was the first grant-maintained school actually to open.

Funding, autonomy and admissions

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Grant-maintained schools held their assets directly, employed their own staff and set their own admissions criteria. They could also bid to central government for capital grants towards essential building work — a route to funding that many governors found more generous than what their local authority had offered. The popularity of opting out in some areas was attributed precisely to dissatisfaction with LEA financial support.

Because GM schools controlled their own admissions, their entry policies sometimes diverged sharply from those of the surrounding authority. Some applied successfully to become fully selective grammar schools; others adopted partial selection; and some used selection by interview.[1] This combination of extra money, distinctive admissions and semi-independent standing made the schools controversial and was a recurring source of friction with local education authorities.[1][3]

Grant-maintained schools and academic selection

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Grant-maintained status intersected with the long-running English controversy over selection at eleven. Because opted-out schools were their own admission authorities, the status offered a route by which a school could move towards, or restore, selection — a prospect that placed GM schools at the centre of the selection debate.

In 1990 the Education Secretary Kenneth Clarke indicated that opted-out schools might become grammar schools where parents wished it; in one widely reported case, parents in Milton Keynes opted their school out specifically to stop Buckinghamshire turning it into a grammar school.[4] From 1992 some GM schools began introducing selection by aptitude, and the Education Act 1993 required them to hold a public consultation before any significant change of character; a departmental circular nonetheless treated selection of up to ten per cent by aptitude as falling short of such a change.[4] The Conservatives' 1996 White Paper Self-Government for Schools went furthest, proposing that GM schools setting their own admissions might become grammar schools and select up to half of their intake by general ability, with specialist schools selecting thirty per cent and all schools twenty per cent; these provisions were, however, dropped before the Education Act 1996 received royal assent.[4] The incoming Labour government's 1997 White Paper Excellence in Schools ruled out any general return to the eleven-plus while leaving the fate of existing grammar schools to local parental ballots.[4]

This selective potential was among the features that made GM status politically contentious and a particular target of campaigners against the eleven-plus.[4][a]

Expansion under the Education Act 1993

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The Education Act 1993 widened the scheme considerably. It allowed independent schools to convert into grant-maintained schools, and permitted independent sponsors to establish entirely new ones.[1] Schools entering the state sector by these routes included:[2]

Case study: Old Swinford Hospital

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Old Swinford Hospital, a state boarding school in Stourbridge, West Midlands, became one of the very first schools in England to take up grant-maintained status, in September 1989, under its headmaster Christopher Potter.[5][6]

When the local authority protested that conversion had raised the school's budget by some £160,000 to more than £1 million, Potter argued that the increase merely represented the school's own share of money previously absorbed by the local education authority, which it could now see and spend directly.[6] He credited grant-maintained autonomy with cutting administrative costs and freeing resources for the classroom.[7]

The school rose to the top of the national examination tables: during the second half of the 1990s it was repeatedly among the highest-placed non-selective schools in the country, ranking at or near the top of the GCSE results for non-selective schools.[7][8]

Scale at peak

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At their height in early 1998 there were 1,196 grant-maintained schools, the great majority of them secondary schools. Within the state sector they accounted for roughly 3% of primary schools, 19% of secondary schools and 2% of special schools.[2]

Performance and value for money

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The performance and cost-effectiveness of grant-maintained schools were scrutinised throughout their existence. The Education Act 1993 placed the funding authorities under a statutory duty to commission value-for-money studies examining the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which GM governing bodies used their grant.[9] The National Audit Office reviewed the sector's performance during the 1993–94 parliamentary session.[10]

On the raw figures, GM schools often appeared to do well: a study of around 300 non-selective schools across six authorities found that GM schools recorded a higher proportion of pupils gaining five or more good GCSE grades, and improved that measure faster, than comparable LEA schools, while A-level results were broadly similar. Once differences in pupil intake were taken into account, however, the apparent advantage largely disappeared: the researchers concluded that GM schools' stronger results were attributable to their having, and progressively reducing, lower proportions of socially disadvantaged pupils, rather than to grant-maintained status or the length of time a school had held it.[11] This finding fed into the wider argument that the sector's distinctiveness lay more in its funding and admissions freedoms than in any independent effect on attainment.

Abolition and the return to local authorities

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Grant-maintained status was abolished by the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.[12] Schools moved into successor categories from 1999. Those that had previously been voluntary aided, or which had private sponsors, generally reverted to voluntary aided status, while most others became foundation schools. A small number opted instead to become voluntary controlled schools or community schools.[2][12]

Although they were once again funded through local authorities, voluntary aided and foundation schools kept a measure of the independence the GM era had given them: they continued to own their buildings and grounds, to employ their own staff and to control their own admissions.[13]

The character of this transition has been examined in detail by educational researchers. Although the Labour Party had once pledged to abolish grant-maintained schools outright, the settlement it eventually adopted created a "foundation" category closely aligned to GM status. In a doctoral study of the policy's final phase, based on interviews and a survey of more than 120 formerly grant-maintained schools, Lesley Anderson found that GM headteachers and chairs of governors generally responded to the changes pragmatically, concentrating on protecting their schools' interests within the new framework rather than resisting reform; she interpreted this accommodation as an example of New Labour's "Third Way" approach to government.[14]

After abolition, the only schools still funded directly by central government were the fifteen City Technology Colleges.

Legacy: the modern academy system

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The idea of a state school funded by central government and independent of its local authority did not disappear for long. In 2000 the Labour government introduced a new kind of directly funded school, the City Academy, soon shortened to Academy.[15] Early "sponsored" academies were typically underperforming schools brought under an external sponsor who met the capital costs while central government funded their running.

Following the 2010 United Kingdom general election, the Academies Act 2010 dramatically widened the scope for schools to convert, and the model expanded rapidly. The education journalist Mike Baker characterised the reform not as an extension of Labour's academies but as a revival of the grant-maintained schools of the 1980s and 1990s.[16]

The resemblance is structural. Like a GM school, an academy is a state-funded school that sits outside local authority control and is funded directly by the Department for Education under an individual funding agreement; its governance and admissions rest with its own trust. The principal difference is organisational: most academies now belong to a multi-academy trust (MAT), a single charitable trust running a group of schools, rather than standing alone as GM schools did.

The scale of the change has dwarfed the original experiment. From around 200 academies in 2010, the number had grown to more than 10,000 by 2024 — roughly half of all open schools in England, including about four in five secondary schools.[17] The overwhelming majority of these academies, close to 90%, form part of a multi-academy trust rather than operating as single-academy trusts.[17] In this sense the grant-maintained school, abolished in 1998, has its clearest descendant in the academy that now dominates the English secondary landscape.

There is, however, an important contrast in how autonomy actually operates. A grant-maintained school was a self-governing institution in its own right, with its own governing body controlling staff, budget and admissions. By contrast, a study by Anne West and David Wolfe for the London School of Economics argued that a programme launched to give individual schools freedom had, by 2018, left most academies with less autonomy than they previously held: because the bulk of academies sit within multi-academy trusts, the individual school is, in law, not a separate legal entity but a site through which the trust delivers education, and cannot of its own initiative leave the trust.[18] The authors suggested that schools run by such trusts could find themselves in a position comparable to maintained schools before the 1988 introduction of local management — controlled from a centre rather than locally — and raised concerns about transparency, financial accountability and the loss of local democratic oversight in the academy system.[18] On this reading, the modern academy resembles the grant-maintained school in its independence from local authorities, but, where it belongs to a trust, departs from the GM model's defining feature of genuine institutional self-government.

See also

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Notes

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  1. ↑ The chronology of selection policy summarised here is drawn from a timeline compiled by Margaret Tulloch and published by Comprehensive Future, a campaign group that opposes academic selection at eleven.

References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 Levinson, David; Cookson, Peter W.; Sadovnik, Alan R. (2002). Education and Sociology. Taylor & Francis. pp. 215–218. ISBN 0-8153-1615-1.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Grant Maintained Schools Database: Dataset Documentation". The National Digital Archive of Datasets. The National Archives. 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2015.
  3. ↑ Wintour, Patrick (5 December 1995). "Attack on 'incomprehensible' policy incenses Blunkett". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 February 2009.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Tulloch, Margaret. "A brief resume of how for over 80 years no Government has completely ended selection at 11 in England". Comprehensive Future. 30 July 2024. Retrieved 13 June 2026.
  5. ↑ "Old Swinford Hospital". Wikipedia. Retrieved 13 June 2026.
  6. 1 2 Hilton, Sally (14 October 1989). "Opt-out school in cash row". Birmingham Evening Mail. p. 12.
  7. 1 2 "Christopher Potter, 83: enthusiastic headmaster who taught archaeology". The Times. 7 October 2023.
  8. ↑ Harrison, Stephen (20 November 1996). "Examination successes and shame of West Midland schools". The Birmingham Post. p. 1.
  9. ↑ Education Act 1993, section 8 ("Value-for-money studies of grant-maintained schools"), Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
  10. ↑ Value for Money at Grant-Maintained Schools: A Review of Performance. National Audit Office. HC 640, Session 1993–94. London: HMSO.
  11. ↑ Levačić, Rosalind; Hardman, Jania (1999). "The performance of grant maintained schools in England: an experiment in autonomy". Journal of Education Policy. 14 (2).
  12. 1 2 School Standards and Framework Act 1998, Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
  13. ↑ "The Composition of Schools in England" (PDF). Department for Children, Schools and Families. June 2008.
  14. ↑ Anderson, Lesley (1999). The Grant Maintained Story: the Final Chapter (EdD thesis). University of Leicester. UMI U594559.
  15. ↑ Clare, John (26 October 2005). "Funding for schools to be 'fair and equal'". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 1 February 2009.
  16. ↑ Baker, Mike (31 July 2010). "Gove's academies: 1980s idea rebranded?". BBC News Online.
  17. 1 2 "The current state of play for MATs". FFT Education Datalab. July 2024. Retrieved 13 June 2026.
  18. 1 2 West, Anne; Wolfe, David (June 2018). Academies, the School System in England and a Vision for the Future (PDF). Clare Market Papers No. 23. Education Research Group, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science. ISBN 978-1-909890-42-8.
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