Flippin' academy governance: Top-down to bottom-up

The intention of government to create a fully academised school system in England, whereby every academy will belong to a large multi-academy Trust (MAT), further erodes community engagement and accountability. This paper illustrates how the policy of academisation has enabled a top-down governance framework to emerge, replacing the power and control of a national education service with unrepresentative and unelected elites – the Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) is discussed as an example. Democratic innovations are presented, innovations that seek to invert the powerbase of academised governance, so creating bottom-up participatory governance in a shift to what might be termed post-new governance.