This paper explores the political discourse around the privatization of England’s state education via the acdemisation programme. Academisation is a project of school reform, which seeks to move the business of state schooling away from Local Authority administration and into the private realm. There are currently over 10,000 academy schools operating in England, representing 80% of all secondary schools and 40% of all primary schools. As the number of individual academy schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs) has  increased so the economies of Local Authority maintained schools become more difficult to sustain. Thus, it is possible to see how the stated political ambition that ‘all schools’ (DFE, 2010:12) should be academy schools is becoming closer to full realisation and is expected to be accomplished by 2030 (DFE, 2022).

Taking the acdemisation programme as a policy case, this paper draws upon a substantive literature review of the policy over a twenty year period (Bailey & Ball, 2016; Ball, 2009; Kultz et al. 2018; Rayner et al. 2018; West and Bailey, 2013). Tracing its inception, as a New Labour policy in 2000 , and identifying, in particular, the moment of acceleration and change that occurs with the Academies Act – the first piece of legislation introduced by the new government in 2010. Tracking the project over the recent lifetime of Conservative government it is possible to identify the ways in which it becomes an expression of neoliberal education reform and part of a wider mission to reduce the state and to extricate government from the complex problems of the day (Clarke and Mills, 2022).

This paper corresponds with, and extends, recent research by Craske (2021), which explores political rhetoric and the ‘populist logic’ (p. 279) of Conservative education reform. Through a focus on the political moment in which this radical transformation was launched and, through the analysis of political speeches, this paper explores the populist rhetoric employed to create and establish the ground for the overhaul and realignment of the purpose and value of schooling in England.  Theoretically, the paper draws upon an Aristotelian concept of rhetoric and methodologically it employs contemporary model of rhetorical political analysis (RPA), which is drawn from political science (Finlayson 2012; Walter, 2017).

This paper draws upon an Aristotelian concept of rhetoric and makes use of rhetorical political analysis (RPA), which is a contemporary model of discourse analysis drawn from political science (Finlayson 2012; Walter, 2017).

The author identifies England’s academisation programme as the most profound education reform since public education began – radically changing the shape of the English school’s sector, not through the teaching profession and within public debate, but via political and economic mechanisms of accountability, governance and finance. This paper argues that this reform, though continually positioned as a school improvement initiative, is rather part of a wider ideological campaign – partially achieved through rhetorical means - to reduce the role of the state in education and to establish a marketplace for private interest (Hoctor, 2022).

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