Education is seen around the world as the key to a nation’s prosperity, and in many countries there has been an important policy focus on raising the achievement levels in  state-maintained (public) schools; different initiatives in this area include free schools in Sweden, charter schools in the United States and the academy programme in England. Academies have some similarities to the US charter schools in that they have a mix of state and private funding, greater levels of autonomy than other schools in the maintained sector yet also have accountability for student outcomes measured by national or federal testing (Goldring and Mavrogordato, 2011). The English programme has been controversial; there are some who believe that academies’ increased autonomy allows the type of curricular and pedagogical innovation that improves student attainment levels, and that the right to set their own conditions of service offers incentives for staff to perform better (Daniels, 2011). Others consider that the programme is a back-door form of school privatisation that will lead to greater social segregation (Machin and Verniot, 2011) and that the democratic process in running these school is being bypassed in a way that endangers the education of the most vulnerable (Stevens, 2010). Nonetheless, the original aim of the academy programme was to:

 … challenge the culture of educational under-attainment and produce improvements in standards, and play a key part in the regeneration of communities – helping to break the cycle of underachievement in areas of social economic deprivation (Woods et al, 2007:239).

 Glover and Coleman define school culture as:

 … the integration of environmental, organisational and experiential features of social existence to offer a context for teaching and learning and its subsequent improvement (Glover and Coleman, 2005, p.266).

 They argue that a school culture has measurable components (such as student attitudes and behaviours), but that each of these measures has a subjective basis. These types of data give a flavour of culture in action, but need to be set in the wider context of the national framework for education, the local socio-economic and political contexts, and the particular makeup of communities in and around the school. It is this combination of factors that makes each school culture unique, and makes any culture change a notoriously difficult process (Collarbone, 2011).

 Using Glover and Coleman’s definition as the theoretical framework, this study is a qualitative investigation into the ways that the leadership in three coastal academies have approached the task of changing their predecessor schools’ culture of under-performance. All three academies are located in coastal areas of high socio-economic deprivation, high levels of unemployment, limited parental involvement in their children’s education and low parental and young people’s aspirations; all three have local circumstances that present a range of particular challenges. The aim of the research is to provide understanding of how these academies’ leaders use their relative freedom in their attempts to turn a failing school into one that is successful.

Collarbone, P. (2011) Leading change and changing leadership in the public sector (UK). Available at: http://www.creatingtomorrow.org.uk/downloads/pdfs/Leading_Change_Changing_Leadership.pdf. Daniels, D. (2011) From reality to Vision: The ‘Birth’ of the Petchey Academy in Hackney, in Gunter, H. (ed), The State and Education Policy: The Academies Programme, London: Continuum. Glover, D. and Coleman, M. (2005) School Culture, Climate and Ethos: interchangeable or distinctive concepts? Journal of In-Service Education 31(2): 251-271. Goldring, E. and Mavrogordato, M. (2011) International Perspectives on Academies: Lessons Learned from Charter Schools and Choice Options around the Globe, in Gunter, H. (ed), The State and Education Policy: The Academies Programme, London: Continuum. Machin, S. and Verniot, J. (2011) Changing School Autonomy: Academy Schools and their Introduction to England’s Education, London School of Economics: Centre for the Economics of Education. Stevens, R. (2010) Ever Reducing Democracy? A Comparative View of the Legislative Events Surrounding the Introduction of New-style Academies in 2010 and Grant-maintained Schools in 1988, Forum, 52 (3): 317-335. Woods, P., Woods, G. and Gunter, H. (2007) Academy schools and entrepreneurialism in education, Journal of Education Policy, 22 (2): 237-259.