Wholesale academy conversion would cost Leeds Council £4m, report warns

Councillors will be told this week that the 45 completed academy conversions and nine ongoing applications in the city have cost the authority more than £1m.

The report sets out the implications for Leeds if schools move to a fully academised system.

It says that if the remaining state schools in the city, more than 200, all became academies the costs would rise to £4m.

Councils are legally required to grant a school converting to an academy a 125-year-lease of their site for free.

A report to a meeting of Leeds City Council’s children’s services scrutiny board on Thursday says the legal costs of conversion have risen when a council-run school site is already subject to a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract with an outside firm as this complicates the transfer of land and buildings.

There are currently 20 secondary academies in Leeds - half of the secondaries in the city. However, the uptake of academy status has been much slower in primary schools. There are 25 primary academies - just 11 per cent of the schools in the city academies are state schools which are run outside of local council control.

The Government’s Education White Paper this year said it wanted all state schools to become academies by 2022. The former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan subsequently ruled out forcing good schools to convert to academy status against their will. But the council’s new report says the White Paper provides an indication of the Government’s vision for schools.

Elsewhere councils, such as Wakefield, are considering forming their own academy trusts to maintain a relationship with their existing schools.

The new report does not suggest that Leeds City Council does this, but says that schools are “looking to the local authority to support them within a Leeds learning community”.