Even the most cursory scan of the education coverage of the national papers over the last number of weeks has revealed many articles about and analysis of the government’s plans to turn all schools in England into Academies.

Originally a Labour policy for turning around ‘failing’ schools, the Academisation process is now seen by the Conservatives as a way of wresting control of education from the councils and placing it in the hands of the academy principals and their governors.

The arguments in favour of this landmark shift in education policy include reducing bureaucracy and allowing schools to be much more receptive to local requirements. The new freedoms enjoyed by the new academies, of which there are already several thousand including over half of secondary schools, include being able to control the school day, being able to produce school meals unencumbered by national legislation concerned with meeting nutritional standards, employing unqualified staff, setting their own pay and crucially, being able to depart from the national curriculum. This last point is crucial because it represents a complete U-turn in Conservative policy, as it was they who imposed the national curriculum in the first place.

My old English teacher would have enjoyed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ Orwellian beauty of this classic double-think, in which the national curriculum is initially trumpeted as the vehicle for driving up standards for the whole of the school population and then the removal of it, sometime later, can be trumpeted as the vehicle for driving up standards for the whole of the school population!

But before my scepticism gets the better of me, I must point out a recent piece on the BBC news website entitled ‘So why are there no academy schools in Wales?’ Here the BBC Wales education correspondent Bethan Lewis reports that while Westminster presses on with the creation of academies, the Welsh Government continues to reject this model. The Welsh are committed to what they call a ’community, comprehensive model for schools’ and reject the claims made for academies in driving up standards.

There is however, a difficulty in that English and Welsh schools are linked by a joint agreement for teachers’ pay and conditions. With English academies opting out of this national framework, this rather leaves the way open for the devolution of teachers’ pay and conditions. The teacher unions are obviously nervous about and opposed to the potential for regional pay to become the norm, with teachers in some areas likely to end up less well off than others, while the Welsh Government seems to be warming to the idea.

This consideration of devolution brings us neatly to the situation back here in Northern Ireland. We have a regionally agreed framework for teachers’ conditions of service known as ‘the Jordanstown Agreement’ but it has been the convention that rates of pay are linked to nationally agreed pay scales. With that national framework now under threat, the prospect of regional pay for Northern Ireland teachers is a step closer.

I have no idea how the new administration in Stormont would view that potential increase to their devolved powers. The local teachers’ unions are still in dispute about a number of matters, not least the procedure for school inspections and the mechanism for making complaints about the work of the Education and Training Inspectorate. If the prospect of regional pay does rear its ugly head, it would not need an astrologer with a degree in Education to predict more trouble.

So what then of Academies? Does Northern Ireland have any and do we need or want them? We do not currently have academies in the sense that the Conservative government proposes for England. However, within our complex, confused and contested system of school governance, we do have Voluntary Grammar Schools, Grant Maintained Integrated Colleges and Irish Medium Schools which, like Academies, are largely free from local government control (in our case the Education Authority or CCMS) and receive their own delegated budget directly from the Department of Education.

However, such schools are still bound by all other regulations about the curriculum, school meals, terms and conditions of staff, the school day etc. In addition there are no academy chains here run by special trusts, as there are in England and no principals (as far as I know) earning £200,000+ salaries as there are in England. No sour grapes intended there: honest!

All this does however, raise the important issue of educational bureaucracy and the degree to which education budgets are top-sliced to provide managerial, administrative and specialist support services. One argument made in favour of academies is that a greater proportion of the (reducing) education budget can get through to front-line/chalk-face services and therefore it can represent a more efficient delivery mechanism.

On the other hand, the freedom and lack of accountability that academies seem to enjoy, has also given rise to well-publicised cases of fraud concerning both admissions and finance, as well as allegations of mis-management and maladministration. So there will always have to be proper structures in place for financial oversight and control of schools and it makes sense to centralise the provision of special needs services, educational psychology, school medical services, a robust but supportive inspection regime and the major procurement functions.

Spending huge sums of money from the public purse will always require that proper systems of control and accountability are in place. However, it is surely an important principle that we make the system as effective and efficient as possible and to devolve as many resources and responsibilities as we can to schools where the education really happens.

I suppose our divided education system, with its multiple administrative complexities, is a reflection of our divided country and our uniquely divided government. Therefore, until we develop a clearer political consensus around education policy, there will remain obvious limits to what education can deliver in terms of efficiency. Therefore, although I do not support the English academisation process and also worry about the ability of the Welsh to go it alone, in both cases, I sort of envy the stability of the political system that allows for coordinated action and for educational policy and public administrative initiatives to be put into practice.