Most research to date about the English government's policy to make schools independent of local authorities (LAs) has looked at the "macro" level of national policy and at the "micro" level of the institution. The study of which this article is a part explores changes at the "meso" level of the locality. Over a period of six years, 52 semi-structured interviews were carried out with key actors at school, LA and local system levels in three areas. Participants were chosen purposively because of their key positions in the local schooling systems. The article focuses on the role of the LA as an actor in the "school-led" system and explores how LAs are repositioning their role and enacting influence in new ways. The article also discusses how changes in local arenas over time have been affected by the different responses to academisation of primary and secondary schools. The article uses an adaptive theory methodology to bring together theorising set out in earlier articles and theory generated by others, with theory generated from this new analysis.

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are emerging. Primary schools are relatively reluctant to embrace key aspects of national policy. We analysed interviews with primary system leaders in three contrasting local authorities to find out how they were responding, and why, and the nature of the groups they wanted to join, create or cooperate with. We identify concerns, interests and motivations that conflict with key aspects of national policy. In the process, we supplement earlier contributions as to how school groupings might usefully be categorised.

In interviews as part of a research study of structural reform in England, some tension between primary head teachers and their secondary peers was evident. This was symptomatic of a long-standing difference in status between the two phases. At a time when relations between stakeholders in local systems are subject to change, we seek to understand anew why that might be the case and how the tension we found was evidence of a current difference of power within interactions between representatives of the phases. We analyse differences of size, resources, workforce, pedagogy and history, and how they have resulted in different, and differently valued, practices and professional identities. We explore how attributes of the two phases have been counterposed and how, in complex interaction with wider discourses of politics, gender and age, this process has invested the differences with meanings and values that tend to relegate attributes associated with primary school. By focusing on the activation of cumulative inequality in interactions, we contribute a complementary perspective to studies of perceived relative status and highlight the implications for understanding school positioning in local arenas as the role of local authorities is reduced.

The school system in England is undergoing rapid change, with the government creating more than 4000 'independent publicly funded schools', known as academies, since 2010. The potential for fragmentation is considerable with diversity of governance emerging as a key feature of the new schooling landscape. Consequently, a major and widely recognised issue to which these reforms give rise concerns the future of the 'middle tier' –that layer between individual schools or groups of schools and central government. There are competing visions of how a future middle tier might evolve: one focuses entirely on a middle tier of individual schools and chains as a 'self-improving system'; others conceive a continuing but revised role for the local authority (LA). The aim of this paper is to begin to explore the latter position, and in particular the potential role of the LA as a 'broker' of new patterns of school organisation. Drawing on interview data from three very different LA areas, the findings show that LAs differ in how they conceive their role and, consequently, on the strategies that they pursue.

Research to date about the English government’s policy to make schools independent of local authorities (LAs) has looked at the ‘macro’ level of national policy and at the ‘micro’ level of the institution. The study of which this article is a part, explores changes at the ‘meso’ level – the locality. The article analyses interviews in three LAs with 15 headteachers whose schools were well positioned locally. We sought to understand how and why they responded to the changing policy environment. We applied Bourdieu’s concepts of forms of capital to model the relationships between schools and to ground explanations of their responses as positioning themselves in the local field. The article develops this general approach by identifying the varieties of capital available and actually possessed. The most important was categorization as a result of the inspection process. Many of the headteachers felt impelled to lead their schools into various associations with other schools. Some individuals were becoming notably more powerful in their competition arenas. The power of these elite schools to further accumulate advantage and the withdrawal of the LA role as an arbiter of conflict between schools in the interests of the whole community are discussed.

The theme of differential access to education plays a significant role in variously characterising the problem of social justice and education. It does so in concert with other key concepts and practices. This paper explores these mutually reinforcing relations and how they vary in two different analytical contexts.

Data from three school admissions surveys and the National Pupil Database are combined to investigate whether changes to the School Admissions Code appear to have altered the published admissions policies and the social composition of particular schools. We show that the 2003 and 2007 School Admissions Codes appear to have been at least in part responsible for changes in the social composition of pupils at schools with criteria and arrangements that were subsequently deemed inadmissible. Although the average impact is relatively small, the direction of the impact is consistent with the observation that school segregation across England has declined a little at the same time that regulations were tightening. Our regression analysis of changes in individual school compositions is able to show this relationship holds even when changes in neighbourhood composition are accounted for. These measured associations that we identify suggest that, if the differentiation of school intakes is a concern, then regulating admission arrangements does appear to have an impact.