Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget. Draft legislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday, will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn. The prime minister said his "vision for our schooling system" was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than "bureaucrats"
    The white paper will come just days before the government's education and adoption bill is made law. That bill was introduced to "sweep away bureaucratic and legal loopholes" and speed up the process of dealing with failing schools by taking them out of local authority control and putting them in the hands of academy sponsors.
    Concerns have already been raised about whether there would be enough good sponsors to take on schools. With many more schools facing academisation, that task will be even greater at a time when some academy trusts are facing criticism for underachievement.
    Teachers' unions, who have been critical of the academisation process, said parents and teachers would be outraged. Kevin Courtney, the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "Finally the government has come clean on its education priorities and admitted that its real agenda all along has been that every school must become an academy. The fig leaf of 'parental choice', 'school autonomy' and 'raising standards' has finally been dropped and the government's real agenda has been laid bare—all schools removed from collaborative structures within a local authority family of schools, all schools instead run by remote academy trusts, unaccountable to parents, staff or local communities."
    Councils reacted angrily to the news. Councillor Roy Perry, chairman of the Local Government Association's children and young people board, said: "Only 15% of the largest academy chains perform above the national average in terms of pupil progress, compared with 44% of council-run schools."
    "It's vital that we concentrate on the quality of education and a school's ability to deliver the best results for children, rather than on the legal status of a school, to make sure that we're providing the education and support needed in each area," he said. "We oppose forced academisation and giving significant powers relating to education to unelected civil servants with parents and residents unable to hold them to account at the ballot box."  Schools in England will turn into academies because of ______.