The following post is copied and pasted directly from the lawyer David Wolfe’s blog ‘A Can Of Worms’. I have re-blogged it here because it is of direct relevance to the situation of forced academies in Birmingham

The short answer is that neither the Secretary of State nor a local authority has direct power to force a maintained school to become an academy.

They are doing it in practice either by (a) replacing the school’s governing body with an Interim Executive Board comprising people he has chosen who then act on their behalf in ‘applying’ to become an academy; or (b) by pressuring the existing governing body into applying themselves (i.e. jumping before they are pushed).

If a maintained school is eligible for intervention then the local authority and the Secretary of State both have powers of intervention.

But neither can directly force a…