The majority of England's state secondary schools are, or are about to become, academies, government data shows – a major milestone for one of the coalition's most controversial reforms.. Figures published by the Department for Education (DfE) reveal 50.3% of the country's 3,261 state secondaries are now academies – or have applied to be.
To get around this problem, the NAO says the DfE and the Education Funding Agency (which channels the money for academies) "hypothesised" financial data for the year to the end of August 2012.
Soon after the coalition was formed, the education secretary, Michael Gove, invited all outstanding schools to convert to academies; counting these schools' results within the data for academies could skew the figures.
There are four academies in the City Sheffield Springsgs Academy, Sheffield Park Academy, Firth Park Academy and Parkwood Academy.
The DfE publishes their exam results and other data from academies as it does for other schools, and they feature in school league tables.
However, the latest data suggested that academy status is no panacea.
Nutt says the chain's relationship with Ofsted also requires improvement, citing an instance when the inspectorate apparently mistakenly sent TKAT data on another academy chain.
To update the Spanish dictionary, the academy relied on a computerized data system to measure the frequency of millions of words used on television and radio and in newspapers as well as other writings.
This combined approach has been validated using data from Chinese Academy of Science-Digital Ionosonde (CAS-DIS), and can be used for ionogram automatic scaling.
In March, the DfE document "Academies: research priorities and questions" appeared to admit that data on the impact of academy status on primaries was scarce, conceding: "research evidence [is] primarily based on secondary schools".
