Academies in England: where are the schools and where will the new ones be?

Academies in England are taking over, with over 600 already open and at least another 700 in the pipeline.

Academies are schools which are independent of their local authority, can be sponsored (although they don't have to be) and can control their own budgets. Although they can be any type of school, they tend to be secondaries.

Plymouth has become the first local authority where the majority of secondary schools are academies and, as Jeevan Vasagar writes today of the education secretary Michael Gove:

Gove wants academies to be the "norm". More than 650 primary and secondary schools are now academies. Nearly 700 more schools wanting to convert are currently in the pipeline. At present, one in five of England's 3,300 secondaries is an academy. It will soon be nearly one in three

So, where are England's academies? The map below from the Department for Education (DFE) official data site shows the spread across the country, with Kent the biggest authority for open academies.

DFE map of open academies in England

But if you look at the existing numbers are dwarfed. That's assuming, of course, that all the schools which apply are successful. However, according to the official stats, every application has been successful so far.

Total applications plus open academies. Get the fullscreen version

The full data, up to May 1, 2011, is below. What can you do with it?

Applications and open academies, May 2011. Click heading to sort. Download this table

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

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reff:guardian.co.uk