It removes them from local government control, which can have good or bad effects. In terms of oversight, the authority is moved from the local government (ulti

It removes them from local government control, which can have good or bad effects. In terms of oversight, the authority is moved from the local government (ultimately chosen by the local voting public), to the nonprofit's board of trustees (ultimately chosen by... well, usually themselves). The hoped-for good outcome is that they'll be run by competent technocrats who will do a good job while being insulated from politics. The worried-about bad outcome is that entities with no democratic oversight can end up captured by their administrators, and drift increasingly away from the needs/wants of the local population. In practice, the national government retains some kind of oversight of UK academies, in part because it controls most of their budget. So they can't completely go off into doing whatever they want. But local government no longer does. So another way of looking at it is that the move represents a centralization of educational oversight, removing oversight power from local government authorities and investing it in the national Department for Education instead. In my personal opinion that's the wrong direction; I'd rather have schools be more locally run.