For many years, England has been the epitome of high-stakes accountability, often playing leapfrog with the USA. It represents an extreme of centralized surveillance, with schools organized as a quasi-market and supervised through a punitive combination of external inspection, the use of test data to name and shame schools, and ultimately closure and privatization. Other parts of the UK such as Wales and Scotland have been moving away from this and developing fundamentally different educational policies. Under the previous ("New Labour") governments of Blair and Brown, a project began of removing low-achieving schools from local government control, and placing them under the control of businessmen as "sponsors." These state-funded independently managed schools were named Academies. This article, a personal statement which makes no pretence at neutrality, introduces new data, and seeks to place the academies' project in the context of the English system more generally. The author hopes it is of interest internationally.