Poll: Do you think all schools should become academies?
Plans to turn every state school in England into an academy have come under fire from Tory councillors - including the politician responsible for education in David Cameron's own constituency. What do you think?
Under the Government's plans all schools will have to become academies or be in the process of converting by 2020, taking them out of local authority control.
But Melinda Tilley, the cabinet member for education at Oxfordshire County Council - which includes the Prime Minister's Witney seat - warned small village schools could be at risk if academy chains decided they were no longer viable.
She said: "It means a lot of little primary schools will be forced to go into multi-academy trusts and I just feel it's the wrong time, in the wrong place, for little primary schools to be forced into doing this.
"I'm afraid there could be a few little village schools that get lost in all of this."
Asked if she was "disappointed" by the Government, she said that was "probably putting it very mildly".
"I'm fed up with diktats from above saying you will do this and you won't do that. This is not why I became a Conservative."
Her concerns were echoed by other senior Conservatives in local government who face losing control of schools in their local areas.
Schools Minister Nick Gibb said the plan would give "more autonomy" to successful headteachers.
He told Today: "If you can get a headteacher who is running a successful school, to have that school become part of a multi-academy trust where he can spread that formula, he can use his expertise to take the winning formula that made his school a successful school and change weaker schools into the kind of school that he was leading, that is the essence of the multi-academy trust programme."
Mr Gibb insisted that forcing schools to make the change was "not diktat, this is about giving freedom and devolution to the school level".
