So she has a difficulty.
She can't accuse her fellow party members of being bumbling incompetents standing in the way of radical change. And it they aren't incompetent then she can't explain why she needs to force through a massive top down bureaucratic revolution to get rid of them and replace them with a series of remote and unaccountable academy chains. So, like all machine politicians, she has come up with a "compromise".
Schools must still become academies but she is going to allow local authorities to set up their own chains of academies so that they can remain in control of the schools that want to carry on working with them. This might just work to patch up a political problem in her own party. It can't possibly produce a logical solution to school problems.
Picture the farce that this produces. The Head Teacher of a successful primary school who has worked happily with the local authority for years now has to apply to become an academy. If she wishes to go it alone she can. Provided that she is confident that she can be expert on everything from property repairs through insurance premiums to legal protection and financial planning. If she is at all worried that she might not have time to run a school, teach several classes and get on top of every aspect of building, financial and legal case management in a spare moment then she is highly likely to decide that she needs some help. She may well want to apply to join the chain of local authority led schools run by the people she has worked with and trusted for years.
She will have to waste a lot of time filling in forms in order to .... stay the same. The local authority will have to create a new legal entity and fill out a lot more forms in order to ....... stay the same.
Apparently the Conservative Party believes in avoiding un-necessary bureaucracy and is opposed to pointless top down re-organisations. I am sure that as awareness of this firm party policy will sustain our poor Head Teacher as she battles with those forms after a hard day teaching and then trying to help parents and children to deal with real problems. I am also sure that the Conservative local authorities who are allowed to open up academy chains will be equally overjoyed to spend all that time on the paperwork.
Meanwhile parents may well be tempted to ask the obvious question of how forcing through a change the governance of a school that is currently well governed contributes to the improvement of their child's education. But Nicki doesn't need to worry too much about this. She's just removed their right to elect a parent governor. So much for parent power!