Free Schools: revolution or retreat?
The claim
“For too long in our country, exercising choice to escape poor schools has been available to the richest, who could just opt out and go private, or to the middle classes who could move house to a better area, but the poorest have had to take what they’re given. Not any more.”
Prime Minister David Cameron, January 29, 2011
Cathy Newman checks it out
Last year’s Conservative manifesto pledged nothing short of a “schools revolution”.
There would be, the party promised, a “new generation of good small schools” modelled on Sweden’s “Free Schools”.
Once in government, the education secretary Michael Gove, said he’d received more than 700 expressions of interest from parents, teachers and charities interested in setting up the new institutions.
Now, with just weeks to go before the end of the school year, FactCheck is taking stock.
How many of England’s new Free Schools will be up and running by September, and is this the educational revolution we were promised? (For Cathy’s full programme report, click here)
The analysis
England’s school system is facing a chronic shortage of 320,000 places by 2014.
Education Secretary Michael Gove hopes to help address this by encouraging Free Schools set up by teams of teachers, parents, charities, businesses, trusts, religious or voluntary groups.
The new Free Schools are publicly funded but independent of local authorities. They will not have to hire teachers with the QTS (qualified teacher status) accreditation they normally have to get in the state sector. And while they have to teach certain subjects, they will not have to follow the National Curriculum.
Mr Gove said last year he’d received more than 700 “expressions of interest”. But in the end, the Department for Education (DfE) received less than half that number of firm proposals. And of the 323 that applied, the government is considering 32 applications and currently 24 are through to the final stages.
Now FactCheck can reveal that just eight are certain to open in September. A further 16 are still hoping they might be ready for the Autumn term and are waiting for their funding agreements to be signed off. Officials at the DfE told us at least a dozen would end up opening altogether.
Free Schools with funding agreement approved:
Batley Grammar School, Kirklees |
Nishkam Free School, Birmingham |
Bradford Science Academy, Bradford |
St Luke’s C of E Primary School, Camden |
Eden Primary School, Haringey |
Stour Valley Community School, Suffolk |
Free School Norwich, Norfolk |
West London Free School, Hammersmith and Fulham |
Free Schools awaiting funding agreement approval:
All Saints Junior School, Reading |
Krishna-Avanti Primary School, Leicester City |
ARK Atwood, Westminster |
Langley Hall Primary Academy, Slough |
ARK Conway, Hammersmith and Fulham |
Moorlands School, Luton |
Canary Wharf College, Tower Hamlets |
Rainbow Free School, Bradford |
Discovery New School, West Sussex |
Sandbach School, Cheshire East |
E-ACT Redbridge Primary School, Redbridge |
The Priors Free School, Warwickshire |
Etz Chaim Jewish Primary School, Barnet |
Woodpecker Hall Primary Academy, Enfield |
Deprivation, diversity and indepedent schools
The numbers are small, but expectations are high. Mr Gove has echoed the Prime Minister’s claim that Free Schools would benefit the worse-off, promising that “by allowing new schools we will give all children access to the kind of education only the rich can afford”.
FactCheck found however that of the 24 schools in the pipeline to open this year, nine rank in the top 50 per cent better-off areas in England.
Four of these are existing independent schools applying for state funding under the Free School status. That suggests many of the children who will benefit from the new schools enjoy fairly comfortable backgrounds.
Two of the independent schools, the specialist arts college Sandbach and the Maharishi primary school, are located in the top 20 per cent of England’s better-off areas.
Mark Griffin, a parent at the £9,000-a-year Batley Grammar School, said grandparents often helped pay the fees, so he was delighted his children would, from September, be attending a Free School. He told FactCheck it was like “winning the lottery”.
Mr Griffin said: “Like the country as a whole, we’ve gone through a challenging period over the past two and a half years, and particularly for parents like myself who run small businesses and have gone through redundancies recently, so therefore, when we heard there was an inkling that the school might turn into a free school we saw it possibly as literally a free school and it felt like a lottery win.”
In fact, of all the 24 schools FactCheck found only two schools in the poorest 10 per cent of England’s local authorities: Nishkam Free School and Art Atwood – both primary schools that together would offer 160 places in their first year of opening.
The latter, a sister school to the Hindu Krishna-Avanti London, is one of seven religious Free Schools hoping to open this year – including the first publicly funded Sikh school in England.
The DfE points out that the majority of the 24 schools are located in the most deprived 50 per cent of the country, adding that if schools are in less deprived areas it is usually because there is a shortage of places.
Such shortages are the reason behind a number of Free Schools that are extensions of existing schools – such as Woodpecker Hall and the Krishna-Avanti.
(Continued analysis and verdict below the graphic)
Buildings blocked
Why are there not more Free Schools, fulfilling the Prime Minister’s original aim? The truth is, setting up a school from scratch is no mean feat.
Two parents who have campaigned for a school in Kirklees, Yorkshire, told FactCheck they never realised it would be so hard.
Lesley Surman and Lisa Holmes wanted to open their Free School next year, but they’ve so far failed to persuade the council to give them the land.
Lisa Holmes, parent, local Conservative concillor and member BBG Academy Trust, said: “I think to set up a school from scratch, which is in part really what we’re doing, I think just as parents without particular expertise in the free school movement, I think would be incredibly difficult.
“Sadly I don’t think it’s quite as easy as we were led to believe in the beginning. But it’s an evolving process and I think maybe even the powers that be at the time didn’t realise it was going to take this route but I think it would be very difficult on your own.”
Sarah Counter, the principal of Free School Canary Wharf College, had a similar story. She’s been working on her plans full time since last September – and she has eight years experience as a head teacher under her belt.
The biggest problem, she said, is the red tape choking the allocation of school buildings. It’s the main reason why existing schools have the upper hand, and some start-ups lose out.
Ms Counter took months to find a suitable building in Canary Wharf, while schools in Bristol, Westminster and Barnet plan to open in temporary accommodation, and others are still searching. One in Kingston has admitted defeat delaying the grand opening until 2012. The Kirklees school will now open in 2013.
Free schools have to apply for planning permission to use buildings as schools – a laborious process which relies on the goodwill of the Local Authorities. There was a government consultation before Christmas on how to make it easier to convert buildings for education use, and we’re told the response is due “imminently”.
Rachel Wolf, founder of the New Schools Network, told FactCheck: “It’s the one piece of the jigsaw that the government has to sort out. And it’s the reason schools are being opened in less deprived areas – it’s not as easy to find buildings in inner city areas.”
Return on investment?
So is it all going to be worth it?
“It’s so much hard work for the Department for Education because most groups don’t have any experience at all”, Ms Counter told us.
There are almost 100 civil servants beavering away on the Free Schools plan. Shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham points out that with no more than 3,000 children set to attend a free school in the first year, that’s one civil servant for every 30 kids. “Not a great return on investment”, Mr Burnham said.
The government has allocated £50m for the Free Schools’ first year in capital funding, siphoned off from the Harnessing Technology Grant.
There are fears that neighbouring state schools will see pupils and funding plundered by Free Schools. That’s because the money follows the pupil, so if a struggling state school loses students it will also lose cash.
So what Alastair Campbell used to call the “bog-standard comprehensive” might end up losing its best pupils to the Free School down the road.
Cathy Newman’s verdict
With just eight Free Schools certain to open in September, the schools revolution has yet to take hold.
But a manifesto is for a whole parliament, and this is only the Government’s first year. It’s also worth pointing out that in Labour’s 13 years in power, a paltry one parent-run school opened its doors.
Publicly, ministers insist they’re not disappointed by the number. Nevertheless privately, some in Government admit they are a little embarrassed that independent schools and parents in better-off areas are in the vanguard.
No wonder the education department would rather focus on its track record so far on Academies. These schools – started under Labour but embraced with aplomb by Mr Gove – are free from local authority control.
They get more money, so they can, they have more freedom to hire better teachers, and they also set their own curriculum.
Comprehensives are becoming academies at the rate of two every school day. There are now 704 open in England, compared to 203 at the time of the election. That just might end up being revolutionary.
The analysis by Emma Thelwell
There are 27 comments on this post
Interesting piece but I am surprised that you continue to imply other schools are “controlled” by local authorities. This really is not true. I would have expected better than that from Fact Check.
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I wonder whether someone looking back in 10 or 20 years time will see this as a revolution or the start of a educational chaos that cost £££ to resolve subsequently. Typically of government policies, what will be measured is the number of free school opening. That’s an almost irrelevant figure. What we need are to look at educational attainment across the whole system & judge how free (& other) schools compare in terms of improving children’s attainment, taking proper account of background & starting point. We get a measurement of inputs but not of outcomes – because it’s easy – but doesn’t actually measure what people want to know – will my child get better schooling? I can’t help feeling this is more about fiddling around with the deckchairs on the “Titanic” than focusing on better teaching in schools & better support outside.
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Useful information but fatally flawed by accepting the Government line that they are successfully creating more Academies than Labour managed. These are not the same beasts. The Academy programme initiated under Blair and Adonis, saw new schools in deprived areas, with massive investment usually including new buildings.
The schools opting for Academic freedoms under this government get some financial benefit but do not get the massive sums the old Academies received.
Until this fact is better known, Gove can get away with such absurd statements as “This Government has created more academies in one year than Labour did in ten”.
Oranges and pears. Heads don’t want to become Academies, but they are desperate for any extra money, however small.
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“They get more money, so they can, amongst other things, hire better teachers”
Um, they can’t *all* get more money, can they, unless there’s more money available. Which there isn’t. This FactCheck needs fact checking, I suggest. As Alison says, it’s far from clear what ‘free from local authority control’ actually means in practice. I’d love to know the breakdown of the academies, particularly who their partners are and where the money’s coming from and going to.
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This is just another ruse for the middle classes to benefit from the education system. The answer to the problems in education are simple:
1) Stop trashing teachers. Pay them properly and give them constant access to ongoing training etc.
2) Stop the see-saw of governmental changes to the education system we see with every new parliament; give head teachers greater powers to set curriculum. Let teachers teach.
Yes, there are incompetent teachers just as there are incompetent politicians. So get rid of them.
Every generation of school kids, mine included, are made into guinea pigs for some ideological experiment – in this case dreamt up by a government almost wholly consisting of privately educated, wealthy white males.
If all politicians were obliged to send their children to state schools, education would improve over night. Same for the NHS.
Oh, and well done to the Archbishop of Canterbury!
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Can anyone verify that figure of 320,000 places needed by 2014 ? Is that a typo for 32,000 ? I know we have a massive problem , with very little school building going on, but is it that high ?
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The figures are correct and are supplied by the Department for Education – 260,000 places needed in the primary sector and 60,000 more in the secondary sector.
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Birth rate began to rise in 2001.
Part of the long running rise and falls that’s been going on since the 1910s and early 1920s. That slump in births then was caused by a shortage of young men and the monogamous culture of the time.
As the generations mature – and as mothers’ average age of first birth gets older – the waves of yearly birth rate increase & decrease and get more spread out.
The current upturn will fade. Leaving too many school places as child numbers fall.
By the way, isn’t the Batley school a re-launch of a private one?
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Can anybody tell me what happened to Bristol Free School. They have taken year 7 pupils and even recruited teachers, is this school going to open in Sep.?
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When we spoke to the Bristol Free School a few days ago, they confirmed they were in the ‘pre-opening stage’ – which means they are just waiting for the government to sign off their funding agreement. They expect to get the green light any day now and having just appointed a Head, were very confident that the school would be open in September.
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‘Even recruited teachers’?
But (as stated above) ‘They will not have to hire teachers with the QTS (qualified teacher status) accreditation they normally have to get in the state sector’.
Looks like yet another race to the bottom, with unqualified people being used as they’re cheaper – just like Bristol Uni!
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I have just seen this report on C4 news. The example they focused on, Batley Grammar, seems to be a school transfering the burden of financing away from the parents and onto the tax-payer. This seems to fly in the face of the purpose of free schools.
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It all looks good the government is sort of pushing for these free schools BUT under this government a school in Brixham down in Devon will be closing at the end of this current term how many more schools will close
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Cathy, thank you for your thoughts on what I believe is a shameful example od government stating a policy is for one when it is actually for another. The point here is not that there were not 700 or so applications from people wanting to setup new ‘neighbourhood run’ schools, but, rather, that it saved a number of private schools from going bankrupt. In Bristol the following private schools have been saved from bankruptcy by becoming tax-payer funded institutions (e.g. academies or Free Schools):
Bristol Cathedral, Colston’s Girls, St Ursula’s school. Now this is not covered in our local newspaper, or television so I only know about through having driven past them and, after looking at all the new buildings that have been erected, noted the change of status on a notice board. At a guess that is about 33% of the private schools that once existed in Bristol.
What is situation in other cities and towns?
Finally, none at any of these appear in your list of schools under consideration. Are we all not getting the full story?
Yours respectfully Shaun Thomas
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Money for the Free School scheme is coming out of the funding pot for State schools.
Under the scheme a Private school, whose parents happily paid £9,000 a year becomes a Free School. Those parents will no longer have to pay £9,000 a year yet still get to send their children to a Private school – using money diverted out of the State sector. Will the current students have to re-apply for places as they would have had to for a “new” Free School, thereby allowing ALL local children to stand a chance of taking ALL of these places? I doubt it!
Sickening.
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I belong to a group of parents/teachers/community-spirited people in Brandon, Suffolk. We applied for our current middle school to become a Free School in 2012 when Suffolk CC closes the school due to the county changing our enclave to a two-tier system.
Our proposal embodies precisely what the Free School policy was set up for and we are very proud that we were granted permission to move onto the business stage back in February.
Making sure that everything is in order legally is a very long process – that’s the only frustrating thing. The rest of it is a very busy and steep learning curve but we are loving the challenge.
We want our school to exist to meet the needs of our community. We will be fully inclusive – not exclusive. We won’t be asking teachers to ignore the National Curriculum, but rather ask excellent practitioners to be innovative with it.
We want our students to achieve personal goals beyond their wildest expectations. We want our community to keep the school site’s facilities.
We keep seeing news items or press articles about what Free Schools stand for: all we know is that, in our instance, we’re doing all that our community asked of us when…
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“Our proposal embodies precisely what the Free School policy was set up for”
What, stopping a local democratically elected authority trying to save money during a major public finance retrenchment, taking funding away from other state schools leading to an overprovision of secondary places? Very laudable.
Also, the Brandon website states the following, or did last time I looked:
“The Education Providers we are interested in look for between 5-8% profit eventually”
Is that also ‘precisely what the Free School policy was set up for’?
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I would be really interested in finding out how many of the applications are supported by companies like Serco or Nord Anglia. I suspect that these kind of educational companies are seeing free schools as an opportunity to make profits out of the education system. Is this something FactCheck could look at?
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The DfE did say the applications would be made public, I’ve not seen any yet – you could make a FOI request?
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The DfE has published a list of the proposed Free Schools and what stage they are at – you can find it here http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/leadership/typesofschools/freeschools/b0066077/free-school-proposals But there is no list – that we’ve seen – of all those that applied.
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In Leeds we like AERO plan a school that is entirely teacher/parent lead – no Nord Anglia or such. Unlike AERO we are not fighting closure but hoping to meet in part the need for spaces, provide innovation and spectacular results. We will be following the lead from Steiner Academy Hereford which opened 2 years ago, Ours will be a city school for children who need it. We intend to have a non selective and a normal community school admissions system. Our preferred site is in an area of deprivation (>10% IMD), but we will need funding to build and this will be a terrible crux with the DfE strapped for cash. We are ever hopeful and really care about the education being available to all children. We will be giving back as much as we can to local communities, though government funded resources will only be allowed to be used for the children’s education. The Free Schools system as it stands is easier for time & cash rich people and organisations, but it’s not been impossible for others to get involved.
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AERO again!
We are a group of parents, teachers and community-spirited people. But we are also going to work alongside an Education Provider and we are currently in the middle of the lengthy procedure of procuring them. We want and need their expertise but we will choose our Education Provider based on finding the one who shares our vision and ethos for our school.
It’s a very exciting time indeed and the options that could be available to us, and to our community, are absolutely outstanding! As one of our members said way back when we first began looking at applying: ‘Out of a situation as dreadful as closure of Breckland Middle School have come better opportunities than any of us could have imagined possible for our town.’
Thank goodness for the Free School policy!
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It would probably be very hard to calculate, but it would be interesting knowing other break downs of Free Schools and/or Academies. For example, how many are fully comp or selective, how many are PTA-led and how many are corporate-led, how many are like-for-like replacements of existing schools and how many are ‘brand new’, plus the motivations – extra finances, extra buildings, better use of resources, extra freedoms, etc.
As for schools vs deprivation, there is a slight bias towards “lower middle” – breaking it into fifths rather than tenths gives 2 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 6, approximate thirds gives 3 / 10 / 10.
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Thanks for the response Emma though that’s not really what I was asking. I’d like to know which of the applications that were made were supported by any of the educational companies. I’d really like to find out how many of the applications for free schools were actually made by parents/ teachers (like the Leeds Steiner) and how many were supported further along the process by third party companies, presumably for some financial reward (like AERO).
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Hi again,
Actually the DfE’s spreadsheet does have some of this info on it. But to help you; my research shows that of the 24 schools hoping to open in September, eight are entirely new parent/teacher-led Free Schools. The rest are either: extensions or ‘sister’ schools of existing schools; existing independent; religious-led; company or charity led. If you want to know more about specific schools please check their websites – which I’ve linked to above. Thanks very much for your comments, Emma
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I’m definitely not getting involved in any of that, but I will say I don’t agree about ‘overprovision’.
All I know is that the Brandon community is finally being listened to……and it’s wonderful. So whatever policy it is that brings us something as extraordinary as we know is out there and helps keep our beloved school at the heart of our community – yippee!
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