On the eve of the election, the future of our proposed school hangs in the balance

1 May 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

As the leader of a group of parents trying to set up Britain’s first free school, I’ve been spending the past week or so frantically mugging up on the Liberal Democrats’ education policy. In the event of a hung parliament, would the Lib Dems support the Conservatives’ educational reforms? On the face of it, the answer’s no. One of the ways in which the Tories are proposing to make life easier for groups like mine is to take away the veto that local authorities have over the creation of new academies. My local council is Conservative-controlled and will probably remain so after 6 May, but as we saw from the remarks of Paul Carter, the leader of Kent County Council, not all Tory councillors see eye-to-eye with the national party on this. There are also the local officials to deal with. All in all, my task will be much simpler if I can bypass my local authority.

In the Lib Dem manifesto, it clearly states that the party is opposed to this. On page 37 it states: ‘We will ensure a level playing field for admissions and funding and replace academies with our own model of “Sponsor-Managed Schools”. These schools will be commissioned by and accountable to local authorities...’ However, after some research I’ve concluded that the Lib Dems would be unlikely to insist on local authority control as a condition of supporting ‘free schools’. Like the Conservatives, the Lib Dems are divided on this issue. The beard-and-sandals brigade at local level will fight tooth and nail to retain control over taxpayer-funded education, while the party’s right-of-centre, privately educated leaders are more sympathetic to granting state schools greater freedoms. I suspect Nick Clegg will pick his battles when it comes to negotiating the price of Lib Dem support for the Tories, and this will not be one of them.

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