Katharine Birbalsingh has been releasing videos of pupils at her school, Michaela Community, getting their GCSE results. They’re incredibly moving, all the more so because you wonder how many of these same kids – many from disadvantaged backgrounds – would have done if she had not set up that free school. These results are testimony, yes, to pupil effort. But when this teenager runs through his exams and lists each teacher who helped him get each ‘8’ and ‘9’, it’s almost a tear-jerker. It’s testimony to the teachers who go against the grain and set up schools – under much attack – to give private-school style rigour and discipline to kids whose families could never afford the £25,000-a-year. This shows what can be done to change lives if you drop the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Free schools have debunked the blame-the-parents mentality that has for decades sought to explain away the scandal of poor academic performance in poor areas. Teachers like Birbalsingh and those in Dixons Trinity Bradford, a Mecca for excellence visited by other teachers nationwide, have proven that another way is possible. With enough determination – and enough support from Whitehall – this country has a big natural resource: extraordinary, dedicated and inspirational teachers. The Tories were the party who ended up empowering them, but now seem uninterested in the results of this Cameron-era experiment. I’ve written about this for my Daily Telegraph column.
The Conservatives sink into cliches about ‘pushing up education standards’ but the party has actually done far more. The Tories created a system where Birbalsingh and many others were able to set up independent schools in the state sector, giving choice in education to those who would otherwise not be able to afford it. The Times today highlights King’s Maths School, run in partnership with King’s College London, which specialises in mathematical talent. It’s selective, but so are the top private schools. And its results are better than any private school: 91 per cent of its A-level results were A or above. A third of pupils are taking up places at Oxbridge. One of its students is a Ukrainian refugee who scored three A*s.
Last week, it was announced that just 15 free schools will open this year – a rather underwhelming augmentation of the 650 we have already. After ten Tory education secretaries, just 5 per cent of pupils are in free schools. So we see a paradox: that as the free school success is proven beyond doubt (this Stanford study shows how the same principle is working well in America with Charter Schools), the number of new free schools dries up as the Tories lose interest and energy.
So we now see hugely successful chains: Oasis, Inspire, Dixons Trinity – all schools that are testimony to the transformative power of good teachers. About 35 per cent of pupils in free schools scored A or A* at A-level versus 22 per cent in council-run schools. The intake of free schools is more challenging: they’re more likely to have pupils on free school meals or who speak a foreign language at home. This is a Tory progressive success: focusing on saving lives, not money. But such language has dropped out of the Tory vocabulary since David Cameron left power.
What changed?
The short political attention span.
New leaders like their own signature projects, which often means abandoning the trademark reforms of their immediate predecessors. Successful experiments can become casualties of political vanity. Gordon Brown had little interest in Tony Blair’s reforms, just as Theresa May had no interest in Cameron’s. Gove had set up an entire apparatus of highly skilled advisers who identified and addressed every pressure point standing in the way of free schools. Rachel Wolf at the New Schools Network, Dominic Cummings at his creative best inside the department, John Nash as schools minister.
When Gove was moved, this team was disbanded. What exists now only does so because Cameron gave him four years as education secretary, an unusually long period (one of his successors did just two days). Gove fought with all his might in that time, taking so many bullets that Cameron regarded him as a politically unviable frontman for the 2015 election. Perhaps real reform is, politically, a suicide mission. The exhumed Iain Duncan Smith managed to reform welfare because he had already been party leader and had no further ambitions.
After Gove, Tories returned to their comfort zone
As soon as politicians take their foot off the pedal of reform, the speed slows. Inertia kicks in. Officials in the Department for Education are not wild about the free schools agenda. Gove used to joke about turning his department into a free school, given that his reforms would reduce the need for civil servants. So when the Treasury came for it (bureaucrats hate opening new schools if there are places to fill in bad ones) the DfE offered little resistance.
Theresa May (whose memoir comes out next week) reverted to the Tory comfort zone of grammars. When Justine Greening ran education, she was uninterested in free schools and the Treasury saw its chance. It proposed – and she accepted – to cut back on capital grants and put the money into day-to-day, per-pupil expenditure. This seemingly technical change pretty much killed the funding for new free schools. A free-school project normally starts with a big capital requirement. It was a long-term investment, which jarred with the short-term thinking that Boris Johnson’s rule did not remedy (he expressed verbal interest, but the Treasury kept on cutting). I understand the Treasury, seeing this agenda undefended, twice formally proposed killing the free school agenda altogether. All that talk about the left-wing ‘blob’ and the real enemy was under Tory control.
What the Treasury can’t see
So again, the ‘blob’ enemy isn’t about party politics, but a spreadsheet mentality. Free schools cost money and while investment in education pays off over a lifetime, it brings no immediate returns that will show up on a Treasury analysis. The cost is seen, but the benefits are not. So we end up with ministers pleading with the Treasury, saying free schools are the most successful recent innovation in European education – and the Treasury saying, no dice, we’re getting pressure to increase per-pupil funding so the capital budget has to go. Politically, people won’t miss what they don’t have. In such ways is the battle for reform fought and lost. (The same is happening in welfare now – but that’s for another blog).
The coming crash in pupil numbers
I argue in my Daily Telegraph column that it’s not too late for Rishi Sunak to pick the free school agenda up again because if Keir Starmer wins I suspect that his time in office will be spent closing schools. Pupil numbers are now declining: primary now, later secondary – see projections below.
There will soon be vacancies in schools – so what to do? Keep schools open at 90 per cent capacity thereby creating smaller classes, more of a market and parent choice? That should be the Tory option. Bad schools will be exposed when they lose pupils at a faster rate. Academies and free schools would likely be oversubscribed. A chasm would open up – and the unions would protest. Or keep class sizes at 32, and close schools for more ‘cost efficiency’ and bureaucratic convenience? I suspect Labour will do the latter, as it last did in government (when numbers were falling).
I could be doing Starmer a disservice, but I suspect he’s more of a Brownite machine politician than a Blairite reformer. I doubt he will see school choice and parent power as a good thing, as a driver of standards. He’ll view the state as the driver of standards, and he’ll want teachers to implement not their own ideas but his pet schemes (like ‘oracy’, a bad idea from a free school set up by his adviser Peter Hyman). A choice lies ahead: either we keep new schools coming (as the US is doing with charter schools) or we enter decline. The Tories can be the party of school expansion and innovation, and cast Labour as the party of managed educational decline.
So, let’s set aside the transformative effect on pupils. If that’s not enough to register Tory interest what about this: they are a political dividing line. Should pupils choose schools, or vice versa? Should teachers be empowered, or take top-down instruction and forced to accept ‘oracy,’ or the latest hot idea from Westminster know-nothings? ‘Minister knows nowt about curriculum’ was the succinct verdict of George Tomlinson, an education secretary under Attlee. If Labour has forgotten this wisdom, the Tories can still champion it. Even now, it’s not too late.
Comments