Has Boris Johnson given up on free schools?

For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the school thrived — it is now part of a growing academy chain — but where we led, others followed. As the first school of its type to be approved by Michael Gove, WLFS showed what a determined group of volunteers could achieve, and there are now more than 600 free schools.

Contrary to the predictions of the critics — too many to mention — this is one education policy that seems to have worked. The Department for Education hasn’t published school level GCSE and A-level results for 2020 and 2021, but the 2019 exam data casts free schools in a good light. Seven of the top 15 secondary schools in the country, as measured by how much progress children make between entering the school at 11 and taking their GCSEs, are free schools. Not bad when you consider they make up less than 10 per cent of the total. The average free school gets better results than the average state school — across all age groups — and 31 per cent have been rated outstanding by Ofsted compared with 19 per cent of all other types of state school.

So why was WLFS’s tenth anniversary bittersweet? Because the present government shows every sign of having lost interest in the policy. True, 52 new free schools opened this month and there are a further 206 in the pipeline, but those are mainly the legacy of previous administrations.