May the marketisation of our schools continue

Towards the end of 2009, shortly after I announced my intention to set up England’s first free school, I debated with Fiona Millar on Newsnight about the pros and cons of allowing parents to set up schools. Fiona had been having this debate, or ones very like it, for at least 20 years and it soon became apparent that I was outmatched. I felt like an amateur who’d stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson.

After five minutes, as I lay bleeding at her feet, she turned to Jeremy Paxman and said: ‘I don’t even know why we’re bothering to have this debate. Toby’s not actually going to do this. Setting up a school is so complicated, it’s not something a group of parents is ever going to manage.’

In the two years that followed, there were moments I feared Fiona might be right, but I also had reason to be grateful to her: the thought of proving her wrong kept me going.

Needless to say, the success of the free school I co-founded, or the 390 others that have opened since, has done little to change Fiona’s mind. Indeed, this month she is publishing a book entitled The Best For My Child: Did the Schools Market Deliver?, which argues the panoply of changes to education policy that have taken place since Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act have done little to improve outcomes. According to her, we need to move away from parental choice, which has led to social segregation, towards fairness and equality.

The first thing to be said about Fiona’s argument is that she misrepresents the reforms of the past 30 years as a ‘market experiment’ and treats the current state of affairs, which she refers to as ‘the wild west’, as if it were the apotheosis of free-market radicalism.