Status Anxiety: Free schools in the front line

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most militant trade unions have education reformers in their sights.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most militant trade unions have education reformers in their sights. A month of industrial action is due to begin at the end of March, culminating in a series of demonstrations to coincide with the royal wedding, and free school proposers can expect to be at the business end of these protests.

The NUT’s opposition to the coalition’s education policy is hardly surprising, but the involvement of other trade unions in this battle is more perplexing. The keynote speaker at a recent rally in Acton to oppose the West London Free School was Bob Crow. What business is it of the RMT if a group of parents and teachers want to establish a new secondary school in west London? Similarly, the GMB recently started campaigning against the Bolingbroke Academy, a proposed new free school in Wandsworth. Hasn’t Britain’s third-largest union got bigger fish to fry?

The explanation is that the leaders of these unions have identified educational reform as a key issue in their attempt to bring down the government. Their general strategy is to portray David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove as fanatical ideologues who are using the deficit as a smokescreen to dismantle the welfare state and transfer responsibility for essential services to their chums in the private sector. Free schools are exhibit A in the case for the prosecution. The policy has the added advantage of being a potential fault line between the Tories and the Lib Dems.

Now, the difficulty with focusing on the coalition’s education policy in order to advance this narrative is that the government has expressly forbidden private companies to run free schools.