Status Anxiety: Mediocrity for all, or excellence for some?

As someone trying to set up a free school, it’s a criticism I hear over and over again: he just wants to secure a free private education for his children at the taxpayer’s expense. Ed Balls has said it, the general secretary of the NUT has said it, Fiona Millar has said it. And it’s always delivered with the same knowing smirk, as if they’ve caught me out. Bad luck, Toby. The gig is up. Time to go home.

They’re quite right, of course. And it is a killer blow — against themselves. For if I’ve worked out a way of providing my own children with the equivalent of a private school education for no more than it costs the taxpayer to educate a child at a bog-standard comprehensive then I should be made the Secretary of State for Education tomorrow.

Let’s unpack this a little bit. It’s a safe assumption that free schools will receive roughly the same amount of money per pupil as maintained schools. The Department for Education has yet to issue any clear guidance on the GAG (General Annual Grant) that free schools will receive — and won’t until after next week’s comprehensive spending review — but we know that it will be in line with the per capita funding allocated to the maintained schools in whatever local authority each free school happens to be in.

So the per capita budget available to my school will be no higher than that of the neighbouring state schools. Will this be sufficient to provide children with the equivalent of a private school education? I’d hesitate to make that claim since, according to the OECD, England’s independent schools are the best in the world. The same cannot be said of our education sector as a whole.