By any measure, the free schools programme has been a resounding success. If you judge schools by how much progress their pupils make between the ages of 11 and 16, free schools occupy the top five positions in the most recent league table and eight of the top ten. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider free schools comprise less than 3 per cent of schools in England and Wales.
A free school – King’s maths school – was the top performing sixth form in the country for the ninth year in a row in 2024 and in 2022 was designated ‘best sixth form college of the decade’ by the Sunday Times.
Why is Phillipson targeting the most successful education policy of the last 14 years?
Another one – Harris Westminster Academy – got 49 Oxbridge offers this year, one more than Eton.
The first free school I helped set up – the West London Free School – hasn’t fared quite as well, but it has done okay. It’s in the top 2 per cent of non-selective state schools in England when it comes to GCSE results and the sixth best state school in London in terms of A-level results.
All told, the free school programme has delivered over 650 schools, providing hundreds of thousands of new places, and it’s done so more quickly and cheaply than Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme.
Yet Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has announced that the free schools approved by the last government which haven’t yet opened are being ‘reviewed’, with the future of the 44 mainstream schools in the pipeline in doubt.
A source close to Phillipson told the Times that free schools were a ‘Tory vanity project’.
‘State schools have been left crumbling for too long, while the Tories’ ideological drive saw capital budgets funnelled into building new free schools with surplus places,’ a Labour insider told the paper.
In fact, of the 650 plus free schools that have opened since 2011, a majority are in areas where there’s a need for additional school places. Yes, some have created surplus places, but you need surplus places if parents are to have a choice. Increased choice means more competition and competition drives up results.
In maths, England rose from 17th place in the OECD’s international league table in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average. Scotland, unlike England, doesn’t have any free schools.
So why is Phillipson targeting the most successful education policy of the last 14 years? I can think of two reasons.
One is revenge. Michael Gove, shortly after he was appointed Education Secretary in 2010, shut down Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme. That caused an uproar, with Labour complaining bitterly that he was sacrificing children’s future for the sake of a ‘vanity project’, even though a subsequent inquiry revealed the programme to be wasteful and poorly managed. So, torpedoing the Tories’ school building programme, which is still closely associated with Gove, looks like tit-for-tat.
Another reason is embarrassment. I know from experience that the entire educational establishment opposed the free schools programme, with the teaching unions leading the charge. How could a bunch of amateurs hope to set up and run something as complicated as a school, let alone a successful one? Much better to leave it to the experts, i.e. them.
Thirteen years later and the 650 plus free schools set up by little platoons of parents and teachers are among the best in the country. Talk about egg on the face of the so-called experts. We proved it was possible to build a better mousetrap and the Guild of Mousetrap Makers have been red faced ever since. Phillipson is sparing their future blushes by restoring their monopoly.
But Labour isn’t entirely to blame for the demise of the free schools programme. Gove’s successors were never as enthusiastic about it as him and in 2020 the Department for Education stopped funding the New Schools Network, the engine room of the programme. Yes, Phillipson is about to pull the lever. But it was her predecessors who built the gallows.
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