3 September 2010
The government has rejected calls from business leaders to allow profit-making companies to set up free schools.
A report published yesterday by the CBI urged the coalition to open up the new style of school to competition from the entire private sector. Currently only parent or teacher groups, charities and other non-for-profit education providers are eligible.
The business group claims the move would drive up educational standards, boost innovation in the classroom and provide better value for money. Profit-making companies would be subject to the same application criteria as other groups, including proof of a ‘strong educational record’.
But a spokesman from the Department for Education insisted that government policy of only setting up free schools as charitable trusts would continue. ‘Any groups can come forward but all free schools have to be established on a non-profit-making basis. The whole point is that it’s there for public benefit not private benefit. They can be involved in it but can’t make a profit,’ he told Public Finance.
Like other schools, free schools will be able to subcontract out elements of running or managing the school to other organisations, including private companies. But the trust remains accountable for ‘the effective and proper use of public funding’, according to the DfE.
The CBI report, Fulfillingpotential: the business role in education, also calls for more businesses to be encouraged to help run ‘federations’, or chains, of schools. This would help share best practice and ‘reap the economies of scale of commissioning from a provider collectively’. Schools that are ‘coasting’ should also not be forgotten in the government’s drive to increase the number of academies, the report says.
Susan Anderson, CBI director of education and skills, said: ‘Businesses have a key role to play in raising educational outcomes, not just by offering students work experience and career support, or acting as school governors, but also by bringing their vast, largely untapped, reservoir of experience to bear in advising, managing and partnering with schools.’
But teaching unions, opposed to the government’s school reform programme anyway, condemned the CBI’s proposals.
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said there was no evidence that the moves would increase academic performance and accused the CBI of a ‘vested commercial interest’.
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, added: ‘School structure and organisation is a specialist topic for which business expertise may not be readily transferable in any mechanistic fashion. We invite the CBI to talk to schools, not talk down to them.’
The first free schools are expected to be up and running in September 2011.
