The new coalition government's free schools reform is one of their flagship policies. It was given top priority in the Queen's Speech and is effectively already being rolled out barely two weeks after the new government took office, through invitations to outstanding schools inviting them to apply for academy status.
The claim is that freeing up our schools by giving them significant new flexibilities and freedoms, and increasing parental choice by making it easy for parents, charities and businesses to open up new schools using state money, will drive up standards and reduce the inequality between children from poorer and more affluent backgrounds that is so pervasive in the English educational system.
These arguments are easy to put forward, but they need to be subjected to some scrutiny. The argument about choice is well-rehearsed. Yet there is little evidence from other systems that competitive markets in school places is associated with better outcomes. When we go back to basic economic theory, it’s not hard to see why. Markets work well – amongst other things – when you have lots of competing substitutable products, consumers are very well-informed about their quality, and consumers can switch quickly between them. For a ‘market’ in school places to fulfil this criterion there would need to be a huge number of excess places that would be expensive to provide – and parents would have to be prepared to switch their child’s school (perhaps more than once) in order to get them access to the best one possible. While many would not mind doing this if their child was at a terrible school, it’s hardly the optimum option.
The first argument, about flexibility and freedoms for schools, is much more appealing. To evaluate the strength of this argument we need to distinguish between two kinds of freedoms – the freedom to make decisions about what to teach, how to structure the school day for example – and financial freedoms, such as what to pay staff and what services to buy in.
Free schools will be given much more freedom on both counts. They will have more curriculum freedom, for example, and more freedom and choice about how to assess their pupils. Many people working in education policy – myself included – have long argued for these kinds of freedoms for schools. While they don’t guarantee improved standards, they do make it more likely, based on the assumption that it is heads and teachers on the frontline who are best-placed to know how to best engage and educate their children, not bureaucrats in Whitehall. All three political parties now support this view, to differing degrees. The Labour government was in the process of moving to a much more pared down national curriculum, for example. The danger is that politicians are often tempted to say what they think should be on the curriculum despite promoting the idea that schools should have more freedom in this area. Both Conservative and Labour politicians have been guilty of this in recent years, including the current schools secretary Michael Gove and minister Nick Gibb.
What marks a more radical step away from previous education reform, however, is that the coalition envisage much more financial freedom for schools. There will be less money attached to specific programmes. This is a welcome development – one of the things that characterised the last thirteen years of education reform was pot after pot of time-limited money attached to specific – and often, on an individual scale, quite effective – programmes that never quite got the chance to bed down.
Most significantly though, schools will be effectively cut free financially from local authorities. Local authorities currently act as the middleman between the Department for Education and schools. They get block grants that they distribute to schools in their area, retaining some to provide services such as education services for children with special educational needs and for children who have been excluded from school. In practice, however, the way they distribute this money is highly constrained.
Under the government’s proposals, there would be a significant number of schools operating outside local authority budgets. They would be funded directly by the Department for Education. The money that local authorities would normally retain to provide specialised services would go straight to schools instead, which schools can then use to buy in their own provision.
There are significant issues with this model. Giving schools individual budgets to buy in specialist provision – for example speech and language therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy – will only work so long as markets in these services exist. In some areas of the country such as inner city areas there are thriving markets, for example, in alternative provision provided by charities for children excluded from school. In rural areas, however, this simply doesn’t exist.
For children who have low-incidence, but high-level needs – for example, severe autism – it is difficult to see how this system could work. Local authorities have a statutory duty to plan provision for the needs of all children and young people in their local area through their central coordinating and planning function. As with all public services, there is variation in how they discharge this duty: some do it excellently, others less so. But if this duty is to be effectively eroded through the expansion of free schools operating outside this system, there will need to be a new form of coordination in place. This could come from clusters of schools cooperating and working together to jointly commission services, as has already been promoted by the previous Labour government. However, to expect more cooperation between schools at the same time as competition and increasing atomisation is explicitly encouraged through the free schools policy is a big ask of the schools system. Proponents of local authorities would argue that to do so would simply be to replace local authorities (which are at least accountable to democratically elected local councils) with another body to do the same thing. However, if a cluster of local schools was more effectively accountable to the community and parents – in other words, a more local form of accountability – it is easy to see why this might be appealing.
One thing is certain: local authorities currently provide services for some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children in society: many of those who sit at the bottom of the attainment spectrum and play a big role in our story about intractable educational inequality. The free schools reform could thus take away a significant safety net. If it is not to harm them, significant safeguards will need to be built in. The school accountability system will need to be reformed to reward a focus on the progress of all children - not just those most likely to help schools reach targets like boosting the proportion getting 5 A*- C GCSEs.
Sonia Sodha is head of the Public Finance Programme at Demos
