I originally started researching and writing about the governments Free Schools policy following an article posted in the Spectator last weekend to coincide with the announcement of 15 Free Schools, primarily focussed on 16-19 students. As we are back in full swing at the day job and time consuming elements of my extended role are at their most extreme in August/September it meant this post did not come to fruition in the timeframe originally in mind. During this the Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) swept into the media, with school closures and various ongoing sagas still ready to come out with regards the scale of young people who are to be affected by this in the coming weeks. This caused me to take a step back and change some of the original focus of my writing, as in my research on Free Schools there are elements that I was discussing that could also tie in with the ongoing RAAC situation.

I appreciate this next sentence may annoy some people at the beginning of this about what is to come, but a disclaimer; there is nothing here which is anti-Free Schools, or anti-MAT (the latter I think have provided a great platform to push positive changes in educational approaches at scale, and empirically speaking were able to respond to the challenges of the pandemic in a much more affective way than other providers in general), the purpose for this post is to shine a light on how these things are represented, how this representation is often more based on ethos and interest, not evidence.

The “…Free School success is proven beyond doubt…” – is this true?

For those not involved within education who have stumbled here, you might be asking what ‘Free Schools’ are. Free schools are essentially newly built state funded schools that fall outside of local authority control (hence ‘free’);  they can be run by academy trusts, charities, universities, community/faith groups and businesses to provide education at a variety of different levels, from primary through to 16-19 education. This strategy of Free Schools allowed for the emergence of studio schools, technical schools and performing arts schools – institutions that in theory allow for higher level of focus on skills beyond the national curriculum. A novel idea was the original primary focus was for teachers, communities of individuals to open schools to meet area demands – I remember in the closing days of a PGCE in a pub myself and a couple of friends joked about attempting to ‘set one up’ there as we still hadn’t secured employment, and there was a section of rather nice bookshelves and a fire in the corner. Whilst always a possibility, over time this element of Free Schools has faded away, instead the process becoming a vessel primarily for Multi Academy Trusts to open new ‘academy’ schools, which are not converter establishments. So essentially, Free Schools = Academies, but are newly opened schools which have never been under local authority control. It is also important again to emphasise ‘Free’ does not mean free in a fiscal sense. Originally a Michael Gove policy, the predicted cost to the government per school was originally forecast to be £3mil, however for the schools launched between 2010 and 2017 the average cost was £8.6mil per school, a total of £3.6billion throughout that period (revealed-the-hidden-cost-of-free-schools).

So is the Free School success proven beyond doubt? A lot of the Spectator article seems to hinge on the 35% v 22% comparison for A*/A grades at A Level, and various unsubstantiated opinion following this. At its heart, that 35% represents a meagre 23 centres – with free schools accounting for only 0.54% of all A Level exam entries. It benefits to get this figure out there though (without this context of course), the government themselves have pushed this in their announcement of the 15 new free schools mentioned in the article, as 9 of these 15 schools are going to be explicitly 16-19 education providers (with more servicing up to that age as well). This drums up the demand and justification for these developments at a glance. However, these developments will come at significant costs – where large scales of the Further Education and post-16 sector have been discussing gross underfunding for the last decade – the fact the proposed developments also include University Technical Colleges whilst various UTC’s have been allowed to fail in recent years has led to ‘frustration’ in the sector as well. It may be cynical to suggest the timing of this coming just before a significant story relating to school issues and potential governmental costs incurring breaks to the public, especially when factoring that the article was penned by a director of a highly influential think tank who have been a predominant backer of Free Schools and large scale Multi Academy Trusts in particular. It does give pause to thought seeing a head mistress from a Leicestershire school on the news this morning saying that the costs incurred relating to RAAC thus far have been dictated by the government as needing to come from existing budget (remember this is the safety of young people and public sector staff), whilst Star Academies are the named provider of three of the announced free schools and will be in receipt of the large scale DfE financial support in setting these up, whilst simultaneously sitting with approximately £16million in cash available, from their most recent financial reports.

Before I go any further, I am also not trying to diminish the great work that these centres do, the hard work of teachers and students undertake in order to achieve their grades – nor do I know anything about any of the individual schools or trusts I will be discussing to pass an particular judgement. I mentioned Star above purely as they are at the top of the announced lists of schools, their accounts were easy to find – and judging through the years the investment in capital resources and their institutions has been substantial – so zero judgement on them. I’m simply trying to illustrate priorities at a macro level.

Continuing from this, some of the individual centres mentioned in the article have a truly astounding results profile, they appear to develop a very strong community spirit and I cannot and would not wish to argue that they are places that are life changing for the young people who visit there. But there is a bigger picture to this, we get a small number of examples, quite often the same examples reeled out time and time again in these situations and articles, and sometimes information is misrepresented or omitted. In this article in particular there is arguably a lack of substance behind the opinions presented (this singular statistic , and a real misrepresentation of scale of current implementation for this policy and even the ability for this to be developed and maintained at a larger level. I am not disputing the 35% vs 22% figure, but if this significant investment leads to a 13-percentage point rise over local authority controlled centres at A Level, for 0.54% of a national academic cohort – is this truly value for the money being spent?

Looking for in depth. In 2017 the National Audit Office tallied that £6.7billion was required to bring existing schools up to standard. That is a large sum of money for the public purse, no argument. However, simultaneously the DfE was facing a £2.5billion bill to simply purchase land for Free Schools! Following on from the aforementioned £3.6billion costs between 2010-2017, this £2.5billion was part of a projected costs of £9.7billion (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39043733 ) on free schools up to 2021. Again, we have priorities being decided. Yes there was a need for school places in certain areas and at certain tiers of the schooling system. But diversion of funding to certain policy decision, to certain individuals, to certain institutions were made – ideological decisions of one thing, not another – to steal from Ofsted, “Intent”. In light of the RAAC scandal reaching front page news this week, it is impossible to say that the situations in schools were not known about (even with benefit of the doubt that absolute specifics were not) – priorities and interests were simply elsewhere – arguably, to attempt to make Free Schools a success.

Now back to the point of the results, Free Schools are generally not A Level providers, but let’s stick with A Levels a little bit longer (I mean, the vast majority of the new centres will be offering A Levels). Whilst for compulsory education Free Schools cannot be selective, A Levels are not compulsory education. Whilst there is the requirement for youngsters to remain in education, training or employment until the age of 18 – there are no demands or expectations that this has to be A Levels. This allows all institutions to be in theory, as selective as they want, or can afford.

Name dropped in the article is the Michaela School in Wembley. Their criteria for entry for studying A Levels are an average GCSE profile of a grade 7, and a grade 8 in the subject you wish to study (or a similar subject) for something such as Politics, which may not have been studied before. Now this is one school, and I appreciate local authority controlled (and other) institutions also apply entry criteria for subjects – for example, where I work (which for clarity is also not a local authority controlled secondary school) has entry criteria to study Politics as well. It’s five GCSE grade 4’s and above, including English and Maths – this entry criteria led to 1 in 3 of entries in Politics this summer being ‘high grades’. Now Michaela is one (albeit highly publicised) school, which does get exceptional results. I am not passing judgement on the institution at all, however, anyone has to acknowledge that if those are the requirements for A Level study, then of course the results are generally to have the better chance of being exceptional. They were 1 of the 23 Free Schools who offered A Levels – try and find me the equivalent proportion of local authority controlled schools who implement this same level of entry criteria and I can’t help but feel you will come up short.

So what happens if we step back a bit further? Primary education is touted as one of the major successes of Free Schools over the last decade. As child numbers increased in specific areas, it was seen as a way of creating more school places in areas of need without having the re-open schools closed by the previous Labour government due to previous dwindling numbers. qIn 2021 the National Foundation for Educational Research produced a report (Free Schools: The Formative First Ten Years – An Analysis of the Impact of Free Schools Since 2010 (nfer.ac.uk)) about the impact of free schools. What they found was that students in Free Schools outperformed their peers in Key Stage 1 in reading, writing, mathematics and Science – however were then 7% less likely to reach the expected standard by the end of Key Stage 2. At Key Stage 4 (GCSE’s) the differences found in the report were minor positives for Free Schools, approximately 1/10th of a grade, as well as generally stronger Progress 8 scores that local authority counterparts – and independent bodies such as the Education Policy Institute confirm that in general progress of learners in secondary Free Schools are higher than in other school types (this will be discussed later as well). Now this data relates to 2018/19, so what is the current picture?

The results relating to the 2023 GCSE sittings are presented below.

	Grades 7/8/9	Grades 4+	Number of Entries
Academies	21.1%	69.4%	2,785,600
Local Authority	19.1%	68.1%	1,385,580
Free Schools	19.6%	67.0%	54,665

Whilst the article makes emphasis on A Levels, when looking at ‘general’ school leaver qualifications, GCSE’s the variations in performance are minimal, with the students in Free Schools being the least likely to reach the ‘accepted’ societal ‘pass grade’ of a 4. However, what is most noticeable again is scale. There are 25 times more entries in local authority schools than Free Schools, even after two decades of ‘forced’ and incentivised academisations leading to the proportion of Local Authority secondary and comprehensive schools falling dramatically. Another interesting statistic, that I admit I have been unable to research more in depth, you will see the figure often banded around that 80% of all local authority secondary schools have converted to academy status – however looking at the figures on entry the ratio is not 4:1 (80%:20%) between academies and local authority maintained schools. The ratio is instead approximated 2:1 or 67%:33% between academies and local authority schools. On the surface this suggests one of two things;

1) Local Authority schools are responsible for the education of a disproportionate number of young people – therefore are doing a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the education sector.

2) As the figures are based on ‘entries’ and not ‘individuals’, if local authority maintained schools do not have a disproportionate number of young people, they must instead be responsible for providing a broader academic offer to young people – providing greater opportunities to achieve in a more diverse range of disciplines. Interestingly one of the major selling points of the ‘opportunities’ for young people/parents of the academisation/free school model.

Progress specific information is not available, so I note we may not be comparing like for like, however realistically, when Free Schools can’t be ‘selective’ (A Levels) are they outperforming the ‘equivalents’, or specifically the ire of the article, local authority maintained schools, after all?

Do they fulfil a wider service?

As mentioned earlier one of the key drives for Free Schools was to quickly and ‘cheaply’ open schools to meet demand for numbers in key areas, such as the capital where more than 30% of Free Schools are situated. This has been most successful in the primary sector, as research from the Education Policy Institute in 2017 found as Free Schools had a significant influence on providing places in communities that needed them (https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Free_schools_EPI_Report_.pdf). Countering this, at secondary level Free Schools have not been effective in doing the same, in fact it is expansion of existing school capacity which has primarily fulfilled the increased demand for school places. Worse than this, in some areas the opening of Free Schools has created surplus places for students, the decision on Free Schools driven not necessarily by requirement but due to the availability of facilities. This can be seen in the East of England, the only other area besides London where the proportion of free schools at least matches the proportion of all schools. This could be attributed to areas such as Norfolk and Sussex, where the modification of their education system in the mid-2000s left a number of easily adaptable former ‘middle school’ premises available, despite the demand for school places not necessarily being there. Where these places are is also interesting, as the 2019 followup report from the EPI (https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Free-schools-in-England-2019_EPI.pdf) indicates that secondary places in-particular are almost 4-times more likely to be located in areas of low demand than high demand. 

As well as meeting demand for school places, one of the other selling points of Free Schools has been the ability to push learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often inflammatory language is used when discussing this, talking of ‘sinkhole’ schools and Free Schools rising to the challenge where local authorities have failed learners. In the Spectator article it takes less than 50 words to reference students from disadvantaged backgrounds, shortly followed by a comment about the ‘soft bigotry’ of low expectations. This idea of ‘low expectations’ is something I’ve seen thrown around for years and often stems from an over simplified analysis of teacher pushback following the removal of accounting for socio-economic disadvantage within the Ofsted framework and grading judgements. This has been manipulated that these teachers were happy to expect less from these students as individuals, when generally this had nothing to do with the curriculum or focus on the individual learners at all, but more pushback on the idea that “Ignoring disadvantage and inequality does not simply make it disappear and not be an issue” in a geographical area or institution.

Interestingly, I feel the Spectator article itself features a significant piece of ‘soft bigotry’ in the form of the following quote, “The intake of free schools is more challenging: they’re more likely to have pupils on free school meals or who speak a foreign language at home.”. This quote makes a sweeping judgement that multi-lingual students are by default ‘more challenging’. Whilst this empirically can be the case at some stages of schooling, overall the picture and research does not show this at all, nor do the the actual results of school leavers. Below shows side by side comparison of native English speakers and their English as an Additional Language counterparts for performance at GCSE, taken from the 2019 performance data for Key Stage 4 school leavers – https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/863815/2019_KS4_revised_text.pdf

Free Schools are more likely to be in areas of disadvantage, particularly in urban settings, and on average the percentage of students on the roll at Free Schools that are classified as disadvantaged is higher than that of the national average of students who are disadvantaged. However, based on EPI reports what is often found is that Free Schools are not actually representative of the local community in which they inhabit. On average the areas where the free schools are located have a higher proportion of students who would be classified as disadvantaged than the Free School in the region would generally have on roll. Furthermore, the broad geographical region with the highest level of deprivation and free school meals entitlement is the North East of England, where over 30% of students are classified as disadvantaged across the region as a whole, with pockets within Teesside, Tyneside and County Durham significantly higher – stretching well beyond urban areas. This is also the area that has the lowest frequency of Free Schools (and significant projects that have failed), and for long periods has had the weakest performance rates and a hub for the much politicised as underperforming ‘white working class boys’. If one of the driving agendas of Free Schools was to address inequality, provide greater choice and to drive standards – why are they missing from the areas that potentially need that the most, but also, when they are in those areas, don’t always satisfy the direct needs of the community? 

Another key proposed factor of Free Schools was to provide innovation to the teaching profession. Lots of articles and opinions relating to Free Schools that look to counter the associated costs or appropriate implementation of other aspects of the policy point to this as the key positive takeaway of its implementation. However, research from the Sutton Trust and the National Foundation for Educational Research (https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/2734/free.pdf) found that Free Schools with a profound ethos or concept of innovation only made up around a third of the total Free Schools by 2018 (primarily the Primary sector) – this number falling as more MAT backed institutions began to open over time – as of 2018 MAT backed Free Schools accounted for 60% of the sector – the percentage likely to have increased since then.

The role of Multi Academy Trusts – now and the future

Last year the government put forward a white paper proposing that large scale Multi Academy Trusts were to be the future of education – and the aim would be for ‘all’ schools to be part of one by 2030. Essentially forcing even successful single school academies and innovative Free Schools to join quite often a ‘branded conglomerate’. Whilst the legislation has been temporarily shelved, in part due to there being more Education Secretaries than school terms since it was proposed, it is still a long-term vision of the incumbent government. In the Spectator article the only non-MAT Free School spoke of in glowing terms is ‘Michaela’, which seems to somewhat contradict the call to arms for the ‘glory days’ of Free Schools, instead it suggests more of a support the broader MAT white paper and innovative and bespoke community Free Schools.

The white paper was widely criticised in the education sector, the policy even received blowback from the New Schools Network (https://schoolsweek.co.uk/free-school-charity-all-mat-sector-would-mean-death-of-innovation/), a former Think Tank launched by campaign advisor for Boris Johnson, Rachel Wolf, and has had Toby Young and Mark Lehain as directors over the years. The NSN spent significant time as a governmentally funded entity as an official support organisation of the Free Schools project, therefore the charity coming out against Government decision seems controversial, although not so much when realising they had lost this contract not too long before that. However, still fairly controversial given long-term alignment and how the white paper was itself advised on by Lehain in his role with the DfE. 

For those not involved in education Toby Young is somewhat of a household name around politics, Lehain is not, but he is now “Head of Education” at the same highly influential think tank where the author of the article is a director (https://schoolsweek.co.uk/ex-dfe-adviser-lehain-becomes-think-tank-head-of-education/). A think tank which is currently pushing for great MAT influence and for the formation of an independently controlled but governmentally funded ‘match making service’ for multi-academy trust sponsors and schools (https://schoolsweek.co.uk/the-schools-that-fought-off-academy-orders/) – at which point the emphasis on MAT based Free Schools in the article makes a bit more sense.

It can be potentially argued that there is a need for such a match-making service in part due to the high backlog and timeframe in matching up schools who are to go into ‘forced academisation’ with appropriate sponsor trusts who have the resources and the want to bring the school into its fold – to the point that numerous schools receive a returning Ofsted visit and a Good or Outstanding rating on re-inspection, negating the need for forced academisation to begin with, before the process completes. 

Quite often MAT’s lead to reduced parental involvement and direct accountability. This can be in part due to the centralised standards process, resources or curriculum constructed that can be dictated among schools in a trust, to the fact that schools can be moved around different trusts with no say from the local community stakeholders involved (https://neu.org.uk/advice/your-rights-work/academisation/neu-case-against-academisation). This is the exact opposite selling point of the Free School system originally, the sell of greater parental and community involvement.

We have had 13 years of increased marketisation of the mainstream education sector, both through academisation and Free Schools projects. We have now reached the embedded stage of a market, where those who have entered are wanting ‘pull the ladder up’ from those following. They want to maintain their control and their market share, which is why we will likely see continued lobbying for an increased reliance on large scale MATs.

The downside of marketisation is that at scale it benefits the appearance of success in the sector of education, over actual success. Statistically there are some outstanding trusts, and some that perform significantly beneath expected standards – just like all schools regardless of format – https://schoolsweek.co.uk/school-league-tables-2019-how-did-your-academy-trust-perform/. Since performance tables existed there has always been an incentive for schools to ‘game’ the system. Frustratingly if benefits institutions and policy makers to ‘play along’ with this, as it presents policy decisions in a positive light.

Like the 2019 report from the EPI mentions, Free Schools are likely to be in areas of social deprivation, however the intake is likely to not be representative of the area in which they are located – underrepresenting disadvantaged students in their cohorts. Similarly they are more likely to be located in areas and communities that whilst financially disadvantaged are not traditionally ‘educationally disadvantaged’ – in fact they are likely to be in areas where academic achievement is higher than average. 

This is ‘gaming the system’ – it is illusion of success/addressing the issue, but they are only targeting specific projects that have a high likelihood of success and avoiding the communities where success is less likely or more difficult to guarantee. This is a criticism of the recent Free School announcement, that significant numbers of the 15 will be selective/high level entry 16-19 providers, and will simply pull the most able students from the other institutions in the areas, giving the illusion of success for those institutions and will have serious knock on effects for recruitment and achievement in currently existing providers – the new centres will in theory look even better by comparison – like it Arsenal signed Man City’s entire starting 11, the Arsenal squad improves from the direct quality added to the team, but also becomes comparatively much stronger than Man City who have lost their high profile players.

This is also an issue with MATs. It can actually be a factor for the delay of sponsored academisation. MATs potentially uninterested in taking on specific cases where success may be difficult to guarantee. Certain MATs are also the driving force between the controversial and illegal process of ‘off-rolling’, where schools coerce parents into removing learners from school or themselves remove students from the roll without a formal exclusion (https://www.educare.co.uk/news/off-rolling-and-school-attendance).

Between 2016/17 almost 20,000 year 10 pupils were removed from school rolls, almost half did not reappear at other schools for year 11 and GCSE’s. Whilst all types of schools were involved, the largest proportion left academies and of those who appeared on different rolls elsewhere, the largest proportion was in local authority maintained schools – again with potential to affect performance tables and centre results. Research indicates that disadvantaged students are those who make up a significant proportion of these off rolled learner (https://www.theweek.co.uk/100831/off-rolling-how-schools-make-pupils-disappear%3famp) – potentially suggesting that the results of the policy decisions which were shared as intending to benefit these learners is working to the detriment of certain individuals in those categories.

For all the discussion of choice, there are distinct threats that choice will fade away from parents with another potential costly policy drive that would fundamentally just be about hierarchical restructuring and legalities.

Nothing is free, but there is ALWAYS money

It’s clear to see that this post wasn’t originally about the RAAC scandal, nor is the final version really. However, it is also not really about Free Schools either. I’d like to think that this is a post about decisions and then how things are presented to us in the public. Like a 30-year piece of aerated concrete, illusions projected regarding policy decisions for the entirety of my time involved in education are starting to collapse. It’s clear to see that there was, and there is, ALWAYS money. Regardless of what we are told. There ALWAYS is. This goes far beyond education as well – the entirety of public sector expenditure. There ALWAYS is the money. When you are told there is not, it simply means those making the policy decisions (whatever ‘side’) do not want to spend it on ‘that’ or on ‘you’. 

In education we have seen staff get worse off, funding for pupils remain stagnant, individual school budgets being stretched and buildings and facilities allowed to fall into disrepair. However, simultaneously significant sums of money have been passed around the sector at trust and ‘capital’ level – and we have those with influence and the ability to write in mainstream newspapers clamouring for more of this. For example for a programme that doesn’t need to exist, for an issue doesn’t need to exist, due to the requirement for schools to convert to something that doesn’t need to exist, but needs to have a sponsor, which also doesn’t need to exist. Every single one of these things (that don’t technically need to exist) cost (or would cost) a large amount of public money to implement – and the money has been there every step of the way.

Now think, realistically what would the public care more about? The upkeep and maintenance of school buildings to legitimately keep young people safe, or the fact that “Little Piddlesbury Primary” is being re-brokered to the 50 school strong “Smoking Duck Academy Trust”, who will receive a six figure sum to take over as the sponsor, potentially only 2 years after it joined a previous trust which has subsequently folded, replicated to a factor of a thousand, under the promise and prayer that this will raise standards.

As someone who was briefly involved in the financial services I often feel the entire thing is just a parlour game of smoke and mirrors, a “Plato’s Cave” of a functioning society – where jobs exist, decisions are made and money is shuffled around such that it generates ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ but does any of it actually matter or ‘do’ anything that actually matters or is ‘real’. The whole ethos of subsequent governments feels like that when it comes to education. They’ve spent years wasting on the ’shadows’, on decisions that fundamentally relate to hierarchical restructuring, whilst the ‘real’ and ‘tangible’ is going to crumble down around us.

When we are told there is no money to address this, or that significant cuts are to be made in order to facilitate the work needed – remember there was and always will be the money there to pursue ideological policies.