The latest research on Free Schools doesn’t, on the face of it, look so good.
The movement’s purpose was ostensibly to pioneer parent-led school start-ups and to create innovative new forms of schooling. An ulterior motive was to put another nail in the coffin of local government’s control of education.
The latest research from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) on the movement suggests neither of the ostensible purposes are playing out as planned. The number of primary Free School launches which had parent involvement, not necessarily leadership, has dropped from a high point of 40 per cent of secondary schools to less than 20 per cent in the schools started since 2015.
Curiously, the figure is much lower for primary schools, which might have been easier to manage. It has dropped from 32 per cent to just 4 per cent! It was always predicted that parents would be marginalised in the complex process, and so they have been. NFER doesn’t comment on the class composition of the parents involved but it’s a dead cert that the critics were right here too…overwhelmingly middle class.
The majority of Free Schools have been established by Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) seeking access to funds in an otherwise bleak funding environment, or to ensure the feeder chain into their secondaries is of high enough quality, or indeed to occasionally meet an unmet need for places. However, some, around a third of all Free Schools, have been innovative in their provision.
NFER is rather scathing about this proportion, and this is understandable given that it was one of the main drivers of the policy. But in a school system which has largely had innovation driven out of it by Ofsted and increasingly onerous National Curriculum requirements, these schools, and this partial realisation of the policy might be worth hanging onto.