Free Schools

Debate between Ian Mearns and David Simpson

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Good morning, Mr Gray. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

What a shame that the Minister for Schools cannot be with us. I am glad that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson) is here—it is good to see him—but it is a shame that the Minister for Schools could not attend, because this is clearly his area of responsibility.

Why would a relatively new Member of Parliament from a place like Gateshead be interested in the oversight of free schools? We do not have a free school in Gateshead. I have been interested in the concept of free schools since I read an article in The Sunday Times, on 4 October 2009—before I was elected—in which the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who was then shadow Secretary of State, said that Tory

“policies are aimed at the Gateshead mum…a no-nonsense working class woman passionate about her kids. Passionate enough to set up a massive comprehensive with 2,500 feral children on a depressed sink estate?”

Having represented Gateshead since 2010, and having been a member of the council there since 1983—with 30 years of elected public service under my belt in Gateshead—I was interested in those comments and wondered whether that was the Gateshead that Michael Gove really knew or was really thinking about—but back to the main item.

The oversight of free schools, which are a new type of school under this Government, will not have escaped the attention of hon. and right hon. Members in the past few weeks and months. Indeed, free schools were described by Channel 4 only last night as the Government’s “flagship” education policy. Although the quality of education that our young people receive is the most important factor in any discussion about education policy, we cannot disregard the cost implications for the public purse, particularly in the case of an ideologically driven policy.

Before mentioning oversight, it is important to give some context to this debate. In that regard, we should consider resources, including the funding allocations up to the next financial year. The Government have allocated a staggering £1.7 billion of capital funding to free schools, which equates to a third of the total budget for creating new school places in England as a whole over the spending review period. We should bear in mind the fact that, at the beginning of the autumn term, there were 174 free schools, compared with about 24,000 non-free schools. The words “disproportionate” and “partial” do not seem adequate to describe this investment in so few schools. However, I am more concerned that all this money is being ploughed into free schools, which are an as yet unproven, ideologically driven model of education, with serious implications for our young people.

The inspection and oversight of free schools, or rather the lack of it, has exposed the worrying shortfalls of this Government’s free schools policy.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining this debate. Just to clarify, does he believe that local authorities should have oversight or should a separate body be set up to oversee the free schools?

[Ian Mearns]

That question needs to be decided. At the moment, local authorities do not have oversight and it is clear—I will come on to this—that the other organisations given the duty of oversight do not yet have the resources to do it effectively.

It is particularly worrying that the Government, in the shape of the Education Funding Agency and Ofsted, seem to find out about failures of governance only when whistleblowers inside the schools feel it necessary to act. Free schools have a great deal of freedom in how to constitute and run their own governing bodies, and there is little evidence that either the EFA or Ofsted is able to identify and act on emerging problems.

In spite of Her Majesty’s chief inspector’s criticism of local authorities for not picking up problems in academies, one basic tenet of the free school movement is that they are totally detached from the local authority. Schools such as the Al-Madinah free school in Derby, Kings science school in Bradford, and Barnfield Federation in Luton—we are not entirely sure how many others there might be, and it seems that the Department for Education and Ofsted are not sure either—show that the wheels are well and truly coming off the free-school wagon and that free schools are vulnerable to a catalogue of problems.

Chief among those problems is the lack of good governance. That failure of governance is compounded by weaknesses in inspection and oversight of free schools. The three schools that I mentioned are examples of that. I should like to make it clear that, when we talk about schools, we are talking about children who, as the Secretary of State reminds us, get only one chance at a good education.