Free Schools

Debate between Ian Mearns and Matthew Offord

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has secured this debate. In the past few weeks the tone used in respect of free schools has changed. I welcome the new approach by the Opposition Front Bench. However, I plead with the hon. Gentleman not to accept that all free schools have poor governance and poor arrangements in place. For example, in my constituency, Etz Chaim school has high standards, good governance and good people running it. I ask the hon. Gentleman not to characterise all schools and categorise them as he has done.

[Ian Mearns]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He has given a good example— an anecdote—of a school in his vicinity, but there are 174 such schools and as yet the mechanisms do not exist to ensure that every free school is of the high quality that he mentioned.