Free Schools

Matthew Offord Excerpts

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on a good presentation of a fairly solid case. I want to make a few remarks and then to bring a particularly graphic case to the Minister’s attention.

I am unenthusiastic about school structure changes in general, but I do not have the same hang-ups about free schools as I do about academies. Academies seem to involve alienating an asset without the consent of the community or the parental body. However, it is fair to acknowledge that free schools also have critics—the hon. Gentleman is obviously among them—and Ministers normally have answers to some of the criticisms they raise.

The big issue that the hon. Gentleman raised, which I will dwell on ultimately, is governance, but there are other criticisms. There is the effect on school places—the fact that there can be over-supply when a free school is created in an area with surplus places. However, I think the ministerial team take that into account, or they say they do, when they give schools the go-ahead.

There is the fact that a lot of free schools are denominational, but, hey, a lot of state schools are also denominational, and we have a quid pro quo in connection with that. There is the claim that free schools involve selection via the back door, but it is not over-selection. The hon. Gentleman also put the case that the funding is somehow rigged, but I am fairly confident that the Minister will have a good answer on that score as well.

There is the fundamental point that free schools can sometimes end up not teaching the shared values or the world view of the funder or the Government. That can be an issue—we think of the Al-Madinah school, where the issue was values, or creationist schools, where the issue is the world view. I am more concerned about free schools that do not teach the shared values of our society. I am not so much concerned with the content of what individual schools teach, where that is at variance from the norm, as long as the teaching itself is proper teaching and not simply indoctrination.

I have to be relatively relaxed about non-qualified teacher status, because I did 30 years’ teaching, and I was not trained to teach at any point. I got into a secondary modern school, and I taught for two years. When I had survived for two years, I got a nice letter from the Department of Education and Science telling me that I was a qualified teacher. During my teaching career, I taught five different subjects, and only in the last 10 years was the subject I taught the same as the subject of my degree. I have to say that my teaching career was not dotted with failure throughout.

[Dr Offord]

The hon. Gentleman illustrates that people do not have to have a teaching degree to make a valuable contribution to education. Indeed, the head teacher of the shadow education spokesman, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) did not have any teaching qualifications, and I do not think that did him any harm either.

[John Pugh]

I must correct the hon. Gentleman; I have a master’s in education and a diploma somewhere, but they have no relevance to my teaching capacities. I never found that they were terribly instructive.

On the positive side, the argument for free schools is that they are set up by parental demand. That partly explains the good results. The biggest factor correlating with educational success is parental support. Enthusiastic parents produce enthusiastic kids, who get good results. We should not be surprised if free schools achieve marginal educational improvements. The key selling point for the Government has always been that free schools are innovative and diverse, in a way that state schools seem not to be expected to be.

I wonder whether, twenty years on, a free school will have settled down to a clear recipe that it understands, and will be producing clear results that it understands. Even if that does not happen, why should not the innovation and flexibility that free schools are given be on the menu for all schools? If they are good things, they should be given to schools regardless of their structure or character—to LEA schools as well as free schools.

The LEA’s role is extraordinarily helpful, and has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson). It does not spend most of its time interfering with schools and telling them exactly how and what to teach; we can safely allow the Secretary of State and Ofsted to do that. By and large, its job is to advise, support and co-ordinate, and to step in when difficulties arise. That brings me to my main point.

By serendipity—it is a fine thing—I was contacted a few days ago, not knowing that the hon. Member for Gateshead would suggest this debate in such a timely way, by someone who had a problem with a free school. I shall not name the school, except to say that it is not in my constituency; it is a lot nearer to where we are today than to my constituency. However, the problem that is described tells us something about what is wrong with governance in free schools, and about what may be going wrong with the experiment. It results from some straightforward playground bullying, and parents getting involved, as they often do, in defence of their child—both the bully and the one being bullied. The issue spiralled alarmingly, because after a while parents became aggressive towards one another.

My e-mail came from a mother, who sent her child to a free school because she believed that such a school was a wholly good idea—she had no problem with that—and because she had had difficulty getting her child into other schools in the area:

“It was reported to us that at the Parents Forum Meeting…parents not present when the assault took place were openly discussing the incident”—

between two parents and two children—

“whilst the representatives of the school sat and said nothing. The Parents Forum Meeting then descended into chaos. A small number of aggressive parents hijacked the meeting and began shouting and yelling…Eventually the Chairman asked one of the most aggressive and disruptive parents to leave”

but that parent refused. The e-mail says:

“The Chairman, Head Teacher and Deputy Head, were speechless in their shock”

and did nothing to try to change events. Parents

“apparently left the meeting in distress, whilst others felt for their safety. The meeting was…abandoned. The Chairman has also since told me that the only reason he was chairing the meeting…was because no one else would do it, that he’d had to cancel a dental appointment to be able to attend and that after what happened he really wished he’d gone to the dentist.”

Subsequently, the parent who contacted me spoke to the deputy head.

“He had no words. He was completely speechless and could not give me any guidance or assurance that the school had the matter under control.”

My correspondent tells me

“We feel that this situation should never have been allowed to get to this point and believe it has, simply because some parents have been allowed to feel for far too long, that they are in charge and that the school answers to them. This I feel is partly because Free Schools appear to request parental involvement in the way the school is guided, and the schools appear not to be adequately equipped to deal with situations when they become difficult, and have”—

this is a key point—

“no higher level of management to turn to for support, other than perhaps their own boards of trustees who, in this case, appear not to be professionally experienced in the education sector.”

The e-mail continues:

“I am unsure whether or not the school were aware of their legal footing, but I do know that a number of parents, including myself, sent them links and documents to various websites including the Department of Education guidelines with regards to bullying outside of school, and how to manage anti social parents behaviour. They seemed uninterested in this and told me that they had consulted a lawyer and there was nothing more they could do with regards the aggressive and intimidating behaviour of parents.

What struck me as most concerning was that the management of the school appeared to have no idea as to their legal rights, or what they could or could not do to address the situation. The Head Teacher appeared to need to consult the Chairman of the school trust for guidance and in turn the chairman had to seek independent legal advice on what action he could tell the Head Teacher to take.”

The writer—someone who chose to send her child to a free school—concludes:

“We feel that our children have become part of a wider social experiment; new schools are clearly needed but why largely rely on people with little or no experience of running schools to set them up and manage them? We now believe this is a dangerous experiment...Free schools are a tempting option when so many state schools are either over subscribed or failing to offer a decent level of education. It is apparent that no guidance is being given by the State, nor is anyone monitoring what is going on”.