While media attention has focused on the Government’s ill-conceived plans to reform the National Health Service, which are stuck in abeyance while the Liberal Democrats decide whether to veto the bill and David Cameron weighs up whether to ditch the scheme and his Health Secretary, another dangerous attempt to privatise public service provision remains. This is the so-called free schools programme.
This is the big idea of Education Secretary Michael Gove, who confidently predicted that 3,000 free schools would be set up by 2015, thereby expanding overall capacity by 222,000 places.
Free schools can be set up by parents, teachers or charities. Of the 323 proposals received, only 41 have been approved to move to either the business case and plan stage or beyond, and only one has entered into a funding agreement with the Department of Education.
Although many of the applicants aim to open in time for the next school year, the reality is that only a handful will have opened by September 2013. That is not exactly a glittering endorsement of a flagship Tory policy, especially when you consider that in Sweden, the model on which Gove based his policy, more than 700 free schools were set up in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Tories have denied that free schools are merely a ruse to allow a widening of the private sector in education, pointing to the results of the policy in Sweden. So what has been the experience of free schools in Sweden and what lessons can we learn?
The state monopoly on Swedish education was broken in 1988 when the Social Democrat government decentralised regulatory powers over schools to the municipalities and the schools themselves. Then a voucher system, introduced in 1992, allowed privately-operated schools to compete for students with state schools on an equal financial basis and gave parents the right to choose the children’s school. By 2008, free schools accounted for 10 per cent of school places.
Swedish free schools can be set up by anyone – parents, teachers, charities, or by businesses on a for-profit basis. In practice, two large chains have come to dominate them: the Internationella Engelska Skolan and Kunskapsskolan. According to academic research, five out of every six free schools made a profit in excess of half a billion kronor (£4040 million). Unsurprisingly, this has caused public anger in Sweden since the schools are funded and underwritten by the taxpayer. It rather gives the lie to them being “free” schools.
On the important question of pupil achievement, research from the Swedish experience points to very clear conclusions. No academic study has found a consistently positive impact of free schools on pupil results. Most show, unsurprisingly, that children from well-educated families gain the most. Even then, the improvements are minor, while the effect on children from families with a low level of education is non-existent. Indeed, free school students are no more likely to go on to university. However, they do cause a slight increase in social inequality between children from immigrant and poorer families and those from wealthier backgrounds
So if the Swedish free schools project has been expensive, delivering only a very small increase in educational attainment for the well-to-do while increasing social inequality, what is this going to mean in Britain where educational and class divisions remain deeply entrenched? The fact that, despite all the fanfare, only 41 proposed schools have been approved indicates there is little appetite amongst parents and teachers to set up free schools. Meanwhile, the ones that have been approved have tended to be set up by wealthy and well-educated parents.
The truth which the Tories dare not speak is that, for free schools to take off in this country, they will have to allow businesses to set them up for a profit.
The right-wing Adam Smith Institute has at least been honest enough to admit this. As it pointed out in a paper published in April urging the Government to lift its ban on businesses setting up free schools: “While the enthusiasm of not-for-profit innovators was important at the beginning, that idealism and drive petered out over time, giving way to more sustainable commercial interests.”
The Adam Smith Institute added that: “Today 64 per cent of all Swedish free schools are run by joint-stock companies.”
The pressure from within the Conservative Party to allow this, especially as the current initiative is increasingly seen as a vacuous flop, may well become overwhelming.
In a country such as Sweden, which has a long tradition of educational equality of opportunity and developed the first and most radical comprehensive school system in Europe, society can cope better with the slight increase of social inequality brought about free schools. Even now, Swedish culture is marked by its discouragement of private providers in health and education.
In Britain, where millions have private health insurance and fee-paying education is not frowned upon, even by many Labour supporters, further marketisation in the school system will inevitably lead to a larger educational divide.
With no free schools open for business yet, Britain’s free schools experiment will almost certainly be a very small one in the immediate future. But Sweden’s example highlights the weaknesses as well as the glaring paradox that lies at the heart of the free schools concept – they only work when the profit motive takes over.
