The party has strangely lost interest in an agenda that has delivered choice and higher standards
fraser nelson · 25 Ago 2023
The decline in pupil numbers need not mean a death knell for school expansion but, instead, a golden chance to rekindle the choice agenda
When Michael Gove started school reform, he spoke of a battle against “the blob,” the name given to the various forces of resistance. He had in mind Labourrun councils, trades unions and law firms who’d use legal aid to sue any new school. Gove made decent progress against enemies on the Left, but forgot his own side. The blob that seems to have won in the end is that within the Conservative Party.
Yesterday’s GCSE results showed, yet again, strong results for free schools. Dixons Trinity, Harris, Oasis, Star Academy: new school chains have emerged over the years with transformative results for the communities they serve. About 35 per cent of free school pupils score As or A*s at A-level, versus 25 per cent for non-selective state school pupils. The schools are more likely to have an “outstanding” Ofsted inspection rating – and not because they’re cherry-picking rich kids in suburbia. Their pupils are more likely to be ethnic minority, on free school meals or speak a foreign language at home.
So what are the Conservatives going to do with this success? The answer, it seems, is not much. Once, it was hoped that hundreds of these schools would open annually. This week, they announced just 15 more for this year, not much movement on the 650 already open.
After 10 successive Tory education secretaries, just 5 per cent of pupils attend free schools. The revolution that was once promised – having one in every community – didn’t quite happen. Not because the Conservatives were thwarted, but mainly because they just lost interest.
After Gove was moved from education before the 2015 general election, the free school project ran out of champions. Theresa May had a low opinion of her predecessor and gravitated back to the Tory comfort zone of grammar schools (which don’t help those who flunk the 11-plus). Her bungled election left her party paralysed before being consumed by the Brexit wars and, then, lockdown. With no one really fighting to keep school reform going, things started to slide.
Small, technical changes had a big effect. The official criteria for who could set up a school was tightened and the whole procedure became harder. It wasn’t the unions but a Tory-run Treasury which then delivered the coup de grace: cutting capital funding. Anyone who sets up a new school needs a chunk of cash to get started, and without it applicants dry up. So when the capital budget was raided to pay for day-to-day pupil funding, it meant far fewer new schools. “The Treasury tried to kill the whole programme,” said one former minister. “It was our reform that we lost to ourselves.”
The Treasury’s argument was that new schools soon won’t be needed because Britain’s low birth rate has finally translated into a decline in pupils. It expects the school-age population to fall by about 100,000 a year – and that, post-election, the mission will be one of closing schools, rather than opening new ones.
But must this be so? A recent Stanford University study shows an alternative view of the future. America is in a similar demographic slump, braced for a fall in pupil numbers. The number in traditional state schools has been falling for years.
But Charter Schools have been booming, doubling their intake since 2010. Like free schools (which they predate), they are independent and run in the state sector. While hated by the unions, they are hugely popular with lower-income Americans who can’t afford to move to a leafier area.
The result has been an improvement to American education. Being black or poor has long been a marker of a poor educational outcome: the Stanford study showed that 1,000 Charter Schools have stopped the gap from widening.
Their pupils gain, on average, the equivalent of 16 days of learning in reading and six days in maths compared with pupils in other state schools. In New York (where state schools are notoriously poor) it’s closer to 75 days. The study’s author says Charter Schools can now be declared “the only story in US education policy where we’ve been able to create a set of conditions such that schools actually do get better”.
In England, this can also be true of academy schools which have claimed independence from local authorities – but the vast majority are just rebadged comprehensives. The promised revolution in choice has not really arrived. Depressingly, more parents are refused their first choice of secondary school now than were a decade ago.
But the Conservatives can and should keep at it. The decline in pupil numbers need not mean a death knell for school expansion but, instead, a golden chance to rekindle the choice agenda.
Letting schools run at, say, 90 per cent capacity would mean both smaller class sizes and more parental choice. A decision can be taken not to block any new school if there’s demand. The American approach has been to say that parents, not bureaucrats, should decide if a new school is needed or not.
But this – an emphasis on choice, the idea that power should lie with the many and not the few – is a Conservative way of seeing things. It was, once, a Blairite view, but probably isn’t Starmerite. The Labour leader is a creature of officialdom, and bureaucrats hate opening new schools if there are places to fill in bad ones.
His approach so far has been for schools to take more instruction from Whitehall, even from him (he wants pupils to learn his “oracy” idea), rather than to entrust and empower teachers. The American Left has long fought Charter schools tooth-andnail. Starmer is more aligned with that world view.
There are hundreds of new schools, celebrating good results yesterday, that simply would not have existed without the Tories in power. There could be hundreds that could open in the next few years, under a pro-choice Tory education agenda that there is still time to rekindle. It worked once and could again – but only if the Conservatives can rediscover what they got right the first time.