Education Secretary Michael Gove has hailed the introduction of free schools as an opportunity to transform the lives of disadvantaged children and young people. He believes fervently that new state-funded independent schools will give poorer children access to the "kind of education only the rich can afford" at the same time as offering parents the holy grail that is school choice.
But his proposals to allow groups of parents, teachers and charities to set up schools in anywhere from a disused warehouse to a former hospital have alarmed many education professionals.
John Dunford, general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, believes free schools will damage other local schools.
"These schools will not be free to local taxpayers or to the education budget as a whole," he warns. "At a time when education budgets are about to be seriously cut, the priority being given to establishing these schools must be questioned."
Free schools are one of Gove's big-ticket education policies and will take priority in this autumn's spending review. The wider impact on the pupils and professionals that remain in schools under local authority control remains to be seen.
How the emergence of free schools could jeopardise the entire education system
While academies can be defended to an extent, the development of free schools risks damaging the whole education system. Aside from all the debates about special needs, admissions and exclusions, and governance, free schools present major difficulties.
Free schools will be state-funded independent schools, set up by teachers or parents. They will operate without restriction in terms of the curriculum and will be funded in the same way as other local schools, from the same overall pot. They will be able to be set up with minimum bureaucracy and with minimum planning restrictions. So, following the Swedish model, free schools might be set up in non-educational premises, such as shops and offices.
Since capital funding is almost certain to be highly restricted, free schools are likely to be set up in buildings that were not designed for education and will often be relatively small.
There will be few restrictions on the buildings and land, so free schools will be developed with a hotch-potch of facilities that may not have specialist provision for practical subjects. This will result in a constrained curriculum offer. While the rest of the education system is being encouraged to make the three specialist sciences available to all, it is impossible to teach these subjects effectively without laboratories. TV and computer simulation, or book learning, is just not the same.
Restricted curriculum
The limitations on curriculum breadth caused by the buildings will be exacerbated by the difficulty of securing specialist staff within a small team of teachers. Suppose there was a free secondary school of 200 pupils with an average year group of 40. In practice, this would need to be taught in 10 classes of 20 on average, with perhaps 15 teachers and a manager. It is difficult to see how these 15 teachers could feasibly represent all the specialisms needed for each of the year groups. And to take humanities as an example, parents are notoriously concerned when a non-specialist, however well intentioned and generally capable, is teaching their child. History taught by a geographer is just not taught as well as by a historian.
So the free secondary school is likely to have a restricted curriculum, delivered in relatively poor accommodation by non-specialists; hardly a recipe for success. Of course, there will be exceptions; if a free secondary school could be set up in decent buildings, operating at a size - perhaps 600 pupils - that enables efficiencies of scale to be made, then it may be able to overcome these inherent problems.
Free primary schools are likely to be smaller than secondary schools and do not require the same degree of specialist equipment or teaching. But they do require some and the importance of outdoor free play space cannot be over-emphasised. A free primary school of fewer than 40 children, which would only have two or three teaching staff, would pose serious challenges.
These problems of scale are already well understood in rural communities, but then there is rarely a restriction on land and the school buildings are designed for education. The extra costs of running such small schools are also well known.
Major funding elements
Understanding the impact of free schools on other schools and academies, and on the education system as a whole, requires an understanding of the way in which schools are funded. While this can be highly technical, the fundamentals are simple. Schools - and this includes academies - typically have four major elements in the funding formula: a lump sum depending on the type of school; funding per pupil; funding for deprivation (the pupil premium is not a new invention, of course); and a small school allowance for some schools.
The more schools you have, the more lump sums there will be, and the greater the proportion of the total funding available used in running individual schools. Similarly, the more small schools you have, the more money goes into small school allowances. Deprivation funding is broadly neutral between large and small schools, although larger schools are better able to deploy this funding flexibly. And 'funding following the learner' is the mantra we have all used since 1988.
Financial constraints
So the problem is that new, small, free schools will bring substantial diseconomies into the system - extra costs without benefits. This is why local authorities have closed small primary and secondary schools, mostly because there are too few pupils to run them economically and efficiently. Small new free schools will need an allocation of extra funding to make them viable - to appoint specialist staff, for example. And this extra funding can only come from other schools and academies, which will suffer a triple whammy - working in a generally less economical system overall; giving up some funding to make small new schools viable; and suffering a reduction in the number of pupils, and therefore funding, as some of them move to the free schools.
So both the new free schools and existing schools and academies will suffer severe financial constraints as the new system is set up with its inherent waste of resource through the maintenance of a structural surplus of places. That might just have been possible in a world of plenty, and year-on-year growth, although the experience of school closures suggests not. But it is certainly neither possible nor desirable at a time when every public penny has to be worked to the maximum.
The anonymous author was a long-standing senior education officer who is still in employment and wishes to remain so
FREE SCHOOLS: What they are and how they will be financed
So what exactly is a free school? Free schools are independent state schools set up by groups of parents, teachers or charities. The idea for free schools comes from a system in Sweden and the US charter school movement, both of which allow groups of parents, teachers and charities to run schools. Free schools will have the same freedoms as academies, but can be set up anywhere and in any type of building.
How will that be possible? Parents or groups who want to set up a free school will have to submit a proposal to prove there is demand in their area. They will also have to investigate possible sites for the school. The Communities Secretary is to relax planning rules so that free schools can be set up on a wide range of sites, without having to apply for permission to change the use of the building. That means the schools could be housed in residential or commercial properties, such as disused warehouses or supermarkets.
But how exactly will these free school groups get their plans off the ground? Education Secretary Michael Gove has commissioned the charity the New Schools Network to help groups across the country get the support they need to set up schools. The charity will receive funding of £500,000 from government initially to do this. All groups that wish to start schools will be expected to contact the New Schools Network for information and advice before submitting their initial proposals to the Department for Education (DfE). Initial proposals will need to include evidence of the demand for a free school in the area, such as a petition from parents. They will also have to list possible premises for the school.
What happens after that? Once the DfE has carried out preliminary checks on a proposal, the Secretary of State will conditionally agree the plans to move them onto the next stage. All groups behind aspiring free schools will be required to write a detailed business case and plan, including a statement of what the educational aims and objectives of the new school would be, details of the key people and organisations that will be running it and evidence that the school will meet required standards.
They will also have to prove that any new school would be financially viable over a minimum five-year period, as well as provide financial projections for operating the school on an ongoing basis.
And then what? The Secretary of State will have to give the business plan the green light, before signing a contract with the group to release start-up funding for the school. The free school will then have to complete the registration process to become an academy, before recruiting staff, organising CRB checks, equipping the school building, setting up systems for running the school and organising admissions for pupils.
The DfE will make sure all free schools complete the necessary legal documents relating to governance, land transfer and company registration. All being well, the first free schools are expected to be ready to open by September 2011.
But how on earth is the government going to fund all this? The government has reallocated £50m of funding from the Harnessing Technology Grant to create a Standards and Diversity Fund. This will provide capital funding to set up free schools up to 31 March 2011. Further funding for free schools will be announced in the comprehensive spending review in October. Gove has already confirmed that funding for free schools will be a "top priority" for his department.
