We reject the government’s use of aggressive, free market competition in schools

This week I received a letter from a disgruntled parent, Ms. Emily Leppenwell. Her children used to attend the Discovery Free School in Crawley – a primary school that opened in the initial wave of David Cameron and Michael Gove’s flagship programme in 2011. However, Ms. Leppenwell’s children have recently been forced to enrol at a different primary school.

But whilst many schools across the country get ready to break up for the Easter holidays, Discovery Free School will be shutting its doors for good. There are around 70 other families who will also have been affected and the closure will cost the taxpayer around £2m in waste.

And yet the true cost of failure only becomes apparent when you consider the impact from the perspective of parent and pupil. As Ms. Leppenwall writes:  “Having been a free school parent from the policy’s inception, I can categorically say that the notion of a ‘free school’ is the definition of ‘playing politics’ if ever there was one. Unfortunately it has been at the expense of my children’s education.

“From that decision [to open the school] onwards, a couple with no formal teaching qualifications, or experience in running a school were given a budget of £500,000 to play school with. Gove obviously dropped the ball on that one because their lack of experience and ineptitude was palpable from the beginning, and left largely unmonitored it was inevitable that a storm would brew.

She concludes: “No free school is safe. I expect to see many more in the coming years fail spectacularly and close, failing the children they were set up to serve. And when they do fail they pose a logistical re-schooling nightmare. Not to mention the years of wasted of public money.”

Now we in the Labour Party can understand how all this stress and disruption might have a detrimental impact upon a child’s education. But there is little in any of it that should trouble advocates of the Free Schools programme. Indeed, they should positively welcome such news, for it is precisely such Schumpeterian ‘fly or fail’ creative destruction that is its intellectual justification.

Make no mistake: this is a free market approach red in tooth and claw and the true believer maintains that just as businesses are subject to the law of the jungle in the private sphere, so should schools be in the public.

Writing in reply to a recent article of mine, Fraser Nelson the editor of the Spectator wrote that “if you set up 300 new businesses, you’d expect at least 30 to hit trouble”. Yet 10% of the overall schools budget equates to around £5.5bn! So if this system were writ large, as its proponents surely desire, that would mean enormous write-downs upon taxpayer-funded failure.

The Labour Party simply cannot see how we can afford such a liability on an untested and, let’s be frank, ideological strategy of school improvement when it is explicitly predicated on that kind of waste. Especially when we face such a tough public finance settlement.

We believe in autonomy – that is why we will extend the freedoms enjoyed by academies to all schools.

We believe in innovation – that is why our parent-led academy programme will ally the social entrepreneurship of parents, teachers and educationalists who want to set up new schools, to the local need for places (as well as insisting that all teachers in the classroom are qualified).

And we believe in competition between schools too – the competition of esteem that is a natural human impulse and may propel Mo Farah to victory in the London Marathon next week.

But it requires a deeply cynical view of human nature to argue that athletes in the London Marathon, or for that matter the Olympian feats we saw in 2012, are motivated by maximising their competitive market value. And it is that type of aggressive, free market competition that we reject as being necessary to raise standards in our schools.

Outstanding leadership, better quality teaching, networks of collaboration and partnership such as our successful London Challenge programme – this is how we raise performance in a way that is a far more effective way of deploying scarce resources and avoids the chaos we will see in Crawley tomorrow.

Moreover, if we look at the Swedish ‘for-profit’ model of schooling so beloved of free marketeer educationalists, we see evidence of a truly staggering slide in standards. Truly this a system that fully embodies a ‘fly or fail’ competitive culture – as parents of the 10,000 pupils at the private equity owned JB Education found to their cost last year, when the chain went bust. Yet in the latest batch of results from the OECD’s PISA survey, no other nation recorded as big a drop from their 2009 score in reading or maths. And only Malaysia’s catastrophic performance in science stopped Sweden from taking a most unwanted clean sweep.

Taking the long view hardly helps. In 2003 Sweden was ranked 17th in the mathematics global league table. Now it is ranked 38th. In reading it was ranked 8th. Now it is ranked 36th. In science it was ranked 15th. Now it is ranked 38th. Meanwhile, evidence published last year by Skolverket, the Swedish National Education Agency, shows that inequality is increasing too.

Remember it is this for-profit model that David Cameron and Michael Gove aspire, however incrementally, to bring into this country.

In 2008, the Education Secretary told the Daily Mail “We have seen the future in Sweden and it works. After 15 years, 900 schools have been created and standards have been driven up. It if can work there it can work here”.

But it has not worked there. And it is not working here. They should stop driving parents like Ms. Eppenwell to distraction and instead focus on the things that do make a difference to our children’s education: encouraging school to school collaboration at a local level, empowering outstanding leadership, and, most important of all, raising the status, standing and standard of teaching.

If Labour win next year’s general election, that is exactly what we will do.