“The system for funding new schools and new places in existing schools is increasingly incoherent and too often poor value for money. The Department for Education is spending well over the odds in its bid to create 500 more free schools while other schools are in poor condition.”
The report last week from the House of Common’s Committee of Public Accounts is incredibly damning and I hope has caused some considerable reflection in the corridors of Sanctuary Buildings, the DfE’s HQ.
At a time when school funding is at crisis point and when a further 420,000 new school places are needed by 2021, the money being thrown at the free school project is obscene.
And this report offers more evidence of the distinct lack of strategy or planning behind where free schools are being opened. MPs on the committee have questioned whether the DfE has “a grip” on its obligation to provide enough school places where they are needed.
There is a divide growing in education caused by the free school experiment. Existing schools look on jealously as money is thrown at free schools – with ministers intent on opening 500 more by 2020, bringing the total number to more than 880.
The DfE has spent £863 million on 175 sites for free schools (2011 to 2016); 24 of these sites cost more than £10 million each and four cost more than £30 million. It expects to spend a further £2.5 billion on land alone from 2016 to 2022.
And, incredibly, the DfE estimates that only 57,500 of the 113,500 new free school places created between 2015 and 2021 will create spare capacity in the system. Indeed, the report states: “There is no automatic link between a new school being granted permission to open and the need for a new school in an area.”
Meanwhile, the state schools estate is in dire need of repair and rebuild and school budgets are facing huge real-terms cuts. Yes, the DfE has allocated £4.5 billion to create new places in existing schools and to improve school buildings, but this is evidently not enough. It faces “significant challenges” in this regard, the MPs conclude.
The farcical situation gets more surreal when one considers that local authorities have the duty to provide sufficient school places in their areas, but at the same time have no direct control over free school or academy places or their admissions policies.
The report is right to highlight this “tension” between existing schools and free schools. Some free schools are doing an excellent job and providing much-needed capacity in the system. Some are struggling and creating spare capacity where it is not needed. The opening of these schools seems to be based more on a DfE obsessed with ideology and hitting targets rather than good planning and real need.
As I have said time and again – it is not the type of school that leads to outstanding results. Whether academy, free, comprehensive, voluntary-aided, religious ethos, trust or whatever else, I can find you examples of outstanding, good and poor schools. Yet governments still obsess about changing the structure of the school system. We know why – because they can’t mess with pedagogy (they wouldn’t know where to begin). Anyway, shiny new schools make for better photo-ops.
It is time to stop. A school, is a school, is a school. It is the quality of teaching, the quality of leadership, and the proper funding and resourcing that make the difference. It’s not complicated.
The committee’s MPs are not convinced that the free school plan represents “the best use of the limited funds available” and I agree. The DfE’s free school experiment must end and ministers must focus instead on properly funding all schools – not just the chosen few.
- Pete Henshaw is the editor of SecEd and Headteacher Update has been writing about education for more than 11 years. You can read his previous editorials for SecEd at http://bit.ly/2oODCuK. Email editor@sec-ed.co.uk and www.twitter.com/pwhenshaw