Who could possibly object to a free school? How could you not admire parents who, seizing on the government’s enlightened attempts to free education from the dead hand of local authorities, put in long hours planning, applying and fund-raising, just to ensure that their children get a decent education. Wouldn’t you do the same? Well you might, if you didn’t give a stuff about children in general, just your own and your friends’. Free schools are, I fear, little more than the latest mechanism to ensure that privilege is maintained and social mobility is restricted even further.
An academy is an existing school opting out of local authority, or even private, control and into government funding. A free school is a school set up from scratch, usually by parents or a sectarian group. Once free schools are set up, they are the same as academies, in that they are directly funded by the government and are free of local authority interference – or guidance – or protection, depending on your basic views on the effectiveness of local authorities. They are not free from the protection – guidance – interference of government; neither are they free from OFSTED.
The most publicised free school to date is the West London Free School founded by writer Toby Young. In the Independent, journalist Fiona Millar referred to it sarcastically as the ‘comprehensive-grammar, secular-faith, Latin-speaking, liberal-education school’. Now, you might well feel sympathy for a group of desperate parents faced with seeing their children forced into a local under-performing sink comprehensive, but most secondary schools around the West London school are rated good or outstanding by OFSTED. There is also the local phenomenon that in west London, with good public transport and a lot of geographically small local authorities, many children living around the new free school have easy access to excellent secondary schools in other authorities – schools like Holland Park or Chiswick. Of course, free schools have to have a fair selection procedure. They can’t simply pick and choose, but I really don’t need to analyse their special needs register to be absolutely certain that West London Free School will be, shall we say, a bit light on S.E.N. children, children with long-term emotional and behavioural problems and children with deeply inadequate or feckless parents.
After its controversial opening this September, the West London school is back in the news for its first exclusion. It was reported in the Guardian on 22nd October that one of its pupils, 11-year-old Kai Frizzle, had ‘been sent home from school for having too short hair’. The article was illustrated with a photo of young Kai with his short, but to my eyes neat and inoffensive, haircut. I’m sure it’s irrelevant that Kai looks Afro-Caribbean, but the Afro-Caribbean lads in my classes would certainly have agreed that, for them, long hair was a nightmare to keep tidy and clean. Toby Young said, ‘The board of governors had discussed the case on Wednesday and concluded that the rule on length was reasonable.’ The legality of such an exclusion is itself pretty questionable. Following the DES official advice, it’s hard to see how a haircut could ‘seriously harm the education or welfare of the pupil or others in the school’. So the reason must be that Kai’s tonsorial neatness must be a ‘serious breach of the school’s behaviour policy’. I’m still trying to work out, even if Kai chose his own hairstyle, how a haircut constitutes behaviour.
There are new proposals for free schools in the pipeline – though not many. The one I like best is from evangelical Christians who want to open an academy in Newark, near Nottingham, with creationism at the heart of its ethos and which will teach, as part of its science curriculum, that evolution is only a theory. Since its publication as a theory 152 years ago, quite a lot of scientifically valid proofs of evolution have been published; the theory that the world and all its creatures were created by God has not, as far as I know, changed at all in the same time period. Education has evolved a lot, so it does seem a bit bizarre that a school jumping onto the ‘survival of the fittest’ bandwagon of free schools, should deny evolution.
But I’m not entirely opposed to the idea of free schools. In fact, looking at my double garage and fairly big garden, I reckon I could set one up chez Gaines. I’ve already got a collection of Victorian textbooks, which should be ideal for a ‘back to real education’ approach. I’ve even got a few Latin primers. I reckon that with about 20 kids, at around £10,000 a pupil, me and Mrs G would only have to run it for a year or two before we disappear to a villa in Spain. I’ve even done quite a bit of research into the application process, so if you are thinking of a free school, why not use the new consultancy I have set up? Just contact honest.keith.gaines@fleecethesuckers.com and we will guide you through the whole process. We will be fast, efficient, proactive and totally professional. The one thing we won’t be, of course, is free.