A lot of excitement has greeted Stephen Twigg’s statement to his local newspaper that Labour won’t shut successful free schools provided they meet three tests:
- is the school raising standards for pupils and parents?
- does it contribute to narrowing of the achievement gap between rich and poor?
- what is the wider impact of that school?
Despite this being heralded as a new departure for Labour, and indeed as a
“surrender” by one of the more excitable members of the Labour left, it is at most a change of emphasis: in all the years of debate over the Labour Party’s education policy, no one and certainly not any of our Education Secretaries or Shadow Education Secretaries has seriously suggested that a Labour government should shut popular and successful schools. If a school achieves the sort of things Labour thinks a school should achieve, then clearly we should keep it open, regardless of how it was set up. It would be dogmatic and ridiculous to do otherwise.
Twigg has since also made clear the Free Schools are not a Labour policy and that they are not an extension of Labour’s academies programme. If Labour were in office, we wouldn’t have implemented this reform in this way.
And that, ultimately, is the real problem and something those who have criticised Twigg for his statement need to come to terms with: Labour isn’t in power. There was an election, we lost: we don’t get to implement our education policy, we have to work out how we are going to live with the legacy of the other side’s.
In squaring up to that challenge and making clear how Labour will deal with the actual educational landscape we inherit rather than the fictional one we can all build in our heads, Stephen Twigg has done excellent work in preparing Labour to think sensibly about how we regain our title as the real radical reformers in British education.
John Blake
I don’t remember having any debate about Free Schools at all. I can’t find one that we have had even on your website. What’s the point of Refounding Labour and policy reviews if this is how policy is decided? What actually is the point of being a member of the Labour Party if all I’m expexected to do is just hand over my monthly direct debit and cheer enthusiastically every time we change policy.?
Frankly Stephen’s talk of tests is meaningless. Having a negative impact on local schools hasn’t threatened the existence of Grammar Schools in Bucks, Kent and elsewhere. Why will Free Schools be any different?
John’s essentially right about us inheriting free schools and what we need to do with them. It’s not about shutting popular and successful schools. It’s about taking them back under a local authority or elected school board. State-funded schools should answer to the communities they serve. At the moment, free schools are vanity projects, experiments, and they’re being pushed heavily because they will help the government to atomise educational provision, break down universality, and allow their own friends to benefit in a variety of ways.
I am happy to accept that Stephen Twigg meant that free schools couldn’t be closed or disinvented but it wasn’t portrayed in the media that way and some Labour councillors and supporters trying to oppose free schools which will damage local provision were left swinging in the wind. Did Labour teachers have to give him such a great big sloppy wet kiss on his arse for it?
I know a Labour member who is setting up and Free School because a new school is needed in an area where kids need good opportunities and they are trying to ensure it reaches Labour ends.
Surely Labour’s policy should be to support good schools that raise standards for pupils narrows the achievement gap between rich and poor and be be against bad ones. I don’t really care what kinds of schools they are, I care about what they teach, to whom and what standard. That should be our policy!
The problem with a mantra with such as “Yay to good schools and boo to bad schools!” is that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Look at this great big list of National Challenge Schools ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7444059.stm ) . Look at how many of these schools are in (Selective) Kent! 28 I think! Should we shut them down because they are ‘bad’? Then what? How can they ever ‘compete’ with the grammar schools? It’s because we are fixated by simplistic measures of school performance league tables and facile notions of competition that we have got ourselves into this mess. You might well find that ‘free’ schools create similar problems – they did in Sweden. What we need is a system of education that creates a good local school for every child. Finland is a good place to start.
This is a really reasonable article. Free schools might not be our policy, but what definitely is our policy is getting as many kids a first-rate education as possible. Saying we’d charge around shutting decent Free Schools just because they weren’t our idea is no way to endear aspirational families. I think Stephen Twigg is right to say we’ll consider education policy on the merits of outcomes, not on arbitrary ideological lines.
Is the acid test of our policies the extent to which they appeal to aspirational families?
Just as I argued on LabourList (http://www.labourlist.org/free-schools-are-reality—denounce-them-at-your-peril) it seems totally self-defeating for us to ignore the prospect of free schools succeeding. For those on the left of the party, many are clearly willing to put old ideologies before the progressive politics our party stands for. The core issue here is not whether they are compatible with our policies in the past but whether they fit our duty as a party for a fairer country; to reshape the debate on education and to drive up standards. I believe free schools can achieve that.
Alex, the parent that said that the opening of a Free School was like winning the lottery – how does that further Labour’s historic mission for a fairer society? Genuinely interested in your answer.
It’s actually more like being given the keys to your massively discounted council house….
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