Free Schools

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of free schools.

It gives me great pleasure to open this debate. I want to start by quoting Kavit, a year 11 pupil at Michaela Community School in Wembley—a free school that I co-founded in 2011, opened in 2014 and chaired until 2017:

“I have been at Michaela, our unique and inspiring free school for five years. I was in the first cohort of pupils and remember when there were just 120 of us here. Now we have 600 pupils and in 2 years, we will have over 800.

I have been given so many opportunities to become a better person. Michaela is like nowhere else. Firstly, there is no bullying in the school. Our high standards of behaviour have led to a friendly environment where younger pupils can go to older pupils for help. We all feel safe and cared for by our teachers at school.

Our teachers are extremely hard working. They stay for hours after school helping pupils who may be unsure on a topic and create new booklets to use in lessons.

I transformed from primary to secondary school. My parents saw me reading bigger books, revising more, helping more at home and I was a much nicer person overall. Michaela inspired me to reach for the top. My aim is to graduate from Cambridge University with a Maths degree.

The advice my teachers have given me has shaped me into the person I am: someone who perseveres and who is stoical.

I am really excited about starting at Michaela’s sixth form next year and I am crossing my fingers that I get into Cambridge. It would be a dream come true.”

That illustrates the power of a great education and how dedicated teaching changes lives and empowers a new generation, regardless of their background.

What is special about Kavit and Michaela is that the inventive teaching methods pioneered at the school in terms of curriculum, behaviour and leadership, thanks to the autonomy inherent in these state-funded comprehensive schools, would simply not have been possible without the free schools policy introduced in 2010. Set up by teachers—in this case led by our formidable headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh—with parents and other community leaders, free schools are from the community and for the community. I was inspired to get involved because I grew up in Wembley in the 1980s, and my parents found it difficult to find a good local state school for me. Had Michaela been around then, there is no doubt that my parents would have been first in line to sign me up.

Let me tell hon. Members about my home town of Wembley, in the London Borough of Brent. The general demographic of our secondary school intakes consists of approximately 50% on pupil premium, 10% eligible for special educational needs support and over 50% with English as a second language. Some of our intakes have consisted of a third of pupils who read below their chronological age and two thirds with maths below the national expectation. Many of our children have been under child protection, in care or excluded from previous schools.

Thanks to the robust knowledge-based curriculum pioneered by the teachers at Michaela, our pupils have been known to make two years of progress in reading in the space of one year or double the normal progress in maths. Some have even made up to five years of reading progress in a single academic year, and others have even come off their special education needs support. That is one reason why Michaela was rated outstanding by Ofsted in 2017. Michaela is one example of how free schools are changing the landscape of education in England for the better. The children of Wembley are lucky to have Michaela in their community, and I am pleased that we now have permission, announced last week, to open a second school in Stevenage.

I could wax lyrical for hours about Michaela, and I know the Minister is a fan and a doughty supporter of our school, but I want to talk more about how free schools overall are faring and about how I would like our next Prime Minister to commit to expanding their reach so that it is not just the lucky few in disparate parts of the country who have access to them. I want a country where every town has a free school, every parent has real school choice and every child has the chance to thrive. While the free schools policy has been an undeniable success since its inception in 2010, nines year later it is necessary to breathe new momentum into the programme, which is in danger of stalling. We need to take free schools from success to scale.

In 2010, the English education system was hampered by poor results and languishing in the international league tables. Twenty per cent. of our 16-year-olds were unable to functionally read or do basic maths. Under the Conservatives, thankfully, those stories are no longer the norm. Led by David Cameron, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and the Minister, free schools were a fundamental part of our charge to drive up standards, unlock innovation and improve discipline and leadership.

In the years following their introduction, free schools have been an unqualified success. The latest figures reveal that a free school is 50% more likely to be rated outstanding when compared with other types of state school. They are the most popular type of school among parents, attracting more first preferences than any other. Although free schools represent no more than 2% of all schools in England, four of the top 10 schools in the country are free schools, when measured by Progress 8 scores. Disadvantaged children do better at free schools than at other types of state school. Free schools are more likely to be located in deprived areas and can be vehicles to address behavioural problems that cause youth violence, thanks to the freedoms allowed to teaching staff. There is also emerging evidence of the competitive benefit that free schools generate, raising the quality of neighbouring schools through healthy challenge.

Despite those successes, the pace at which new free schools are entering the education system has slowed to a crawl. In a paper that I have authored, which is due to be published soon, I found that two thirds of parents do not live within reasonable commuting distance of a free school, because of a lack of geographic distribution. I also found that, at the current rate, it would be another 12 years before free schools made up just 10% of all English schools—two decades after the programme began. The first four years of the programme saw significantly higher numbers opening than in the most recent four years.

The 2017 Conservative manifesto aimed to increase the expansion of free schools through the building of at least 100 new free schools a year, but that has not been achieved. There used to be multiple application waves per year; now, there are longer gaps between the waves, and the number of approvals is falling. I was delighted to see the announcement of 22 new free schools last week, but that number is a reduction compared with waves 11 and 12. We risk losing the opportunities presented by free schools if that trend continues.

Today, I am making the case for scaling up free schools. There are several practical ways in which the slowdown could and should be reversed. First, we need to revisit the original purpose of free schools and broaden the approval criteria by which they are chosen. Free schools should be able to open wherever there is parental demand. Basing the criteria exclusively around a shortfall in school places severely restricts the opportunities for underperforming areas to have access to a free school. If we really value school choice, we need to genuinely provide it.

Secondly, a future Government should place innovation squarely at the centre of their school roll-out strategy, ensuring the approval of free schools that demonstrate an innovative and potentially useful approach, thereby reducing the cost of education and bringing about a net benefit to the overall education system.

Thirdly, to overcome some of the teething problems faced by newly established free schools and to disperse their location, we could develop a more proactive outreach programme, identifying teams of teachers, community leaders, business people and parents in areas that do not have a free school, and build their capacity to successfully apply for and open one. It is a bewildering process and requires much support. The New Schools Network has been excellent in that regard, providing support to promoter groups, but it should be tasked more explicitly and supported more widely with the talent-spotting resources needed to get a free school application team ready.

Fourthly, I need to mention the disappointing performance of studio schools and university technical colleges, two strands of the free school programme that offer more technical or vocational qualifications, which have suffered a disproportionate number of closures. We need to overhaul the fortunes of those institutions. Far from abandoning them, we need to make changes to ensure that the public do not lose faith in this essential kind of education. By changing the recruitment age to 16 so it is in line with the rest of the system, and allowing selection to be used in those schools, we can ensure that they operate on a level playing field.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we need compelling ideas about how to deliver more free schools affordably. The Conservatives have done remarkable work to deliver new free schools at a cost a third lower than under the Labour Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme, but the issue of capital investment needs to be addressed, hopefully at the next spending review. If we are serious about ensuring that the free school programme remains dynamic, self-improving and growth-oriented, funding solutions have to be offered.

To that end, I am confident that we can drive down cost through neighbourhood plans, specifically by funding neighbourhood plans that propose free schools, allowing for cheaper land. Being more ambitious, we could oversee the creation of a new kind of social impact bond to allow ordinary citizens to support the capital cost of a new school while offering them a small return.

Finally, we could incentivise free schools to use their funding more smartly. For example, they might receive more funding if they provided teacher training or developed more efficient teaching methods. We could also explore how to allow free schools more choice over how they use their allocated funding. We could, for example, allow a school to choose to take lower ongoing per capita funding—90% or 95% of the funding it would otherwise receive during its first two decades—and plough the savings back into its ongoing capital costs.

Those ideas will be fleshed out in my paper, which I am sure you are eagerly awaiting, Ms Buck. The next Prime Minister and Education Secretary have a golden opportunity to—[Interruption.] I have no doubt that Ms Buck will be waiting with bated breath for my report. I will send her a personalised copy. The next Prime Minister and Education Secretary have a golden opportunity to galvanise free schools and, in so doing, to galvanise the education of our young people. We are at a turning point, and I hope they seize the initiative to create the legacy of a school system that provides all our children with life-changing opportunities. For children like Kavit in Wembley with dreams and aspirations, we need to take free schools from success to scale.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) on securing this important debate, and I look forward to reading her report.

It is fair to say that I wholeheartedly disagree with just about everything the hon. Lady said. Her comments about the concept of people getting a financial return from investing in local education establishments make me fearful. Education should not be considered as a business. The money-making, business and enterprise element of even the academies programme has served only to put additional pressure on schools and families. Parents have to finance so many of their children’s additional activities in the education environment. That simply did not happen to the same degree prior to the academisation programme.

I am delighted that Kavit, whom the hon. Lady mentioned, has had such an enriching educational experience, but I deeply believe that Kavit’s experience should be everyone’s experience, and that the responsibility for education lies not with a few well-meaning local residents or capable parents but with the state. It is our responsibility. We in this place should take responsibility for ensuring the very highest standards in our state education system. For that and many other reasons, which I will come to, I cannot understand the enthusiasm for the free schools programme. Some £15,000 more per primary school pupil and nearly £20,000 more per secondary school pupil goes into free schools compared with those in the state system. That is a ridiculous amount of money.

The hon. Lady talked about “undeniable success”. Sir Peter Lampl, who founded the Sutton Trust, said:

“Free schools were supposed to bring new and innovative providers into the education sector, to drive up standards and improve school choice. But as our research shows, very few are fulfilling that original purpose.”

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I will not, because the hon. Lady had a good 20 minutes to set out her case. I am sure she will cover these things extensively in her report or in summing up at the end of the debate.

Cancelled schemes were given £8.7 million of funding by the Department for Education. That money has now been written off. It could have been used to help struggling state schools, or even to reward schools in the state system that are succeeding and excelling and that deserve to expand, rather than being funnelled into these local community projects run by well-meaning individuals. The idea that improved financial self-management will in any way resolve those problems is for the birds.

In Great Grimsby, we have been fully academised at secondary school level for about five years. Even in that academised system, there are concerns about the level of exclusions, temporary and permanent. Some schools—if they are in the wrong area—feel they are a dumping ground for other schools that cannot cope with the diverse needs of their student body. We have also seen an increase in provision through pupil referral units.

I went recently to Phoenix House pupil referral unit in my constituency. I saw young people who would have struggled in mainstream education—whether a free school, an academy trust or the comprehensive system—but who are now in an environment that works well for them. Where they might previously not have gone on to sit their GCSEs, they are now sitting them and engaging with their school community. They are forming friendships and respecting their local community. That school is going round begging for and borrowing facilities. It has a fantastic workshop where the kids can work on a car chassis, build it up from scratch and take it apart again. The school has to go to local scrapyards and car dealers to beg for things for that facility, yet we are wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on free schools that often do not deliver for their pupils.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I wish to speak about Europa School UK in Culham in my constituency, but this is not an attempt to get one over on the Minister—quite the opposite. The Minister has been incredibly helpful with that school, and his recent letter to it was a model of assistance that I am told helped to make a significant impact on the heads of other national delegations—it does have the word “Europe” in the title, so I thank him for that.

I disagree with what the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) has just said—I suspect this will go backwards and forwards across the Chamber. Europa School UK was founded as a free school because local people wanted it, not because the Government or any other institution wanted it. It could not be provided for by the local authority because of the way that it teaches the children who attend—I will say something about that in a moment. It also could not be provided for because it teaches the European baccalaureate, rather than any other baccalaureate or GCSEs and A-levels. It now has permission to continue teaching the European baccalaureate until 2021, subject to the European Commission, which effectively owns the copyright. That gives an enormous advantage to children who started when they were five with the expectation of taking the European baccalaureate, and who will now work through the school until 2021.

The school is also a good example of how petitions can work. I presented a petition that had been signed by parents and friends of the school to Parliament, and it had a big effect. Perhaps a message can go out from this debate that parliamentary petitions—as opposed to the e-petitions that we debate in Westminster Hall on Mondays—are not a waste of time, because that petition put the issues raised firmly on the table at the Department for Education, and helped to crystallise them.

Under the terms of the free school, parents have agreed to the provision of a certain type of education, which I am about to describe. The importance of this school began in 2011, when I started getting people together to get permission for the free school to go ahead. At its core was a proposal to do something that has never been offered before in the UK or, incidentally, in the European Union school system. The proposal was to offer a complete, thoroughgoing commitment to full bilingual education from reception until finishing school. Pupils would not simply learn another language; they would learn through that language, which is an important distinction. They would learn the linguistic rhythm of a language and have truly deep language learning, not just acquire a second language overlaid on the first.

My hon. Friend’s references to Europa School UK remind me of Northampton International Academy, which as a fairly new free school attempts to achieve that ethos. He referred to the ability to drive excellence through parental choice, and Northampton School for Boys has just been granted permission to go for free school status, which comes off the back of being a school that local parents recognise as a provider of excellence. Does my hon. Friend agree that this programme provides an opportunity for that parental view to be broadened and spread across local communities?

I agree with my hon. Friend, who has hit on the key word that describes the whole programme—choice. It is about parental choice. What I have described has worked well for my school and I hope it works well for his.

There is not much more I can add. The Europa School UK is a model school that everyone is welcome to visit to see how the teaching is done. Of course, they will have to speak Italian, German and Spanish to understand the courses being delivered, but I am sure that will not cause any problems for hon. Members in this multilingual Chamber.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) on securing the debate and on her excellent job application. When the future Prime Minister is appointed, I am sure she will be given serious consideration after such a loyal speech.

I will devote my contribution to the urgent need for a new secondary school in Radcliffe in my constituency. Radcliffe is an old industrial town that was on the frontline of the industrial revolution. When the paper mills shut down in the 1990s, not only did people lose their jobs, but the town lost its sense of identity. That was made worse by the loss of its secondary school and a sense that it was failing to get a fair deal from the council in Bury or the Government in Westminster. If we are to truly give Radcliffe families hope for a bright future, it is essential that they get the school they deserve and were promised.

First, I agree with much of what my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) said about the Government’s ideological preference for free schools, which is predicated on a myth that keeps being repeated—that schools are subject to interference from local councils. That has not been the case for decades; in the real world, headteachers and governors run schools.

For a long time, the support provided by an excellent local education authority in Bury added value to school leadership and made a key contribution to raising standards. In recent years, the withering on the vine of the active LEA, especially the loss of expert advisers due to cuts, has contributed to previously excellent schools ending up in special measures or requiring improvement. I do not claim that all local education authorities were adding value to schools, but those that were should have been invested in, not effectively dismantled.

The fragmentation of the school system has led to a dearth of accountability, as my hon. Friend said, and has made no discernible difference to raising standards. Those who claim that new Labour is somehow to blame because it introduced academies are guilty of rewriting history. We created academies in communities where, despite extra funding and changes in leadership, long-term underperformance had blighted young people’s life chances. Our passion was to break the shameful and enduring link between social class and educational attainment that continues to blight the country’s success. I believe that breaking that link is the Government’s objective too, but forcing academisation on all schools and insisting that all new schools are free schools will not necessarily achieve that.

Despite those misgivings, I make no apologies for working with the council and the Government to develop a proposal for a free school for Radcliffe. Government policy means that we have a stark choice: a free school or no school. In those circumstances, I will work night and day to secure a secondary school through the free school programme.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) on the comprehensive way in which she introduced the debate. Although I do not necessarily agree with my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), she presented the arguments against free schools skilfully. My hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) made a good point about the Europa School. Free schools present an opportunity to vary the educational system and encourage different sorts of school. I sent all my children to the French Lycée, which is a state school, and I have never regretted that.

I want to talk about one community that wants to open free schools. The Minister will not be surprised by what I am about to go on about. In 2017, the Conservative party made a solemn manifesto commitment to lift the faith cap on free schools. Manifesto commitments are supposed to be very important. For instance, nobody has ever dared to break our commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on international aid, and the same applies to pensioner benefits. However, there was one manifesto commitment that we broke: the commitment to end the 50% faith cap.

The Minister knows—I hope he will respond to this—that the cap uniquely disadvantages the Catholic community. There are 2,142 Catholic schools in England, covering every level of education. They make up 10% of the national total of state-funded schools. Everybody accepts that they are the most diverse schools, that they are the most willing to provide for all educational standards, and that they never impose academic selection. Despite all that, the 50% faith cap has, up to now, prevented the opening of a single new free school. Indeed, there cannot be any Catholic free schools because the 50% cap policy would come into effect only if the school was popular with pupils from other faiths and none. That means that the policy would only target popular Catholic schools that already had diverse school communities, while having no impact on schools that were either not over-subscribed or only attracted pupils from one, monocultural, community.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on making an excellent case and highlighting that this policy unnecessarily disadvantages Catholics. It is completely unnecessary for the Government not to have stuck to their manifesto pledge. I hope that the Minister will give some explanation for that in his speech.

I hope he will, because this is an important point. Catholic schools have traditionally opened as voluntary-aided schools. VA schools are state schools where 10% of the capital costs are found by the faith group. In addition, Catholic schools’ buildings and land are owned by the Catholic Church. The Church provides those premises at no charge to the state, and that arrangement saves the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds a year. Until recently, the onus for local authorities to prioritise new academies and free schools—this is where I agree with the hon. Member for Great Grimsby—meant that it was much harder to open new voluntary aided schools.

Now, that manifesto commitment was broken. Why was it broken? Of course, it has nothing to do with Catholic schools. The Government know perfectly well that we have the most diverse schools in the country. The Government are not at all worried about Catholic schools. In last night’s televised leadership debate, there was a question about Islamophobia—something that we all oppose—but frankly, the Government are phobic towards the opening of new Muslim faith schools. That is what it is all about. It is never announced, never admitted. The Government are worried about 100% Muslim faith schools. Personally, I believe that if Muslims want to have faith schools, they should be allowed to have faith schools, and if that is the reason why the Government are preventing the creation of new Catholic schools—which are the most diverse schools—they should openly admit it. Of course, they cannot admit it because it would be embarrassing.

Here we have a Government, breaking a solemn manifesto commitment and preventing the opening of new Catholic schools—the most diverse schools in the country. The ban is not only wrong but completely ineffective, because very few non-Muslims apply to Muslim schools, so most of those schools are in fact 100% Muslim—I am not complaining about that—so the faith cap does not even come into effect. The faith cap only prevents the opening of Catholic free schools. It is unsustainable, wrong and should be dropped.

I call Mike Kane.

I am recovering from that speech.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) on securing the debate. I cannot say that I agreed with much of her speech, but she has a passionate commitment to education, even though we may view it differently. I thank all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. It is the birthday of my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn)—can we all wish her a happy birthday? She summed up how all our schools, not just free schools, are underfunded and are having to beg scrapyards for resources; that will live long in the memory.

In this Chamber yesterday we debated whether migration should be in the history curriculum. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) was sitting in exactly the same place when I left yesterday, so he must have been working there overnight. He speaks regularly in Westminster Hall about his passion for the Europa School. It is just nice to see a Conservative being nice to fellow Europeans, in particular, once in a while, and I say well done to him, flippantly.

The hon. Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis) speaks passionately about his constituency and the need for a school in Radcliffe. As my wife was born in Radcliffe, I am sure it will be the subject of pillow talk later.

The right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) has shown passionate commitment to the treatment of Catholic schools. I declare an interest as the convenor of the Catholic Legislators Network in Parliament. A manifesto commitment was broken, and the Church is finding it extraordinarily difficult in bidding rounds to build the schools that it needs under the voluntary-aided system—a system that we happen to support. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will make progress with his campaign, because it is important.