'Free schools' offer political rewards

Those parents, like me, eager to set up a new state school should know that there's no need to wait for a Tory government
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As the leader of a parent group in Acton trying to set up a new state school, I was delighted to read in the Guardian about how many other groups are planning to do likewise. According to the report, about 300 groups of parents and teachers are poised to take advantage of the Conservative policy to make it possible for charitable trusts to set up "free schools". This is good news because if enough of these schools spring up over the next five years it will make it difficult for a future government to dismantle them.

That's been the experience in Sweden were a similar initiative was introduced in 1992. "It had been in the manifesto since the 1970s," says Anders Hultin, who helped implement the policy. "I remember the deputy education minister saying to me, 'This is tokenistic, nothing will come of it.' Then, to our surprise, we had all these groups saying they'd like to set up schools." Seventeen years later, almost a fifth of Swedish children of secondary school age are educated in free schools.

The only discouraging thing about the report is that most of these groups believe they're going to have to wait for a change of government before they can get off the starting blocks. Not true. The Labour party is broadly in favour of the policy, too. On the website of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) it states: "The government wants to encourage parent groups who want to see improvements in local provision to come forward and set up new schools."

To date, at least two groups of parent promoters have successfully set up state secondary schools. The most famous is The Elmgreen in Lambeth, which admitted its first cohort of students in 2007, but there's another in Barnet called the Jewish Community Secondary School that's due to open next year. However, neither of these schools are "free" in the sense the Tories have in mind. They're funded and administered by their local authorities and, as such, the process of setting them up was long and arduous. I've spoken to members of both groups and the general consensus is that it can't be done in less than five years.

To speed up the process, the Conservatives want parents and teachers to minimise the involvement of their local authorities and petition the DCSF to allow them to sponsor academy schools. What many people don't seem to be aware of is that this, too, is possible under the current government. It used to be the case that academy sponsors had to come up with £2m, but schools secretary Ed Balls dropped that requirement earlier this year, opening the door to groups like mine. As far as I know, we're the only group of parent promoters applying to sponsor an academy, but there's nothing to prevent other groups coming forward.

Whether we get anywhere before the next election largely depends on the attitude of Balls. So far, he's been content to let the Tories claim credit for the "free school" policy and attacked it on the grounds that it will involve diverting money from Labour's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme which, he says, has been earmarked for the refurbishment of existing schools. But the money to set up new academies already comes out of BSF so what the Conservatives are proposing won't involve any policy change on that front. The key difference is that under the existing rules an academy can only secure a funding agreement if the sponsors can prove there's a genuine need for more school places in the relevant neighbourhood, whereas the Tories have no qualms about creating excess capacity. Not exactly clear blue water.

Given how popular the "free school" policy is already proving to be, the smart thing for Balls to do would be to take ownership of it himself, thereby denying his Tory counterpart Michael Gove an easy political win. After all, he's already changed the rules to enable groups like mine to set up "free schools". Why not broadcast this fact? That way, he would encourage the 300 parent and teacher groups to get going straight away and reap the political reward.

• Toby Young can be contacted at newfreeschool@googlemail.com

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