Free schools: why the fight goes on

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/13/free-schools-why-fight-goes-on

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Fresh from the National Audit Office, the first results are in this week from the free school project. Costing £6.6m, the schools are, on average, twice as expensive as the Department for Education (DfE) estimated they would be. However, thinktanks, including the Policy Exchange, point out that they are cheaper than comparable builds under Labour's flagship Building Schools for the Future, so represent value for money.

One day, though, some geek somewhere will calculate how much the scheme cost in man-hours of the people who oppose these schools. They opposed them from the beginning, on principle, on technicalities, on practical, ethical, moral and – in two remarkable cases – medical grounds. Once in a blue moon, they win. (Snaresbrook primary in east London recently fought a slightly different campaign, against forced academisation, and were successful. "Looks like all the hard work paid off," said one campaigner, in a wry way, privately admitting that he had no idea what had decided the outcome.) Mostly, they lose, and they rarely know why. Then yesterday, another development. The DfE announced that Discovery New School, a primary free school in Crawley, West Sussex, was to close and have its funding terminated, making it the first casualty of the free schools programme.

In September last year, a Steiner school opened in Frome; it was followed a year on by another in Exeter; a third will open in Bristol next year. At the Frome site, many complaints were lodged – about traffic and whether new school places were needed, or if it was an appropriate use of public funds – but there was a piquant topnote about Rudolph Steiner himself, the originator of this educational model, who devised it in Germany just after the first world war. A local resident, John Boxall, said, mildly, of the educational model, that it "comes out of a whole series of ideas that ultimately become the Nazi party. There was no evidence to suggest that Steiner would have supported the Nazis ... it was a messy period and a lot of people were in the same mess."

I've never heard a more polite objection to a belief system that appears to be founded on racial purity. Andy Lewis, on his blog, Quackometer, publishes Steiner's hierarchy of value, and notes: "Nearer the bottom of the spiritual hierarchy we can find animals such as fish and reptiles. Those animals with good karma will progress to become apes, Indians and finally Aryans." The schools themselves claim that the founding philosophy plays no part in their teaching (I know people who send their kids to Steiner schools; I'm sure the Nazi heritage isn't the draw). The curious thing is that anybody would spend public money on it, especially when the Steiner method doesn't believe in reading until the age of seven, which will play merry hell with their EYFS scores. Frome's Steiner school also faced opposition from the local NHS trusts, on the basis that they didn't believe in vaccination. This – being such an unusual position among reasonable adults – would likely attract non-vaccinating parents from far and wide.

This may have been the stiffest and most varied opposition faced by a school that went on to open – but it's impossible to establish, since nobody audits the naysayers. The DfE has published impact assessments on all the free schools that opened in 2012, but it's impossible to tell what the adjudication process is. One teacher's remark – "I think Steiner education offers the best student-focused environment where the pressure of external exams and the like are forgone in favour of real teaching and learning" – is set against another message. "They are anti-intellectual, anti-science and provide the wrong message to young people …" But who decided that "real teaching and learning" was the case, and not "anti-intellectualism"? And on what grounds?

The divisions within the no-camp buffeted its momentum, which is a common feature, most marked in the opposition to the Al-Madinah school in Derby. This now-notorious school opened in September 2012; this year, the most damning Ofsted assessment ever seen in the public domain featured, among other things, the demand that they cease, with immediate effect, "any practices and procedures that have as their reason, cause or effect that women and girls are treated less favourably than men and boys."

This week, inspectors went back to the school; they found that no significant improvements had been made, but the students are now "safe". So that's something.

The opposition to this school at its incipience came from two distinct groups – local secularists, and local Muslims complaining that the school wasn't Muslim enough: "It will teach a secularised form of Islam, stripped of all rules and values, and reduced to a crude universal ethos and a few meaningless rituals," said Kamran Raja, a spokesperson for those opponents at the time.

It appears that the dichotomy of these voices was enough to persuade the DfE that Al-Madinah would provide a moderate and balanced education. In fact, as Stephen Evans, campaigns manager for the National Secular Society describes, their objections pre-existed the discovery of how girls would be treated in the school, and how poor the education was. "Even though on paper it's only 50% one faith, in practice particularly minority faith schools tend to be 90 or 100% the one faith, and obviously that often also means ethnicity." Apart from the social divisiveness brought about by educational segregation, there's a fundamental principle at stake. "We'd like all publicly funded schools to be equally welcoming to all pupils regardless of religion or belief. All schools funded by the taxpayer should be open to all children."

Scarlett Harris is part of the Our Community, Our Schools campaign in Walthamstow in north-east London, where the Muslim Tauheedul chain (recently in the news for requiring pupils to wear hijabs inside and outside school) has been green-lit for a Leadership Academy for Girls. She describes how the voice of secularism has been eroded: "In a meeting with the sponsors of the free school at the local mosque, we were told that they had done their best to consult all faith groups – when we asked if they'd consulted parents who don't belong to a local church or mosque, they were completely baffled. It hadn't even occurred to them that the 'community' is wider than just the local religious community."

Returning to Al-Madinah, the DfE believed the Muslim opposition to the school to be associated with Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation dedicated to re-establishing caliphate – that is, bringing the Muslim world under Sharia law. Its opinion on western democracy is divided, but broadly negative. Since 2010, the DfE has had a Due Diligence and Counter Extremism Division "to ensure that children and young people are safeguarded from extremist views". So I asked the process by which the Hizb ut-Tahrir influence had been established – thinking it may have been investigated by this division. The DfE press officer would not confirm the Hizb ut-Tahrir link, even though it was in their own impact assessment. In a conversation of Orwellian weirdness, she said, "Who told you anything about Hizb ut-Tahrir?"

"The British Humanist Association."

"When did we say that? Do they have it in writing?"

"I don't know. But they're a reputable organisation."

"So is the Department for Education!"

"I know you are. Can't you just tell me if it's true?"

"I wouldn't make it the main point of your piece."

"Don't worry about my piece. Just tell me if it's true." No further information was forthcoming.

Transparency is, as they say, an issue with this department. Laura McInerney is a British researcher in educational policy, based in Missouri on a Fulbright scholarship. One year ago, she asked for the application forms for free schools, the judgment and the reasons, as part of her research project. "Up until 2010," she told me, "the local authorities did the process and all that information would be in the public domain. To me, when that became national, the level of transparency should remain the same." Successive FOI requests were refused, ignored and appealed, until this month, when the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) ruled in her favour. The DfE has until Monday to appeal this decision.

The key point, she says, is this: "There isn't a process in which local people at the moment are easily able to make their voices heard. There is a requirement to do a consultation. And the only people who know what is written about that consultation are the people who write it and the DfE. So we have no way of checking if what happened in the room actually went to the DfE. We're not saying local people should have a veto, I'm not saying they're necessarily right. But we must be able to see the process of having their voices heard and, if you decide not to listen to them, the process of deciding not to listen to them."

This is the theme that unites opposition, whether it's objection in principle to free schools – such as in Walthamstow – or objection to a particular project, such as the Save Our Sulivan campaign, in which a primary school Fulham, London, with a meadow has been earmarked (apparently everybody wants a piece of the meadow) for a secondary free school. Wendy Aldridge, headteacher at Sulivan, said: "It's not transparent or clear. It doesn't seem to matter how well you're doing or how hard you're trying; if the politicians have their eye on the land, it makes no difference."

One more somewhat misleading element of the process is that, if local authorities or MPs – or anybody else, for that matter – support a local free school application, that is taken as their endorsement of the entire idea. But often they have no choice, since they need extra places and the local authority's remit to provide them has been stripped away. So this week, Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, who accused the department of neglecting value for money in its rush to open free schools, found herself at the sharp end of Tory minister Liz Truss's accusation. "It is sad to see Margaret Hodge denigrating free schools after campaigning for one in her own backyard. It's these kinds of double standards that put people off politics – one rule for her, another for everyone else."

Hodge is alive with rage about this. "They don't want to engage in the issue, so they just attack the people. It's absolutely pathetic. Of course, I persuaded Barking and Dagenham to go for a free school, because we desperately need school places. I'm not going to sit on my political high-horse and deny these kids their places." Furthermore, she points out, this report was "written by the NAO. It's their report. It's not my report. I would never interfere in the writing of the report. They're independent of us. They don't even have a party-political label."

Michael Gove has disappeared from the territory. It's uncanny.

If that all looks quite fun in a Punch and Judy sort of way, McInerney quickly bursts that Westminster bubble. "The government's argument is that if they hadn't moved quickly, if they hadn't pushed the legislation through, then the schools wouldn't have opened. And my point has always been, democracy sucks but it's there for a reason. The ministers will rise again, but these kids have one shot at an education. I'm not minded to sacrifice 400 children in Al-Madinah so that a minister can learn a hard lesson."

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