The Flap Over Free Schools

Free schools encourage a better quality of teaching, which is exactly what we need.

free schools local education authorities michael gove simon johnson The Daily Mail

Getting outraged over very little is a skill that The Daily Mail has perfected over the years. A quick glance through a normal edition will see a pleasant article warning about the carcinogenic properties of tomato juice competing with an explanation of the health-restoring properties of vitamin-containing fruit juices.

But, to its credit, The Mail does provide superb, raw material for sparking controversy for the next staid dinner party you may have the misfortunate of attending. And this month’s dinner party controversy has been the inexorable rise of free schools; good left-wingers around the country can be seen throwing up their hands in despair, and muttering darkly that compulsory Latin is irrelevant.

Michael Gove is at the centre of the debate

As an ancient historian, my views on Latin are inevitably a little biased but, for a moment, let us move beyond cheap headlines about classical languages and look at a few details. Free schools were a centrepiece of the Conservatives’ election manifesto, and since the coalition came into power, 24 newbies have sprung up in England.

At the heart of the free school concept is the new power of the head teacher to negotiate the pay of their teachers. Free from the constraints of the Local Education Authorities, it is little surprise that free school head teachers have already come out and said that they will use it to reward better teachers with a higher salary and to encourage failing teachers to seek their future elsewhere by cutting their rations. Naturally, our gallant teachers’ unions have already warned that this marks the beginning of the end of the British Education System.

I don’t understand what the problem is. One of the central messages of the recent wave of insider-accounts of our school system, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s To Miss With Love, is that head teachers are trapped by a system that doesn’t allow them to remove or even punish irreparably substandard teachers. Stuck in an over-unionised system that would never be tolerated in the private sector, we continue to inflict poor quality teaching on our children. If the way to break out of this loop is to reward better teachers, and to force poorer teachers out, then our children will be better for it.

After all, today’s statistically average adult has a reading age approximately that of a Daily Mail editorial. We need to be teaching our students to do better than that, and if that’s what the rise of free schools will encourage, then surely they’re a good thing.