A new free school planned for Wandsworth, South London, the Bolingbroke Academy—sponsored by ARK, the academy chain—quickly became known as the ‘bankers’ free school’, as its supporters included a number of bankers working for various City firms including Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Plans for the new school were strongly opposed by many local parents and teachers as well as by local representatives of the GMB trade union who, in an unusual intervention, accused the free school group of deliberately excluding one of the local primaries that served a markedly less affluent community, as a ‘feeder school’—that is, a primary with special links to a local secondary. The Bolingbroke conflict was given the deceptively light-hearted tag of The Battle of Nappy Valley. Eventually, the whole intractable matter was put out to ‘consultation’. Similarly, a planned free school in Stoke by Nayland in Suffolk drew protests from a local head who believed it was being designed to siphon off the wealthier families of the area. Mike Foley, head of Great Cornard Upper School, said: ‘The suspicion is that parents in that [free school] group don’t want our children mixing with oiks. Whatever the motivation, the impact of it is to create this division. Although we have children from diverse backgrounds, they flourish here. The view here is that children shouldn’t be educated in a bubble.’27
Meanwhile, several ailing private schools, and ambitious religious groups, were clamouring to come under the shelter of the state’s umbrella. In January 2011, it was announced that 25 Steiner schools, whose curriculum has a humanistic, artistic emphasis, were in talks with the government about becoming free schools; but elements of the Steiner ideology remain highly controversial, and the decision was thus delayed.28 Seven out of ten free-school applications register a faith-based ethos. The Everyday Champions Church in Newark, an Evangelical church in Nottingham which intends to teach creationism as part of its science curriculum, handed over its plans for a 625-place school on the day before the first ever free school conference in January 2011, where Gove declared that ‘applications’ from creationist groups would be considered, with each judged on its merits. But only a few weeks later, after insistent representations from the British Centre for Science Education, Gove appeared to back down, claiming that it was ‘crystal-clear that teaching creationism is at odds with scientific fact’.
Free-school development has been increasingly constrained by practical factors. As many had warned, setting up a school is a major venture; those who have made it through the various stages have mostly done so with the backing of a charitable body or an existing education provider, although occasionally an individual like Young, who wields unusual political and public influence, appears to manage it alone. By May 2011, a year after the formation of the Coalition, only four groups had entered into a funding agreement, or contract, with the secretary of state—the West London Free School in Hammersmith and Fulham, Eden Primary School in Haringey, St Luke’s Church of England Primary School in Camden, and The Free School in Norwich—giving the lie to predictions that between ten and twenty would open in September 2011. Altogether, 323 groups had applied to start free schools. Of these applications, forty-one had been approved to the business case and planning stage, and seventeen to the pre-opening stage. Early criticisms of the apparent ease with which free school applications were approved had forced the government to slow down the process. Andrew Nadin, for example, an energetic opponent of a free school proposal in Bedford and Kempston, had persistently raised questions concerning a petition the Bedford and Kempston group had presented to the Department of Education claiming to show widespread support for the establishment of another school in the area. In the early summer of 2011 rumours began to circulate that Gove was trying to persuade school leaders in one London borough to back the establishment of a new free school, instead of another academy—a sign, surely, of the minister’s realisation that his flagship policy was faltering.
And who was paying for the new schools? There were rumoured plans in the summer of 2010 that the free school meals budget was to be raided to pay for free schools. Not surprisingly, this proposal was soon ditched. The government then suggested that free schools were to be largely funded from a special IT fund. The cost of free schools and the new academies became a more pressing issue as cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review started to bite. The entire project began to look decidedly less exciting, and potentially offensive, as existing state schools battled with leaking classrooms and cuts in one-to-one tuition. Many teenagers were facing a bleak future, without the financial support of EMA in the sixth form, and the prospect of soaring tuition fees. According to a report on Radio 4’s Today programme in early 2011, the Department had set aside £50 million in capital funding when the policy was first announced. But Today revealed that Bolingbroke, the planned free school in Wandsworth, was costing a total of £28 million in public money: £13 million from Wandsworth Council, to buy the building, plus £15 million of public money to refurbish it. According to Toby Young’s own estimates, the capital costs of the West London Free School were to be £12 million. While parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests did not elicit much hard information, it was revealed in April 2011 that the government had spent £21 million in its first year alone to private consultants to help launch the free school policy; at the same time, almost 100 civil servants were being directly employed on the policy. According to Labour’s shadow education secretary, Andy Burnham: ‘Pledges are being made; ministers are going round the country waving cheque books at people wanting to set up their pet projects. When the Government have cancelled Building Schools for the Future, it is unacceptable that they are not prepared to answer parliamentary questions to tell us how much money has been committed to these new schools. It gives the impression that, shamefully, ideology and not need is driving the allocation of capital to schools.’29
They may have attracted a lot of media attention, but increasingly free schools began to look like a distraction from the main show: the hundreds, and potentially thousands, of schools that were being enticed to become independent of local authorities. This was, indeed, the silent revolution, as one magazine article named it. The government’s initial offer to ‘outstanding’ schools to convert to academy status had been extended to ‘good’ schools; it was rumoured that conversion would soon be possible for those with ‘satisfactory’ status, if they were willing to work in partnership with other schools. Plainly, the aim was to create a majority of privately managed institutions, including many primaries, leaving a rump of struggling schools within the ambit of local authorities, themselves undermined by savage budget cuts.
The government was clearly playing up schools’ anxieties about funding in an age of austerity. And it seemed to be working. In April 2011 a survey of its members conducted by The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) found that 46 per cent had either already converted or were planning to do so, with a further 34 per cent undecided. Only 19 per cent said they would definitely not go down the academy route. In May the government announced that over a thousand schools had applied to become academies since June 2010: 647 applications had been approved, and 384 had already converted. The total number of academies, including those opened under New Labour, now stood at over 650. As the government press release boasted, ‘schools are becoming academies at a rate of two every day.’
At the heart of the strategy was money. Opponents of the ‘conversion’ plans became increasingly suspicious of the government claim that the new academies would enjoy no funding advantages, and that the move to so-called independence was all about the wish to be free from the mythical stranglehold of local government. In early January 2011, every Local Authority suffered a top-slice from their general grant to help fund the academies programme, irrespective of how many academies they had in their area. The national top-slice for 2011–12 was £148 million, rising to £265 million in 2012–13. This reduction in the budget, in addition to cuts announced the previous year, was justified on the grounds that the schools would have received the money anyway, in terms of services provided by the local authorities; now they were merely being given the budgets directly, to buy in services themselves. But the decision left many academies far better off than they would have been if they had stayed with the local authority. The question was, for how long?
Nigel Gann, chair of governors at Stanchester Community School in Somerset, resigned when the school decided to convert to an academy. He wrote to his local paper in April 2011, ‘Why the rush? Well, it’s money, of