The Tory free school model was far from the original free schools, a distinct, libertarian tradition within English private education in the twentieth century that stressed genuine intellectual freedom, unfettered creativity and vigorous school democracy. The Tories had nothing like this in mind. They looked instead to neoliberal experiments within the Swedish school system, instituted since the 1990s, and the US charter school movement, which now educated a million and a half children, many of them from low-income homes, outside the public (state) school system. Taken together, these international examples of pedagogic experimentation helped project a public image of a party finally at ease with the diverse, modern world. According to Cameron, these were important models, ‘making sure there’s excellence, there’s competition, there’s innovation’. It was several months before serious doubts began to be aired more publicly about the effectiveness and wider social impact of both the Swedish and US models.
In the period running up to the May 2010 election, there was considerable media interest in a number of free school campaigns. These could not easily be yoked together in terms of their demands, as many of the groups arose from distinct and inevitably complex local factors. They ranged from the efforts of journalist Toby Young, who had rejected his local comprehensive in Acton, West London—a school judged by Ofsted to be ‘good with outstanding’ features—and gathered a bunch of well-heeled parents to explore the establishment of a free school, to a band of parents in Kirklees, Yorkshire, who wanted to convert an existing middle school, serving a number of villages, into a local secondary school. Inevitably, all were lumped together in media reports as state-school parents ‘fed up with their educational options’. However, as writer Geraldine Bedell perceptively observed, although ‘the tone of the argument is often angry … everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all.’3
Suddenly, proposals put forward by comprehensive reformers over several decades—from smaller class sizes, to more resources for poorer children, to greater freedom for teachers—had apparently been hijacked overnight by the new right. It was striking how often Michael Gove employed the term ‘comprehensive’—an attempt, perhaps, to link his party with fairness in the public mind and to banish some of the lingering images of elitism, arrogance and class partiality it displayed during the 1980s. In the winter of 2009, in the promisingly entitled A Comprehensive Programme for School Reform, Gove set out five priorities for changing our schools. But the ‘c’ word was used here in its blandest sense, to mean ‘of large content or scope’. A year on, the department deflected criticism of unfair admissions practice by referring to government plans for ‘a comprehensive programme to make opportunity more equal’.4 In the run-up to the election, David Cameron visited the free school advocates in Kirklees and signed his name on the parents’ outdoor campaign wall, adding: ‘Let’s support parents who want great state schools for their children. I salute your courage and dedication, and we will not let you down.’
At the same time Cameron worked hard, if not entirely successfully, to present himself as an ordinary, averagely sharp-elbowed, middle-class parent, ‘terrified’ of not finding a good state school for his young children.5 It was a sign of changed times that an Eton-educated Tory leader felt obliged to send his children to state schools, although other front-bench figures, out of the direct line of fire on the schools issue, chose an expensive private education for their children. Cameron’s close ally, George Osborne, withdrew his two children from a state primary in 2008 in order to send them to a non-selective preparatory school in West London. In an interview in March 2005, shortly after he was made shadow chancellor, Osborne said: ‘I hate that kind of tokenistic politics where the politician uses his private life to illustrate some broader point. When it comes to choosing a school, we will make a decision on which school, state or private, we feel is best for them.’
But the Tory trump card was Michael Gove, one of the very few senior front-bench figures who could credibly front an education revolution based on apparent popular discontent. The adopted child of an Aberdeen fish processor, Gove had won a scholarship to private school and then gone on to Oxford. Gove clearly represented a different educational trajectory—and social class—to that of Cameron, Osborne and other leading Conservatives. If he was not—quite—the poor boy made good, he was certainly one of Alan Bennett’s History Boys. Clever, witty and personally charming, Gove also had, as one feature writer observed, the faint air of vulnerability of the man who has risen far and fast. At times, however, his mission on education has seemed largely focussed on getting more people like himself—the naturally brilliant who were not born to rule—to an elite university: the classic grammar-school narrative that still obsesses our nation. Gove liked to speculate in public about what would have happened to him if he had been obliged to attend some poorly performing local school.
If a general alliance between entrenched privilege and aggressive, yet ultimately deferential, aspiration has powered so much of recent British education policy, the confident, gilded Cameron and the restless, brainy Gove perfectly exemplified the mix in human terms. There were echoes of the close political and personal partnership between the privately educated Tony Blair and his educational mentor, Andrew Adonis, the brilliant son of a Greek Cypriot immigrant, who won his chance to shine with a scholarship to a state boarding school.
From the outset, the Coalition ruled, not as if it had come to power as a result of a carefully crafted cross-party consensus, but as if it had won a massive popular mandate for fundamental transformation. As lead partners in the Coalition, the Tories were clearly determined not to commit Blair’s mistake and wait before pushing through radical change. When an ebullient Gove rose to introduce the Queen’s Speech debate on education, in late May, sitting to his right was a faintly dazed-looking Sarah Teather, the new Liberal Democrat minister of state for children and families. Any political discomfiture on Teather’s part was understandable. After all, the Liberal Democrats had fought the general election on a platform of direct opposition to both free schools and the extension of the academy programme—principles overwhelmingly affirmed at their autumn 2010 conference.
Michael Gove’s first year in office was marked by a number of embarrassing errors and U-turns. Early estimates of the number of schools that wished to convert to academy status were overblown: not over a thousand, as Gove first excitedly suggested, but a mere 153—although the numbers would later climb. Then, in a gleeful speech to the House of Commons in early July, Gove announced the cancellation of Labour’s school-building programme, Building Schools for the Future. The new minister waxed lyrical on the ‘massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy’. A total of 706 projects were considered too far advanced to be abandoned, 719 projects were to be axed, while 123 academy schemes were under review. Within a few days Gove was back in the Commons, forced to issue a grovelling apology; having announced that building projects would still go ahead in Derby, the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Peterborough, Doncaster, Greenwich, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Lancashire and Bexley, in fact all these were to be axed.
Normally mild-mannered head teachers and loyal backbenchers were roused to real anger at the brutal speed and apparent carelessness of the government’s handling of the cuts in the school building programme. Tory MPs in Croydon, West Yorkshire and Kent, facing cancelled building projects in their constituencies, made special representations to the new minister. Heather Duggan, assistant head teacher at Liverpool’s St John Bosco Art College, told the BBC: ‘We were just floored.’ When Liverpool’s cabinet member for education and children’s services, Councillor Jane Corbett, visited the school to try to soften the blow, the students asked