Will free schools drive up standards? Read Toby Young's guest post and join the conversation

[ElenMumsnetBloggers]

Are free schools ready to fall or fly? Do they really drive up standards or are they a snobbish gimmick? And should more parents be setting up their own schools? Journalist and producer Toby Young explains why he set up the West London Free School and what makes the free school proposition an exciting one. Join the conversation that Toby's begun and have your say on free schools.

Brighton does not bus children from one end of town to the other. That's nonsense. Everyone is in a fixed catchment of one or two schools. If you're in a 2 school catchment and one is over subscribed there's a lottery between the 2 to see who gets a place there, no matter where you live WITHIN THE CATCHMENT. The others would get the less popular school. The lottery was actually introduced to appease middle class parents who didn't live near the "best" schools.They now have the same chance as others in catchment but living closer .

I think what gets me about Toby Young is the impression he gives that any group of interested parents could achieve what he has done. I expect having a dad who is a Lord gives you political and social connections that other parents couldn't hope to cultivate.

Toby Young's might manage the same although if he has lots with free school meals from poor homes he might find it harder to add that value.

FSM does not necessarily mean dim, you know.

He could teach them to speak with received pronunciation and what to wear and that alone perhaps unfairly gives children a big advantage when they apply for many jobs.

I don't think he will be teaching in the school and AFAIK they will be wearing their school uniform. They may actually speak perfectly well already. And if the posh ones are the majority, it will soon rub off on their more common brethren.

Toby - if any of your staff are co-habitees are they happy with Gove's latest ill-thought out burblings about how free schools MUST promote marriage as important for family life?

Also, do you not feel hypocritical about the suspension of Kai Frizzle?

Xenia, I've given vouchers some thought, and I don't believe they provide the solution offered by free schools, though they do have the advantage of distancing the education offering from state control.

I'm imagining a scenario where I'm the head of a small independent school. Say I need 16 students paying £7k annually to cover operating costs and salaries. (Of course I'm not talking about well endowed historical schools like an Eton.) If I knew that my parents were each getting a £6k voucher toward fees, and were therefore only needing to pay the £1k top-up, I'd be very very likely to say to myself, hmm, we're really operating on the edge here, and if our enrolment drops below 16 for whatever reason I'd have to let someone go, or another administrative hand in the office would improve our offering greatly, or it be great to be able to offer a sibling discount, etc so why don't I raise tuitions a bit, not a whole lot, but by at least £1k or so. I would do so not because I was trying to bring home more money for myself, but because I would want to shore up or improve the current offering. So I think vouchers would result in an overall tuition rise. Perhaps this is fine, but rather than a £1k top-up, parents would be looking at a £2k top-up, thus reducing the accessibility. And of course, parents on benefits would not be able to address top-ups at all, and there would still be the inaccessibility issue, which free schools address.

On the flip side, vouchers may be the only way to get away from the knee-jerk socialist or PC responses such as "I don't want my tax money going toward . . . IQ selection . . . Islamic schools . . . insert prejudice here." Though if a voucher programme was ever implemented, I suspect there would be a string of caveats about where and how that voucher could be spent.

fivecandles, yes, we can all agree that all schools should be good schools. The difficulty arises in that my definition of a good school is different from yours, as even I suspect mine is different from Xenia's or claig's, even though we all support choice. Take primary for example. A good primary school, to me, is one where the content and methodology are chosen according to a clearly understood child development paradigm, not according to social engineering goals. Let me give an illustration. The Rose report of a few years ago stated that IT training in the primary years was of equal focal importance to that of literacy and numeracy. This statement was made, as Rose himself admitted, to ensure a levelling of access to computers for all children, a social engineering goal, not a pedagogical goal. In fact, such a statement flies in the face of mounting evidence suggesting that computer time for young children is not such a good idea. For me, any school that adhered to the recommendations of this report, or any school who believes watching Disney films is an appropriate use of my dc's school time, is NOT a good school.

If you'd like to maintain that any parent who does not agree with or wants something other than the state mandate should pay for it, that's fine, but understand that that is a political statement.

noblegiraffe
very funny remaek about cargo cults.

Nothing I've read here suggests that Free Schools are likely to drive up standards over all. Not in a statistically measureable way, or in a value for money way, at least. Sad, really.

On a side note, if Claig mentions the word 'Islingtonista' (or sometimes spelt Islintongista) one more time I think I might have to lay myself down in one of N1's busiest roads. What does this mean? My kids go to school in this borough you've mentioned about 7 times and its pupils are 40% FSM and around the same number EAL and very high levels of SEN. Are the parents at this school and all the borough's other schools operating some sort of cabal to dictate educational policy to the rest of the country?
Lots of interesting stuff on this thread though.

Not if this is the Toby Young who pimps himself out as a professional controversy monger. Why are Radio 4 paying this guy for his opinion?

He is an expert? On what? He has to appear on Come dine with me in order to pay the bills.

I wouldn't send my dog to his training school, let alone a child. Begone with you! Perhaps if everyone ignores him he will just go away.

Islintongista does not refer to the good people of Islington, it refers to a completely different set of Mrs and Misters

Who, the ones who live in Islingtong perhaps.

No, Islintong

iddle I po

But we are digressing because Toby Yong is not an Islintong ista

unless there's something that I've missed ah

Competition drives up standards so of course they will improve standards unless we think all children are birth have their set IQ and that it matters not much at all where they go to school as their genes are the main thing. Most of us(or I do) think it's 50/50 genes and environment so schools and parents do matter.

It is a hard issue for the state - they want every child to be able to get a good education but they also want parents to have some choice about that and that might mean no reading until you're 7 which doesn't do the Dutch too much harm or no lessons or just 6 hours a day Koran or Bible or "learning through play" or latin and Greek etc. My son just finished his latin homework but he's at a fee paying prep school.

It's like upbringing of children. There is probably one good way to bring up children, no smacking, no shouting at them etc but the sate has to allow a broader range of parenting styles than that yet it does step in if there is abuse or neglect. Same with schools. I was very glad Summerhill won its case and most pupils there do choose to attend lessons and I am glad parents can home educate too in whatever ways they think fit within reason.

I think the benefits of that freedom of choice even freedom to make bad choices for your child are as important as uniformity and eveni f that choice is exercised by a parent or school in a way that may not be the best thing objectively for chidlren. Thus I woudl find myself supporting the right of Christina fundamentalists, the FLDS and orthodox muslims and jews to train girls for housework and forbid them an education and ship them abroad to marry at 16 etc even though that is inimical to my own views. Although I have some problems with medical students (Muslim and Christian) absenting themselves from lectures which involve clearly proven scientific proof about evolution). I suppose I would allow the choice, the variety, the good and the bad and hope the free market which tends to work pretty well, prevail.

Over 50% of parents would pay school fees if they could affrord them,. 7% are able to.

I see someone mention teaching coding at school. I feel frustrated about all this emphasis on Latin and the classics when there is a skill sitting there which, if learned would see our young people completing globally in new media etc industries.

I hate the curriculum's distinction between 'science' and 'arts' when do many people who are successful creative in ICT industries have design flair and mathematical ability.

DP certainly was unable to take computer science and art together as highers at school as the timetable doesn't allow it. Yet he was painting and drawing and also writing binary code for his own computer games from a very early age.

I find all this talk of classics and Latin rather uninspiring - what exactly does it offer your average kid who wants to work in a skilled industry? And (let's face it ) can't afford university?

"I hate the curriculum's distinction between 'science' and 'arts' when do many people who are successful creative in ICT industries have design flair and mathematical ability. "

Here we are, 50-odd years on from CP Snow's The Two Cultures still having this argument.

"Snow's Rede Lecture condemned the British educational system as having, since the Victorian period, over-rewarded the humanities ( especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of scientific and engineering education, despite such achievements having been so decisive in winning the Second World War for the Allies. This in practice deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. "

Back again and catching up with thread. Claig, I cannot understand how you can acknowledge, 'Poorer children have less choice than richer children and they end up in schools that are not as good.' and yet persist in arguing that the answer to this problem is more choice.

More choice means more choice for those who are able to make those choices. It doesn't matter how many different sorts of schools (with their accompanying overt or covert selection) you have, disadvantaged parents will STILL not be able to access them and the school they will send their kids to (the nearest that they are allowed into) will continue to deteriorate further.

I do find it odd that, in spite, of all the evidence, there are still people who can't seem to understand this.

Yes, I do see your point. I had hoped that more choice would lead to more new schools in all areas so that parents would have a greater choice of local schools. But I guess this is not realistic because the budget is only so big, and maybe money is just shuffled from existing resources to new resources.

'Poorer children have less choice than richer children and they end up in schools that are not as good.'

And again, this is a truly bizarre position. Can you not see the contradictions in it? Eton has the prestige it does because of centuries of snobbery, money, tradition and elitism. It is therefore absolutely not possible to have an 'Eton' for the ordinary folk. It's a total contradiction. But it's also questionable that the Eton model is a good model for education for anyone let alone for working class kids.

I do find it bizarre that those who want to improve the lot of disadvantaged kids (or say they do) not only lack the imagination to suggest getting rid of the bastions of elitism and social inequality but also want to somehow emulate them.

Forget the snobbery and prestige etc. we all know that exists in society, Apart from that presumably Eton produces good academic results, and I agree that this is partly to do with teh fact that it takes bright children, but I assume it must also be down to the fact that it has good teachers.

If they took the children from a sink school and sent them all to Eton, I guess their academic results would probably improve, which I would put down to the teachers.

'not only lack the imagination to suggest getting rid of the bastions of elitism and social inequality but also want to somehow emulate them.'

I care more about education than social revolution. I accept that people will be much richer and more privileged than me. Improving education and opportunity is what I care about, not "getting rid of the bastions of elitism".

I think if they took the children from a sink school and sent them all to Eton, the teachers wouldn't know what to do with them. I expect that teachers at Eton are used to pliant, obedient and clever classes and would struggle when their teaching methods which have stood them in good stead for many years suddenly completely and utterly fail.

That's possible.

I tend to agree with Xenia. I like academic selection, because it eliminates teh advantages of snobbery and privilege and creates a meritocracy which allows bright young children like teh ones we read about who pass A levels at teh age of 8 to gain entrance above any Tim Dim But Nice with privilege.