Michael Meacher MP

So the Tory flagship policy of so-called ‘free schools’ has just been launched down the slipway.    It has been sold as increasing choice, breaking free from the oppressive control of local authorities, and allowing parents and the local community to set up and run schools in the way they wish.   The real motive is perhaps rather less elevated or honourable.   It is to escape disorderly inner city schools with poor teaching and worse discipline, full of disruptive working class kids and too many immigrants.

Of course Michael Gove will argue that it allows opting out in the spirit of the distinctive and superior grant-maintained schoolds and city technology schools of the 1980s or even a throwback to the prized pre-1944 grammar schools.   Opting out has always been the preferred way both of Tories and New Labour, backed by higher pay or knighthoods to bribe their backers.   But where is the evidence that such experiments have ever succeeded?   Independent assessment of academies’ performance have presented a very mixded picture, their sponsors rarely contribute even the £2 million subscription, whilst often acting as purveyors of intellectual eccentricities. (more…)