Free schools have to pass our most rigorous exams

Many applicants have failed to realise how hard it is to set up a new free school.

In these pages earlier this week, Toby Young highlighted the hard work, the opposition to be overcome and the sheer worth of setting up a free school. He did so as one who has broken through to the sunlit uplands of educational success. But what of those groups of parents and teachers whose applications didn’t get through the process?

I help the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, with the vetting of free schools. One applicant I spoke to described how his group fell apart through exhaustion after struggling nine-tenths of the way through the bureaucratic thicket, only to find that the premises they thought they’d got were abruptly sold off by an ideologically hostile local authority. Such antipathy from elements of the educational establishment, particularly the unions, won’t go away, as control is part of their raison d’etre and any freedoms that threaten it – no matter how beneficial to the children they’re supposed to be educating – will be opposed.

But ideological spite is not a major reason for failure. The most common cause is that the applicants simply haven’t thought through how the school is to be set up and run, what it will teach, whether there’s a need for it, what its catchment area will be, and how it can be financially sustained. Virtually all applicants expect to recruit “outstanding” headteachers and staff, but not all consider where these people are to come from and what will attract them to the school. Getting this right takes far more energy and time than most people realise.

The Department for Education has been criticised for being too demanding of applicants, but it is right to err on the side of caution – significant sums of public money are being handed over, and we’re consigning our children to their care.

About a third of this year’s successful applications are from groups wanting to set up faith schools, which highlights another problem area. There is an argument for banning faith applications altogether – why should the state fund faiths to advance themselves when the only example we have here of an almost entirely faith-based educational system (Northern Ireland) is discouraging? This would please the British Humanist Association, but it ignores the fact that we have a long tradition of tolerant and beneficial faith schools to which parents of all faiths and none are keen to send their children. To ban believers from setting up free schools would be to exclude a large number of able, well-meaning and experienced people who can do much to raise levels generally.

The trouble is, as always, when it’s taken to extremes, whether it’s evangelical Christians, totalitarian Muslims or segregationist Jews. Such applications need careful vetting, not because there shouldn’t be far-out religious and ideological beliefs, but because the taxpayer shouldn’t pay to propagate them – and because children should be able to participate in a wider society without having their horizons narrowed by fundamentalism.

That is why Mr Gove is right to insist that creationism – essentially, the assertion that the universe is not evolving but was created much as it is by a single deity and centred on us – must not be taught as part of science. It may be taught in religious education as one doctrine among others, but not as one scientific theory among others, a rival to evolution.

For most of those who failed, the message should be: try again. There will always be mistakes, of course, and things that go wrong, but among the hundred or so groups that got through this year are a reassuringly high number of talented, determined and altruistic people. And there are plenty more out there.

Original source here