Queen's speech: education a top priority
Updated on 25 May 2010
New academies, plus free schools established by parents and teachers - two of the signature "big society" ideas in the Queen's speech. Alice Tarleton looks at what is on offer.
Letting parents set up their own schools - following the example of Sweden and the USA - was one of the Conservatives' highest-profile policies in opposition.
The academies bill - one of 23 unveiled in today's Queen's speech - makes it much easier for taxpayer-funded schools be created outside local authority control.
Academies are independent state schools with input from sponsors including businesses, church groups and universities. A key Blairite reform, the first three opened in 2003; there are now just over 200 in England.
Under the government's plans, any existing local authority-maintained state school will be able to apply for academy status. All schools with the top "outstanding" rating from the education watchdog Ofsted will be automatically pre-approved for greater independence.
Free schools: a parent's perspective
The writer Toby Young is part of a group of parents and teachers planning to set up a free school in west London.
The school would offer up to 750 children a classical liberal education without any "soft" - vocational - options. All pupils would do at least eight GCSEs including separate sciences, history, geography and Latin or a modern foreign language (or preferably both).
Young is considering bids to run the school from 10 private and charitable education providers. He hopes the group will appoint one in July, take out a 25-year lease on a mothballed secondary school, and admit the first year sevens in September 2011.
He acknowledges funding could become tricky if the school were under-subscribed - "for a fairly small school, margins are small" - but having researched demand in the area, this isn't something he anticipates. "If we weren't providing the extra school places, the local authority would have to," he said.
But the main difference in the free school is that the group of parents and teachers "will have much more control over a school set up in this way than a school the local authority sets up in response to, say, a petition". This doesn't extend to guaranteeing his own children a place - the admissions policy of the non-selective school has yet to be set.
Although he thinks his group could have set the school up under the existing academy framework, the process has still been "fiendishly complicated". Today's removal of the need for local authority approval should also make the process easier for parents in some other parts of the country.
The coalition will allow primary and special schools to become academies in their own right for the first time, and removes the need to get local authority approval for a new academy.
But critics say the move will be costly and do little to improve standards. The head of the largest teaching union, the NUT, described it as a "a retrograde step which will cause social division and planning gridlock".
“The idea that maintained schools can simply decide to be academies because of an Ofsted judgement also has major funding and planning implications," said NUT General Secretary Christine Blower. "Expanding the programme into primary schools is also unacceptable and unnecessary.
“In short, the very freedoms which the Government intends for schools will be mired by controversy over its wholly unproven argument that somehow, because a school becomes an academy, that will automatically raise standards."
The evidence for academies to date isn't conclusive - although GCSE results do tend to show a marked improvement, researchers at the LSE found there was little difference in their performance compared to other, similar schools in the area.
There have been notable poster children of the academy programme, such as the super-achieving Mossbourne academy in Hackney, while academies at the other end of the spectrum have been taken into special measures.
The government said today it expects standards across the education sector to rise both through the creation of more academies, and through plans to give more freedom to teaching staff.
A separate education bill, expected in the autumn and also announced today, will slim down the national curriculum, giving teachers more control over what pupils learn. Children will be tested on reading at the age of six, to try to pick up problems early. Teachers and head teachers will also be given greater powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying and head teachers will be held "properly accountable" for attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
The government also commits to introducing a "pupil premium" of more money for the poorest pupils, although the Queen's speech does not say how much this would be worth.
The Local Government Association, which represents local authorities, supported expanding school choice but expressed concern over the accountability of the new schools.
“This does not mean… that schools can just be left to look after the education of our children without someone keeping an eye on their performance," said its chairman, Dame Margaret Eaton. "When things start to go wrong, only prompt, joint action by the council and school provider will put things right."
The bill makes no mention of allowing the schools to become more selective, in keeping with last week's coalition agreement which said the government would "ensure that all new academies follow an inclusive admissions policy".
The New Schools Network said 630 people with an interest in setting up their own school had registered with it to date across England.
