Should free schools make a profit?
21 Apr
One of the most frequent topics on this Blog has been free schools.
Voice's numerous concerns about free schools include:
- the impact of free schools in terms of their long-term funding and viability and their potential effects on other schools: with our public services facing savage cuts, can the country afford free schools?
- a "buffet approach" to education provision risks causing chaos and confusion for parents, admissions policies, infrastructure planning, employers, staff recruitment and retention;
- importing an idea from a country with a different education system and social attitudes and trying to make it fit here is a risky ideological experiment that could potentially damage children's education if it fails;
- the employment of unqualified teachers (if teachers in academies and other publicly-funded schools have Qualified Teacher Status, why not free schools?);
- the number of people employed in the Free Schools Group;
- the possible classification of free schools as "permitted development", taking away the need to apply for planning permission; and
- schools being set up by those who wish to promote a particular philosophy be that atheist, religious, creationist or political or to make a profit: providing high quality education may not be their priority.
Now, as reported in Education Executive, "Michael Gove is being urged to allow profit-making companies to open and run free schools without the need to become a charity first. Without this change in legislation the free schools revolution will fail, says the Adam Smith Institute."
In Profit-Making Free Schools: Unlocking the Potential of England’s Proprietorial Schools Sector (pdf), "James Croft argues that the crisis of school places can only be met by giving true freedom to Free Schools and allowing profit-making schools to operate within the Free Schools programme".
"Profit-making free school" sounds contradictory. Oxymoron or "giving true freedom to Free Schools"? Do let us know your views…
Update: The BBC reports that: “Only 8% of teachers believe government policy for free schools and academies in England will improve poor children’s education,” according to a National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) survey of 2,199 teachers (pdf) commissioned by the Sutton Trust.
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Voice my report argues that no, the state cannot afford the cost of developing the new free school infrastructure on present capital constraints, even if the government secures the required changes to local planning law and comes up with a 'revenue-financing' alternative to the PFI both proposals which are in the pipe, and on which successful roll out of free schools depends. However, I don't assume that the state should be able to afford this level of development. We need new classrooms and new facilities to accommodate demand, but the state does not need to own those buildings.
We need to find 330,000 new places, at the primary level alone, by 2014-15. While there is excess capacity in the system approaching this scale, that spare capacity is concentrated in poorly performing schools, which aren't showing signs of turning around this year or next. So policy needs to focus on finding ways of stimulating expansion of good schools and unlocking spare capacity where it can be found. The present system does not incentivise good schools to invest the effort necessary to expand. It's only by an overhaul of the way we fund schools (on a per pupil basis, removing the local authority funding process and its tendency to compensate for failure) that schools will start taking responsibility for growth.
In the meantime, new schools are, or should be, an important part of the solution. It may be the case that this policy initiative is an 'import', but the idea of a school operating for a profit is not. Proprietorial schools have been doing it, in their hundreds, since the mid nineteenth century. The evidence of my report is that for-profit management, in contrast with trust-based models, has a focusing effect on educational outcomes and works to ensure that pupil attainment measures with or exceeds expectations.
Schools are businesses. Whether their revenues come from fees or, in the case of state schools, whether it is the taxpayer who foots the bill, they need to be substantially resourced, and then tightly managed. The important question is how efficiently their budgets are managed, and then, should they find themselves with an operational surplus, or profit, how they invest the extra. I contend that the really important issue is the quality of management, not the type. And if you widen the range of models that can be accommodated by the policy, you will widen participation. The evidence, again from England, suggests that the profit motive encourages expansion more rapidly and at a scale with which state-sector expansion does not even compete.
why shouldn’t they make a profit as long as they educate our children they deserve to make a profit.
Voice has frequently stated that the key to the success of a school is the quality of the leadership. Changing the way schools are organised and governed is not a guarantee of success or better education, as the mixed results from the academies established so far supports this.
Investment, leadership, management, ethos, positive relationships with local communities and support for social and family problems are the engines of improvement, not the status of a school.
@Allanbeavis sent this link to me/@Voicetheunion on Twitter in response: [www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2011/04/the-dangerous-liaison-between-free-schools-and-for-profit-making-organizations-is-landing-on-our-shores/#comment-5443]