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Chapter One

Understanding the New Schools Revolution

Sometime in February 2010, rumours began to circulate that the American actress Goldie Hawn had flown into London for talks with Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove on how she might help improve Britain’s schools. Hawn’s Foundation Charity runs a group of schools in the USA and Canada that emphasise Buddhist techniques of meditation and breathing. The prospect of a meeting between the would-be minister and the famous comedy actress was irresistible to the press. It felt like one of those quirky Orange cinema advertisements you get before the main film: Gove and Goldie practising enlightenment in a curtained House of Commons office, deep-breathing their way to intellectual excellence. In fact, the two never did meet in person, as Hawn rather huffily revealed later that year. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I had a meeting with an aide of his … in some lobby at one of the parliament buildings down there by the river … just in the place where you get the coffee from the vending machine.’¹

But if the ‘vending machine’ discussions came to nothing—or not yet—Hawn’s surreal entry onto the UK education scene was a clear sign of the impending sea change in public service reform.

New. Free. Choice. Innovation. David Cameron’s rebranded party worked hard, when in opposition, to project itself as a fresh, engaging voice on education, to bury memories of the Tories’ miserable record on schools when last in office during the 1980s and 90s. In the months running up to the election, Gove and Cameron gave a number of press interviews revealing the fact that they shared the school run to a Church of England state primary in Kensington. Cameron’s Tories were close observers, and admirers, of Tony Blair, eager to learn from the former Labour leader’s triumphs as well as his errors, and their energetic, almost evangelical approach to education reform clearly echoed New Labour’s early spirit as well as its main theme.

The Tories were particularly keen to build on New Labour’s academy programme, extending it far beyond the impoverished inner-city areas that it was originally intended to serve. Academy status was natural conservative territory, with its freedom from local authorities, from national agreements on teachers’ pay and conditions and from an often constricting curriculum, imposed, incidentally, by the Conservatives when they were last in power. But, in a crucial political twist, the Tories planned to use this special status to the advantage of the already advantaged. These freedoms were now to be offered to existing ‘outstanding’ schools, with the ultimate aim of creating a network of ‘independent state’ schools to sit alongside, and appear to outshine, the maintained sector—that is, schools funded through and supported by local authorities.

Initially, at least, academy conversions attracted less publicity than the alluring ‘free school’ idea. In terms of their legal status, free schools were to be virtually identical to academies; publicly funded but independently run, they had the added ideological appeal of appearing to emanate from the combined dynamism and desperation of parents and teachers up and down the country. A few parent-sponsored schools had opened under New Labour, but the more successful of these, such as Elmgreen School in West Norwood, South London, worked closely with its local authority. The academy model, however, enabled a complete break with local democracy.

A Tory Green Paper on education, published as early as November 2007, had already floated the idea of parent- and philanthropist-promoted schools and claimed that, if elected, a Conservative Government would seek to create 220,000 school places over the next decade. Now, in the immediate pre-election period, Gove and Cameron were keen to create an impression of unstoppable momentum. Gove spoke of the ‘hundreds’ of parents and groups of teachers who had contacted the Tories expressing an urgent interest to start their own school: not just the ‘yummy mummies with sharp elbows’, but also ‘the Gateshead mum … a no-nonsense working-class woman passionate about her kids’, or ‘groups in Birmingham who have strong representation among the Afro-Caribbean community, some of them with links to churches … desperate … to set up schools.’² Cameron promised ‘to bust open the state monopoly on education and allow new schools to be established’.

The Tory free school model was far from the original free schools, a distinct, libertarian tradition within English private education in the twentieth century that stressed genuine intellectual freedom, unfettered creativity and vigorous school democracy. The Tories had nothing like this in mind. They looked instead to neoliberal experiments within the Swedish school system, instituted since the 1990s, and the US charter school movement, which now educated a million and a half children, many of them from low-income homes, outside the public (state) school system. Taken together, these international examples of pedagogic experimentation helped project a public image of a party finally at ease with the diverse, modern world. According to Cameron, these were important models, ‘making sure there’s excellence, there’s competition, there’s innovation’. It was several months before serious doubts began to be aired more publicly about the effectiveness and wider social impact of both the Swedish and US models.

In the period running up to the May 2010 election, there was considerable media interest in a number of free school campaigns. These could not easily be yoked together in terms of their demands, as many of the groups arose from distinct and inevitably complex local factors. They ranged from the efforts of journalist Toby Young, who had rejected his local comprehensive in Acton, West London—a school judged by Ofsted to be ‘good with outstanding’ features—and gathered a bunch of well-heeled parents to explore the establishment of a free school, to a band of parents in Kirklees, Yorkshire, who wanted to convert an existing middle school, serving a number of villages, into a local secondary school. Inevitably, all were lumped together in media reports as state-school parents ‘fed up with their educational options’. However, as writer Geraldine Bedell perceptively observed, although ‘the tone of the argument is often angry … everyone wants the same thing: a good, free, local school for all.’³

Suddenly, proposals put forward by comprehensive reformers over several decades—from smaller class sizes, to more resources for poorer children, to greater freedom for teachers—had apparently been hijacked overnight by the new right. It was striking how often Michael Gove employed the term ‘comprehensive’—an attempt, perhaps, to link his party with fairness in the public mind and to banish some of the lingering images of elitism, arrogance and class partiality it displayed during the 1980s. In the winter of 2009, in the promisingly entitled A Comprehensive Programme for School Reform, Gove set out five priorities for changing our schools. But the ‘c’ word was used here in its blandest sense, to mean ‘of large content or scope’. A year on, the department deflected criticism of unfair admissions practice by referring to government plans for ‘a comprehensive programme to make opportunity more equal’.⁴ In the run-up to the election, David Cameron visited the free school advocates in Kirklees and signed his name on the parents’ outdoor campaign wall, adding: ‘Let’s support parents who want great state schools for their children. I salute your courage and dedication, and we will not let you down.’

At the same time Cameron worked hard, if not entirely successfully, to present himself as an ordinary, averagely sharp-elbowed, middle-class parent, ‘terrified’ of not finding a good state school for his young children.⁵ It was a sign of changed times that an Eton-educated Tory leader felt obliged to send his children to state schools, although other front-bench figures, out of the direct line of fire on the schools issue, chose an expensive private education for their children. Cameron’s close ally, George Osborne, withdrew his two children from a state primary in 2008 in order to send them to a non-selective preparatory school in West London. In an interview in March 2005, shortly after he was made shadow chancellor, Osborne said: ‘I hate that kind of tokenistic politics where the politician uses his private life to illustrate some broader point. When it comes to choosing a school, we will make a decision on which school, state or private, we feel is best for them.’

But the Tory trump card was Michael Gove, one of the very few senior front-bench figures who could credibly front an education revolution based on apparent popular discontent. The adopted child of an Aberdeen fish processor, Gove had won a scholarship to private school and then gone on to Oxford. Gove clearly represented a different educational trajectory—and social class—to that of Cameron, Osborne and other leading Conservatives. If he was not—quite—the poor boy made good, he was certainly one of Alan Bennett’s History Boys. Clever, witty and personally charming, Gove also had, as one feature writer observed, the faint air of vulnerability of the man who has risen far and fast. At times, however, his mission on education has seemed largely focussed on getting more people like himself—the naturally brilliant who were not born to rule—to an elite university: the classic grammar-school narrative that still obsesses our nation. Gove liked to speculate in public about what would have happened to him if he had been obliged to attend some poorly performing local school.

If a general alliance between entrenched privilege and aggressive, yet ultimately deferential, aspiration has powered so much of recent British education policy, the confident, gilded Cameron and the restless, brainy Gove perfectly exemplified the mix in human terms. There were echoes of the close political and personal partnership between the privately educated Tony Blair and his educational mentor, Andrew Adonis, the brilliant son of a Greek Cypriot immigrant, who won his chance to shine with a scholarship to a state boarding school.

From the outset, the Coalition ruled, not as if it had come to power as a result of a carefully crafted cross-party consensus, but as if it had won a massive popular mandate for fundamental transformation. As lead partners in the Coalition, the Tories were clearly determined not to commit Blair’s mistake and wait before pushing through radical change. When an ebullient Gove rose to introduce the Queen’s Speech debate on education, in late May, sitting to his right was a faintly dazed-looking Sarah Teather, the new Liberal Democrat minister of state for children and families. Any political discomfiture on Teather’s part was understandable. After all, the Liberal Democrats had fought the general election on a platform of direct opposition to both free schools and the extension of the academy programme—principles overwhelmingly affirmed at their autumn 2010 conference.

Michael Gove’s first year in office was marked by a number of embarrassing errors and U-turns. Early estimates of the number of schools that wished to convert to academy status were overblown: not over a thousand, as Gove first excitedly suggested, but a mere 153—although the numbers would later climb. Then, in a gleeful speech to the House of Commons in early July, Gove announced the cancellation of Labour’s school-building programme, Building Schools for the Future. The new minister waxed lyrical on the ‘massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy’. A total of 706 projects were considered too far advanced to be abandoned, 719 projects were to be axed, while 123 academy schemes were under review. Within a few days Gove was back in the Commons, forced to issue a grovelling apology; having announced that building projects would still go ahead in Derby, the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Peterborough, Doncaster, Greenwich, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Lancashire and Bexley, in fact all these were to be axed.

Normally mild-mannered head teachers and loyal backbenchers were roused to real anger at the brutal speed and apparent carelessness of the government’s handling of the cuts in the school building programme. Tory MPs in Croydon, West Yorkshire and Kent, facing cancelled building projects in their constituencies, made special representations to the new minister. Heather Duggan, assistant head teacher at Liverpool’s St John Bosco Art College, told the BBC: ‘We were just floored.’ When Liverpool’s cabinet member for education and children’s services, Councillor Jane Corbett, visited the school to try to soften the blow, the students asked her: ‘How could the government be allowed to do this, to destroy young peoples’ futures?’⁶ On a sweltering day in July, a packed Central Methodist Hall in Westminster, London, heard impassioned speeches from parents, trade union leaders and politicians. The message on one placard—Building Schools for the Favoured—neatly encapsulated the mood of the moment.

Before the end of May, Parliament was presented with a new Academies Bill that, in the words of the BBC, presaged ‘the most radical overhaul of schools in England for a generation’. England’s secondary and primary schools were to be offered the chance to convert to academy status, with institutions already judged ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted to be fast-tracked through the process without consultation with staff, parents or the wider community; free schools could be set up on the same independent basis. ‘Not since the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 has legislation other than that intended to counter terrorism, or deal with economic crisis, been rushed through all parliamentary stages in quite this fashion’, teachers’ union leader Christine Blower told her union conference later that year. There was widespread criticism of the Bill, particularly its limited provision for consultation.⁷ Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, uneasy at the pace of change, pushed through some minor amendments on consultation, safeguarding provision for children with special educational needs and freedom of information.

Spending cuts were to prove a key part of the school revolution jigsaw. Clear parallels were emerging with welfare and health, where government policy was developing a similarly toxic mix of radical, fast-paced, structural change and slashed spending. In the summer, the government had already announced swingeing cuts to local authority budgets which were soon to filter through to schools. In the October Comprehensive Spending Review, while the dedicated schools budget was marginally increased by 0.1 per cent (not enough to keep pace with inflation), and an additional £2.5 billion was pledged for a new ‘pupil premium’, an extra sum per pupil for children from low-income families, the overall Department for Education budget fell. Some of the main savings, like the 60 per cent cut to the school building programme and the abolition of a number of education quangos, including the General Teaching Council and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, had already been publicised, as had the axing of the Child Trust funds and one-to-one tuition. The government now announced that it would also scrap the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA), a subsidy of up to £30 a week that allowed many students from poorer homes to stay on at school, and cut £162 million from the School PE and Sports Strategy that had up to now been ring-fenced, to fund 450 schools sport partnerships.

There was public dismay at both these abolitions. Getting rid of the schools sport partnerships was ‘an act of gross stupidity’, one partnership manager told the Daily Telegraph. Under public pressure, Michael Gove restored most of the budget for school sports; but there were reports that he had partly funded this U-turn by deciding instead to abolish Bookstart, an imaginative scheme to offer free books to nearly 3.5 million children at three key ages, from pre-school to the end of primary. A fresh bout of outrage greeted the Bookstart announcement in December: Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, accused the government of behaving like ‘Scrooge at his worst’, and best-selling author Ian McEwan declared himself ‘appalled’ at the move. In response, Department of Education officials were dispatched on Boxing Day to meet with Viv Bird, CEO of Booktrust, which administers the Bookstart scheme, to announce the continuation of funding.⁸ In March 2011, Gove restored a third of the budget for EMA, although this did not stop the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development calling on the government to restore the whole amount in the interests of fairness.⁹ The November 2010 vote to triple tuition fees, despite explicit pre-election promises by the Liberal Democrats to oppose such a move—and widespread, sometimes violent, street protests—contributed significantly to the darkening of the public mood, and the mounting fear and cynicism about public sector reform.

Nothing, however, would stop the Coalition as it steamed ahead with a White Paper, The Importance of Teaching, most of whose proposals were later enshrined in the 2011 Education Bill. University-based teacher training was to be scaled back in favour of practical experience in the classroom via a new network of Teaching Schools, some to be located in the private sector. All new schools would now be either academies or free schools, and, with the Kirklees example in mind perhaps, central government gave itself the right to purchase school land from local authorities to hand straight over to the new ventures. Schools that were not meeting the new ‘floor target’ of 35 per cent GCSEs including English, mathematics and a science (but not to include vocational qualifications like BTEC, which many thought were artificially inflating school results) could be forced to convert to academy status. Schools that wished to convert were now required only to consult when they deemed it ‘appropriate’, and this consultation could be delayed until after an academy order has been made, rendering it virtually meaningless. Free schools could be set up in a number of locations including empty shops, office space or even ice rinks. Local admissions forums, important area-based committees created to scrutinise the fairness of school admissions, were to be abolished—just as a raft of new schools, with enhanced powers over their own admissions, were to be created. The School Adjudicator could no longer make changes to a school’s admission policy in response to a complaint or a referral. These changes may have precipitated the decision of the existing School Adjudicator, Ian Craig, to announce that he would stand down in October 2011, six months before his contract expired.

Meanwhile a fresh row was brewing over the introduction of a new measurement of school quality, the English Baccalaureate, known as the E-Bacc. In order to qualify, pupils had to have a good GCSE in maths, English, two sciences, a humanities subject (but this did not include a GCSE in Humanities), and an ancient or modern foreign language. Many heads were furious to discover that their schools were to be judged retrospectively on the new measure—that is, on GCSEs taken in the summer of 2010. Many were now faced with unpalatable decisions concerning whether to switch pupils halfway through existing GCSE courses to make sure their school performed well in future league tables, or to ignore what many saw as Gove’s arbitrary rulings over what subjects now counted, and stay at the bottom of the pile. Many deplored the absence of subjects like music, art and religious education from the E-Bacc.

A new partiality seemed to have crept into government policy-making. Critics questioned the high number of academy heads and leaders represented on a major review of teaching and learning, announced in March 2011—particularly since academies and free schools were to be exempted from so many government strictures on the curriculum and standards. There were also raised eyebrows at the appointment of ex-Blair adviser Sally Morgan as Chair of a newly slimmed-down Ofsted, given her close links both to ARK, one of the powerful new academy chains, and to the New Schools Network, a government-funded body for facilitating the establishment of free schools. On the curriculum review, announced in early 2011, Gove made plain his preference for ‘a traditional education, sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of eleven, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.’ Later he told teachers that ‘the great tradition of our literature—Dryden, Pope, Swift, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy—should be at the heart of school life.’ But over half this list were already being taught within schools. English teachers also questioned the fact that the only expert in primary-level literacy on the committee overseeing the national curriculum review was Ruth Miskin, the most public advocate of the controversial ‘synthetic phonics’ method of teaching children to read, and whose company Read Write Inc. sells training programmes to schools. Both of the primary heads also appointed to the committee were vocal supporters—and users—of Ms Miskin’s training programme.

There were further embarrassing setbacks for the ‘breakneck Coalition’. Following a judicial review launched by six councils including Nottingham City, Luton and Kent, challenging the legality of the government’s precipitate abandonment of the Building Schools for the Future programme, the High Court found Gove’s failure to consult on BSF cancellations ‘so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power’. Gove dismissed the judgment as a minor technicality. A few weeks later he told Parliament that a college in Doncaster, a new school-building pilot project, was agreed by the government in an impressively short ten weeks. Not true, pointed out Rowan Moore in the Observer: in fact, it took 22 weeks. In the same trenchant piece, Moore, an architectural journalist, observed: ‘If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.’¹⁰

Rowan Moore’s metaphor was a sound one. Behind the glitzy shop-window dressing of the Coalition’s school plans, with their relentless harping on novelty and freedom, there was a deeper and darker agenda. While a British Social Attitudes survey published six months after the 2010 election found that public satisfaction with both health and education had improved dramatically over the past twenty years,¹¹ elements of the Coalition Government set out ruthlessly to undermine public confidence in public services. In order to justify rapid and widespread change, it was vital to the new right that it paint an apocalyptic picture of state education, and project an image of the nation’s schools as places of intellectual mediocrity when not given over to anarchy and indiscipline. Here, it was building on an often dishonourable national prejudice that stretches back decades. Adrian Elliott worked as a head for over twenty years, and found that the public message on schools remained remarkably unchanged over that period; state schools and those who worked in them were a disaster. ‘If anything, the portrayal of state education in England by the media, politicians and business leaders has become more negative. Criticisms [now] appear almost daily in books, newspapers, journals and the broadcast media.’¹²

In a piece for the New Statesman in 2010, Fiona Millar and I looked at the typical image of state schools presented in the press. We found a consistent picture of despair: ‘discarded needles, enforced mediocrity, petty bullying, too much political correctness, not enough Jesus or competitive sport: a distorted picture put out daily by a press and broadcasting media, few of whose leaders use the system they so relentlessly traduce.’ We highlighted a piece in the Sunday Times by one of the paper’s war correspondents, Christina Lamb, who asked the question, ‘What’s wrong with winning?’ In it, Lamb explained in anguished prose why she had to move her son from a state to a private school. The main problem, according to Lamb, was the lack of any competitive drive within what was, by her own account, a happy primary school, led by a ‘firm headmistress and young, dedicated teachers’. Forced to resort to ‘subterfuge’ in order to find out her son’s overall ranking in the class, Lamb was later dismayed to find that on sports day, ‘instead of racing against each other, the children were put into teams with a mix of different ages … with each team doing different activities.’¹³

Such worrying experiences forced Lamb to apply to the nearby oversubscribed private school, where she was deeply reassured by the head’s boasting about everything from sporting achievements to A grades to Oxbridge entrance successes. Lamb makes much of her own state education and avowed abhorrence of the ‘two-tier’ system of education in this country. This theme of reluctant conversion is a common one, with minor variants. A piece by Will Self in the Evening Standard in October 2009 was headlined: ‘I’m a diehard lefty but my son is going to private school’. Having described the reasons why he had to take his son out of a state primary, Self concluded that he could not be accused of hypocrisy, on the apparently watertight grounds that he had never actually believed that state education was an engine of social change. One of the sadder stories in this genre was by William Miller, the middle-aged son of the writer, television presenter and theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller, who, in the Mail on Sunday in February 2009—under the banner headline ‘Atrocious lessons and daily bullying … why I won’t send my children to a state school’—castigated his father for propounding a ‘a mistaken ideology’. According to Miller, he and his two siblings were ‘the victims of the most cavalier of social experiments’: they had been sent to a comprehensive. William Miller was at school in the 1970s. State schools are very different places today. No tales of bullying or poor teaching in a public school over thirty years ago would be used to condemn private education today; they would more probably be filed away under Interesting and Irrelevant Social History, or used to demonstrate the many improvements that have occurred within the sector in the years since.

Every story of this kind relies on often unchallengeable anecdotal detail. Little place is given to the part played by parenting, personality or other behind-the-scenes factors or tensions. According to these writers, and dozens more like them, it is the school and the school alone that causes a child’s lack of achievement or unhappiness. The reader also has no way to address the clear contradictions that arise between these stories. Lamb’s son was in an admittedly happy, co-operative primary where, according to his mother, his ruthless edge was not being sufficiently sharpened. Self’s son was allegedly bullied and tested to the extreme. Miller blames his lack of an academic education on his middle-class parents, while other newspaper features will regularly castigate the middle class for claiming that the state education system, rather than their own privilege and efforts, enabled them to achieve good results. Parents who send their children to inner-city state schools no longer appear vaguely daring so much as disingenuous and dishonest, as Martin Samuel in The Times has argued, because they ruthlessly exploit their own affluence and connections to cover up their children’s poor education.

The real politics of education is never openly discussed in such articles. Lamb declares herself impressed by ‘the astonishing range of facilities and activities’ on offer at the private school she finally chooses for her son. Yet the resource argument, central to the privilege and achievements of the private sector, is treated as a marginal element in her decision, rather than being woven objectively into the story. Even the smallest private school spends about twice what the state sector spends on each pupil, currently around £6,000 a year in England. At the top end of the market, fees are £30,000 a year for boarders. Many private day schools will charge half that.

Similarly, stories of struggling state schools are presented out of context, as if a set of teachers and local authority officials got together and deliberately decided to create a bad school, to prove beyond doubt that comprehensive education really is the engine of mediocrity. Only passing reference is made to the extraordinarily complex issues of school choice, admissions policies, funding or the huge impact that poverty has on the ability of so many children to learn. Part of the fresh attack launched by the Coalition and their allies on state schools involves the claim that poverty is used as an excuse, not by the poor themselves, but by the do-gooding middle class, who actively prevent rigorous learning from taking place; whereas in ‘good’ schools, home background would, of course, form no barrier to learning.

It is not just newspapers that misrepresent our schools. Comprehensives get a rough, sensationalist ride from modern TV. Waterloo Road, the prime-time soap opera, features the popular actress Amanda Burton as no-nonsense super-head Karen Fisher. While Fisher is appealing, her school is not. It has, over time, been both set on fire and demolished by a digger; its lockers are sprayed with graffiti, its students peddle drugs, and its often raddled-looking teachers have the temerity to belong to a trade union.

Two best-selling novels of recent years reinforce this general picture of an out-of-control pupil population in league with the politically motivated, professionally incompetent, or both. The North London school featured in Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, published in 2003, is a den of chaos and appallingly low standards where ‘last year we had 240 pupils sit their GCSEs, and exactly six of them achieved anything higher than a grade E pass.’ Not, then, a fictional representation of Heller’s own North London comprehensive, Haverstock School, which educated among others Oona King and David and Ed Miliband. Mercilessly lampooning the comprehensive school staff as either cynical and weary or sentimental and naive, this supremely English novel reads less like satire than a prolonged act of casual, conservative vandalism.¹⁴

But St George’s, Heller’s fictional school, seems like bliss compared to the hellhole featured in Sebastian Faulks’s best-selling state-of-the-nation novel A Week in December (2009). Radley Graves, an alcoholic, internet-addicted teacher works at a chaotic South London comprehensive in the ‘Lewisham/Catford overlap’ where ‘the kids were allowed to come in late to lessons … to talk pretty much unchecked through a class … not to work if they didn’t fancy it.’¹⁵ The school football team even plays a fixture against St Michael and All Angels, a real school which achieved notoriety when teacher Katharine Birbalsingh spoke publicly about some of its pupils at the Tory Party conference. It has since been announced that the school is to close, following a sharp drop in applications.

Published in spring 2011, Birbalsingh’s thinly fictionalised account of her teaching life, To Miss With Love, immediately became a best-seller. With its string of unappealing caricatures—anxious heads, cynical white liberals, slick, clipboard-toting edu-preneurs and mouthy teenagers, insufficiently challenged by a complacent education establishment—the book did its bit in undermining confidence in state education and softening up public opinion in favour of government reforms.

Gove’s agenda fitted perfectly with this cultural and political backdrop. As a new minister, there he was on the platform at the autumn 2010 Tory Party Conference, nodding along as Katherine Birbalsingh made her impassioned speech declaring, to huge applause, that the system was ‘broken’. During his own Conference speech Gove lamented how this ‘waste of talent, this squandering of human potential … this grotesque failure to give all our fellow citizens an equal chance is a reproach to our conscience.’ Launching the Education Bill in February 2011, he said: ‘I would love to celebrate a greater level of achievement, but I am afraid that this is the dreadful inheritance that our children face.’

* * *

Two key themes shaped Gove’s assault on the nation’s schools. The first touched on the apparent sharp drop in the performance of UK schools in recent years, as judged by the findings of PISA—Programme for International Student Assessment: a series of tests of fifteen-year-olds across the globe, in developed nations, in maths, English and science. The release of this sort of cross-country information had become, in the words of education academic Stephen Gorard, a kind of annual ‘education Olympics’ although, until recently, discussion of PISA results had been largely confined to academic and educational circles, with occasional comments by government ministers, usually regarding rising trends. PISA results for 2006, for example—which showed a slippage from 2000—had received very little coverage.

Intensive press coverage of the 2009 results, boosted by regular negative commentary from Gove, gave the impression of startling educational decline under New Labour. Inevitably, it was not that clear cut. Of the sixty-five nations that took part, England was an above average performer, coming in sixteenth in science, twenty-eighth in maths, and twenty-fifth in literacy. The position was further complicated by a recent increase in the number of participating countries, bringing in some of the ferociously competitive new ‘tiger economies’, and questions concerning the validity of the 2003 UK sample. Some questioned the legitimacy of the entire exercise. According to Stephen Gorard, ‘International comparisons also have a downside. [They] encourage policy-makers to concentrate on improvements relative to other countries rather than absolute changes over time. Above all, they seem to encourage glib remedies.’¹⁶

Gove put the PISA 2009 results down to a lack of traditional rigour in the nation’s schools under New Labour, so justifying his argument for further market reforms. But there is an alternative, almost counterintuitive, explanation, that has been put forward in recent years by experts like Professor Peter Mortimore, former director of the Institute of Education. Might the UK’s apparent decline be, at least in part, the result of intensive teaching to the test, so reducing pupil’s broader knowledge and skills, and their ability to make the kind of independent intellectual judgements that help them to do well in evaluations, such as PISA, which actually cannot be prepared for? And what of the growing gap between the highest and lowest achieving UK students? More competition, and increased testing, might only make it worse.¹⁷

At the same time, Gove conveniently ignored information which presented a more complex picture of school achievement. In 2007 England finished in the top seven countries in all four Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests, taken by 425,000 pupils worldwide, leading the Times Educational Supplement to state that ‘England joins the elite for maths and science.’¹⁸ Jon Coles, director-general for Education Standards at the Department for Education and chair of the National Curriculum Review Advisory Committee, told the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education at the Royal Society in March 2011: ‘Over the last ten years, just looking back at the figures, we have an awful lot to look at that suggests progress, and that’s good and positive.’ The number of people coming into maths teaching over the last ten years had doubled, he said, while the number passing the subject at GCSE had grown very significantly, and had doubled at A level. The take-up of further maths A levels had also increased markedly in recent years.¹⁹

Another favourite theme of Gove’s was the tiny number of children on free school meals who made it to Oxbridge. He constantly referred to these figures, using different comparators, depending on his opponent of the moment. In the Queen’s Speech debate, he pointed out that more pupils went to Oxbridge from St Paul’s girls’ school in London in one year than from the entire cohort of children on free school meals—a clear dig at acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, an ex-St Paul’s pupil, who was sitting opposite him. By the second reading of the Education Bill in early 2011, several MPs commented during the debate on the frequency with which Gove referred to this single aspect of the education system, using it to hammer home his broader point that social mobility had stalled under New Labour.

Jenny Chapman, the Labour MP for Darlington, challenged him on his narrow definitions, observing that ‘the secretary of state often speaks about social mobility in a way that might lead people to think that he understood it.’ She pointed out that he only referred to statistics on free school meal take-up and admission to Oxford and Cambridge, whereas in her own constituency of Darlington, she said, ‘five or six years ago there were one or two wards where a young woman of eighteen or nineteen would be more likely to be a mother than to be a student in higher education. I can report with great pride that that is no longer the case. Teenage pregnancies are reducing, and participation in higher education in those wards is improving. That needs to be taken into account when we discuss social mobility in the House.’²⁰

Chapman’s argument was an important one. There were clearly schools in difficulty all around the UK, particularly in areas where poverty, unemployment and social problems disfigured neighbourhoods; family background remains the single most important determinant in a child and a school’s success—or lack of. But there had also been significant improvements in state education, particularly in previously low-attaining schools. GCSE results in 2009 were the highest ever for London. There had also been a marked fall in the number of children leaving primary school without reaching the expected levels in English and maths; by 2010, 60 per cent of pupils had five ‘good’ GCSEs, more than three times the proportion that left school with five O levels in the so-called golden age of the grammars. And as Jenny Chapman had suggested, more higher education places were being taken up by young women and men from low-income families. Even Gove’s ministerial colleagues presented a more nuanced, complex picture of school achievement. Lord Hill, leader of the Coalition in the House of Lords, told a conference in January 2011, just after the publication of the Education Bill, that ‘there is much to admire and build on in the current system: hundreds of outstanding schools, tens of thousands of great teachers, the best generation of heads and leaders ever.’

* * *

The new school revolution was not just happening in government. Gove had powerful allies, keen to promote, both politically and professionally, the new strategy for schools. In the autumn of 2010 it emerged that Gove had granted half a million pounds to one of his former aides, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, to set up the New Schools Network, an advisory body for parents and teachers who wanted to create their own schools. For Rachel Wolf, ‘parents know what is best for their children, so if they are unhappy with what is on offer, why shouldn’t they be free to set up alternatives?’²¹ Wolf is, as it happens, the daughter of prominent academic Alison Wolf, who produced a report on vocational education for the government in spring 2011. Another voluble, occasionally vociferous, contributor to the debate was the journalist Toby Young, who led a high-profile campaign to set up the West London Free School in Hammersmith and Fulham, where the Conservative council gave him a warm welcome. Katharine Birbalsingh also became a public champion of the new schools policy. In May 2011 she announced plans to open a free school in Lambeth, apparently with the help of Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College—a PR marriage surely made in heaven. For Seldon, private-school involvement in free schools would ‘not only profoundly enrich the lives of many children from less advantaged backgrounds, it would also give the independent school, its teachers and pupils much, because state schools in significant ways have forged ahead of independent schools, over the past ten years in particular.’²² Seldon’s view of the public sector is not one expressed by most private-school heads, nor, in fact, does it chime with much of what he himself has written on the rise of ‘factory schooling’ and a general lack of pedagogic imagination in state education.

When the new educational evangelists bemoan the current condition of the nation’s state schools, they invariably argue that the comprehensive ‘experiment’ has failed. Once, the charge from the right was that comprehensives let down bright, poor children who could only truly succeed in grammar schools. Now the argument has subtly shifted—or crudely widened—and comprehensives are accused of failing all children on virtually all fronts, through low academic standards and poor vocational provision: the central finding of Alison Wolf’s report in spring 2011. This position chimes with the right’s broader refusal to recognise any significant correlation between family background, poverty in general, rising economic inequality and school outcomes. Almost a third of British children live in poverty, and UK children regularly score badly in international league tables in terms of general well-being and happiness; but the idea that low incomes might still form a significant barrier to learning is now dismissed as a moral frailty of the left, or soppy middle-class posturing.²³ Such arguments lay behind the Coalition decision in early summer 2011 to abolish the publication of Contextual Value-Added measures in league tables, one way in which government was able to track the relative achievement of schools with high numbers of children from deprived backgrounds, but now apparently deemed patronising to the poor.

Critics from the new educational right regularly imply that the entire edifice of state education is rotten and requires demolition rather than steady improvement. Toby Young uses his blog for the Telegraph and column for the Spectator to launch regular attacks on so-called low standards, political correctness and comprehensive reform—and reformers—while Katherine Birbalsingh, in a clear echo of Tony Blair’s remarks about ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’, frequently lambasts poor discipline, limited intellectual ambition and a ‘culture of excuses’ that ‘keeps poor children poor’. Virtually, all problems in state schools are laid at the door of poor teachers, middle-class liberals and an ineffectual and yet over-controlling state. A highly sympathetic interview with Birbalsingh in the Observer suggested that the ex-teacher articulates a ‘sense of frustration and despair felt by many people across the political spectrum at the variable and frequently poor quality of state education in our large cities and towns … Most of the schools she has worked in have been adjudged “good” or “outstanding” by Ofsted, as are 60 per cent of all schools. She wanted to write the book, she says, to show what “good” or “outstanding” can mean in the inner city.’ The interviewer, Andrew Anthony, summed up Birbalsingh’s views as follows: ‘It’s safe to say that “mediocre and poor” would seem a more appropriate verdict.’²⁴ If parents who sent their children to local schools weren’t in despair before reading the Observer piece, they certainly might be afterwards.

For the new educational evangelists, therefore, only the new schools can act as a genuine engine of social mobility, another sign of how the education debate has subtly shifted. For decades, the issue at the heart of the school wars concerned grammars versus comprehensives. Support for the grammars has in recent years gone largely underground. Now, the academies and free schools are presented as the new face, or necessary modernisation, of the comprehensive ideal. Some of the new school providers feel a strong sense of mission, tinged with an almost religious fervour, to improve the lot of the ‘disadvantaged’. As the director of one chain of academies told me, ‘We are all really fighting for the same thing.’

Yet there is a glaring contradiction at the heart of this position. On the one hand, there is a strong emphasis on the non-selective, inclusive character of free schools and academies. A rigorous education should be available to all, regardless of class or ethnic or religious background. Toby Young continually uses the term comprehensive, albeit illogically: the West London Free School was, originally, designated a ‘comprehensive grammar’ (although as one debating opponent put it, this was rather like talking about a vegetarian butcher). On the other hand, as Young’s position implies, the new school revolutionaries strongly support academic selection. When, during the debate on the Education Bill in May 2011, Nick Gibb, the minister for schools, refused government backing to an amendment put forward by Graham Brady MP, a grammar-school supporter, proposing that private schools that come in under the free schools umbrella should be allowed to continue to academically select, observers of the debate thought Gibb’s rejection of the amendment flat and unconvincing. After all, the Tory party and its allies clearly celebrate, and confirm, academic selection wherever they find it. Grammar schools that have converted to academies have maintained their right to academically select. And Gove told a Friends of Grammar Schools parliamentary reception, in the autumn of 2010, that ‘my foot is hovering over the pedal’ concerning the expansion of selection within the state system. Clearly, the new education evangelists believe in non-selection—but only for all those who have not already been selected.

The new school revolutionaries regularly swing in behind Gove and Cameron in their attacks on the ‘educational establishment’ or ‘the forces of resistance’—echoes, once again, of Tony Blair and his attack on the ‘forces of conservatism’. Before the 2010 election, Cameron told The Times that Tory school plans ‘will mean some big battles with forces of resistance. Some Local Education Authorities might not like it, some of the education establishment won’t like it.’²⁵ (In fact, there have been no Local Education Authorities since 2006, when Blair abolished them.) It is not quite clear who or what was meant by the amorphous term ‘the education establishment’, but it almost certainly embraced university-based teacher training, local authorities and trade unions, all of which have found their roles severely constrained by the new government. Cameron’s war cry was reiterated a few months into government when the Sunday Times claimed he was preparing to take on the teaching unions rather as Margaret Thatcher faced down the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s. Coming out of Waiting for Superman, the film about US charter schools, in late November last year, Toby Young tweeted, ‘Just saw Waiting For Superman. Spellbinding indictment of teachers unions. Made by director of Inconvenient Truth. Oh happy days.’

Claims that it is the teachers’ unions who use bullying tactics were a little strained by one revelation in January 2011: it emerged that Lord Hill, the minister responsible for academies, had strongly hinted to schools interested in converting to academy status that the government might turn down their request, if the school chose to abide by national pay agreements for teachers—prompting the unions to consider legal action.²⁶ ‘It’s like tanks rolling over your lawn … while government ministers are polite and charming in private,’ observed Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in spring 2011. ‘There’s never any ceasefire; there’s never a chance to map out the lie of the land—they just carry on, and they are going to be left with many unintended consequences.’

There are some important silences, however. Probably the most significant development in the new schools revolution is the massively expanded role it will give to the private sector, a path partially cleared under New Labour with its city academy programme, encouraging private sponsors and charitable bodies into state education. Several companies already run schools in England, and many more provide important services to them. With the new free schools and academies, the door is wide open to the expansion of the market. Yet one would scarcely know it from public debate on education. Unsurprisingly, little reference is made by any of the new school celebrities or politicians to the growing private control of public education, or to the cost of this to the taxpayer who is, in effect, underwriting the latest round of privatisation of state education.

The government has continued, if with rather less conviction, to promote the idea that free schools represent the authentic voice of the people. The Department for Education website broadcasts a number of videos promoting the educational aims and vision of successful bidders. These short, artful films project a compelling picture of ordinary, decent parents and teachers working hard to create good schools, denied to them by a mix of local state bureaucrats and egalitarian ideologues. What these films do not dwell on is the role of the private sector in much of the free school movement, nor the extent to which many of the new school campaigns are dividing communities. Increasingly, free schools are like the educational equivalent of fireworks: random, concentrated explosions that appear to come out of nowhere, startling and polarising communities, alienating as many parents, teachers, school leaders and governors as they attract.

A new free school planned for Wandsworth, South London, the Bolingbroke Academy—sponsored by ARK, the academy chain—quickly became known as the ‘bankers’ free school’, as its supporters included a number of bankers working for various City firms including Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Plans for the new school were strongly opposed by many local parents and teachers as well as by local representatives of the GMB trade union who, in an unusual intervention, accused the free school group of deliberately excluding one of the local primaries that served a markedly less affluent community, as a ‘feeder school’—that is, a primary with special links to a local secondary. The Bolingbroke conflict was given the deceptively light-hearted tag of The Battle of Nappy Valley. Eventually, the whole intractable matter was put out to ‘consultation’. Similarly, a planned free school in Stoke by Nayland in Suffolk drew protests from a local head who believed it was being designed to siphon off the wealthier families of the area. Mike Foley, head of Great Cornard Upper School, said: ‘The suspicion is that parents in that [free school] group don’t want our children mixing with oiks. Whatever the motivation, the impact of it is to create this division. Although we have children from diverse backgrounds, they flourish here. The view here is that children shouldn’t be educated in a bubble.’²⁷

Meanwhile, several ailing private schools, and ambitious religious groups, were clamouring to come under the shelter of the state’s umbrella. In January 2011, it was announced that 25 Steiner schools, whose curriculum has a humanistic, artistic emphasis, were in talks with the government about becoming free schools; but elements of the Steiner ideology remain highly controversial, and the decision was thus delayed.²⁸ Seven out of ten free-school applications register a faith-based ethos. The Everyday Champions Church in Newark, an Evangelical church in Nottingham which intends to teach creationism as part of its science curriculum, handed over its plans for a 625-place school on the day before the first ever free school conference in January 2011, where Gove declared that ‘applications’ from creationist groups would be considered, with each judged on its merits. But only a few weeks later, after insistent representations from the British Centre for Science Education, Gove appeared to back down, claiming that it was ‘crystal-clear that teaching creationism is at odds with scientific fact’.

Free-school development has been increasingly constrained by practical factors. As many had warned, setting up a school is a major venture; those who have made it through the various stages have mostly done so with the backing of a charitable body or an existing education provider, although occasionally an individual like Young, who wields unusual political and public influence, appears to manage it alone. By May 2011, a year after the formation of the Coalition, only four groups had entered into a funding agreement, or contract, with the secretary of state—the West London Free School in Hammersmith and Fulham, Eden Primary School in Haringey, St Luke’s Church of England Primary School in Camden, and The Free School in Norwich—giving the lie to predictions that between ten and twenty would open in September 2011. Altogether, 323 groups had applied to start free schools. Of these applications, forty-one had been approved to the business case and planning stage, and seventeen to the pre-opening stage. Early criticisms of the apparent ease with which free school applications were approved had forced the government to slow down the process. Andrew Nadin, for example, an energetic opponent of a free school proposal in Bedford and Kempston, had persistently raised questions concerning a petition the Bedford and Kempston group had presented to the Department of Education claiming to show widespread support for the establishment of another school in the area. In the early summer of 2011 rumours began to circulate that Gove was trying to persuade school leaders in one London borough to back the establishment of a new free school, instead of another academy—a sign, surely, of the minister’s realisation that his flagship policy was faltering.

And who was paying for the new schools? There were rumoured plans in the summer of 2010 that the free school meals budget was to be raided to pay for free schools. Not surprisingly, this proposal was soon ditched. The government then suggested that free schools were to be largely funded from a special IT fund. The cost of free schools and the new academies became a more pressing issue as cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review started to bite. The entire project began to look decidedly less exciting, and potentially offensive, as existing state schools battled with leaking classrooms and cuts in one-to-one tuition. Many teenagers were facing a bleak future, without the financial support of EMA in the sixth form, and the prospect of soaring tuition fees. According to a report on Radio 4’s Today programme in early 2011, the Department had set aside £50 million in capital funding when the policy was first announced. But Today revealed that Bolingbroke, the planned free school in Wandsworth, was costing a total of £28 million in public money: £13 million from Wandsworth Council, to buy the building, plus £15 million of public money to refurbish it. According to Toby Young’s own estimates, the capital costs of the West London Free School were to be £12 million. While parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests did not elicit much hard information, it was revealed in April 2011 that the government had spent £21 million in its first year alone to private consultants to help launch the free school policy; at the same time, almost 100 civil servants were being directly employed on the policy. According to Labour’s shadow education secretary, Andy Burnham: ‘Pledges are being made; ministers are going round the country waving cheque books at people wanting to set up their pet projects. When the Government have cancelled Building Schools for the Future, it is unacceptable that they are not prepared to answer parliamentary questions to tell us how much money has been committed to these new schools. It gives the impression that, shamefully, ideology and not need is driving the allocation of capital to schools.’²⁹

They may have attracted a lot of media attention, but increasingly free schools began to look like a distraction from the main show: the hundreds, and potentially thousands, of schools that were being enticed to become independent of local authorities. This was, indeed, the silent revolution, as one magazine article named it. The government’s initial offer to ‘outstanding’ schools to convert to academy status had been extended to ‘good’ schools; it was rumoured that conversion would soon be possible for those with ‘satisfactory’ status, if they were willing to work in partnership with other schools. Plainly, the aim was to create a majority of privately managed institutions, including many primaries, leaving a rump of struggling schools within the ambit of local authorities, themselves undermined by savage budget cuts.

The government was clearly playing up schools’ anxieties about funding in an age of austerity. And it seemed to be working. In April 2011 a survey of its members conducted by The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) found that 46 per cent had either already converted or were planning to do so, with a further 34 per cent undecided. Only 19 per cent said they would definitely not go down the academy route. In May the government announced that over a thousand schools had applied to become academies since June 2010: 647 applications had been approved, and 384 had already converted. The total number of academies, including those opened under New Labour, now stood at over 650. As the government press release boasted, ‘schools are becoming academies at a rate of two every day.’

At the heart of the strategy was money. Opponents of the ‘conversion’ plans became increasingly suspicious of the government claim that the new academies would enjoy no funding advantages, and that the move to so-called independence was all about the wish to be free from the mythical stranglehold of local government. In early January 2011, every Local Authority suffered a top-slice from their general grant to help fund the academies programme, irrespective of how many academies they had in their area. The national top-slice for 2011–12 was £148 million, rising to £265 million in 2012–13. This reduction in the budget, in addition to cuts announced the previous year, was justified on the grounds that the schools would have received the money anyway, in terms of services provided by the local authorities; now they were merely being given the budgets directly, to buy in services themselves. But the decision left many academies far better off than they would have been if they had stayed with the local authority. The question was, for how long?

Nigel Gann, chair of governors at Stanchester Community School in Somerset, resigned when the school decided to convert to an academy. He wrote to his local paper in April 2011, ‘Why the rush? Well, it’s money, of course. There’s a substantial incentive on offer—a sum per pupil for secondaries that are able to convert before September this year; about half of that for those that follow shortly after … Since the only extra money available for schools that opt to become academies will be taken from money the local authority holds centrally for support services, how might the movement of secondary schools out of the authority affect funding for primary and special schools and others remaining?’ Gann was not a lone voice. There were growing protests at the high-handed, unnecessarily hasty manner in which academy status was being rushed through.³⁰

Even some of the heads of new academies declared themselves surprised at the amount of money they had gained through the move. As one head teacher in Cheltenham told the Guardian, ‘The increase in funding has been dramatic.’ The Guardian was shown a number of documents by newly converted academies, including four grammar schools; all showed that the schools had become significantly better off as a result, with net benefits ranging from £150,000 a year to £570,000 in one case. The schools were supposedly being given money that would allow them to buy back the additional services, including behaviour support, school improvement and central administrative staff, that they would have received from the local authority, a funding stream known as Lacseg (local authority central spend equivalent grant). But once the schools had calculated how much it would cost them to buy the services back, some found they were incurring a clear profit of up to six figures.³¹

Over the course of a year, I talked to several head teachers, many of them leading outstanding inner-city schools. Most were opposed, in principle, to the policy of taking good schools out of the local authority, but with severe cuts looming, the government offer was a poisoned chalice. The word used most often was ‘bribe’. There was also considerable uncertainty over conversion financing, and how long it would last. Schools interested in converting to academy status were encouraged to use a ‘ready reckoner’ on the DfE website to see how much better off they would be if they chose to go down the academy route. According to a governor of an ‘outstanding’ secondary in the north-west of England that has chosen to convert, ‘the figures are very unclear, but it seemed from the ready reckoner that at first the school would get an extra two million over five years, which was very tempting. Then it went down to 1.5 million. And then down to a million … The problem is, we don’t yet know the extra costs. We are going to have to hire a finance director, more staff. We are going to have to buy in office services that were provided by the local authority and get an audit done, sort out our own pensions liability.’ According to Peter Downes, a former head teacher, funding expert and Liberal Democrat councillor, who tabled a successful motion against the academy and free school programme at the party’s annual conference in 2010: ‘The dice are massively loaded in favour of academies, in terms of funding. But my thesis is that this is simply not sustainable.’

The long-delayed implementation of the pupil premium in December did little to allay schools’ fears. For each of its pupils on free school meals—that is, from a household with an income of less than £16,000—a school was to receive the ‘pupil premium’, an annual additional amount of £430 per pupil, with head teachers deciding how it was to be distributed. Gove promised £625 million in 2011–12, increasing to £2.5 billion by the end of 2014–15. ‘It’s not going to mean anything for us, once you take the rest of [the cuts] into account,’ one head teacher told me, shaking his head despairingly. Andy Burnham called the premium ‘a con … what was meant to be additional money for the most deprived, will simply recycle funds from one school to another. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul.’

Into this anxious and uncertain atmosphere over school funding, the government decided in January 2011 to release a mass of figures into the public domain—in the name of transparency in government—on individual school budgets in England. While this revealed that the average figure per pupil per year is £5,547.13, it appeared that some boroughs and schools were spending far more, and some far less. Ryeish Green School in Wokingham, which had closed in August 2010, had spent a staggering £32,937.91 pounds per pupil in a year, while All Saints Catholic Centre for Learning in Knowsley, Liverpool, had spent only £1,529.81. The local authority with the highest average spending per pupil per year—£8,528.50—was the East London borough of Hackney; the local authority with the lowest—£4,310.05—was Knowsley in Merseyside.³² While some heads protested at the dumping of what they thought to be dangerously undifferentiated data into the public domain, presenting school budgets out of context, the Coalition used the publication of the figures to argue that it was not government funding that mattered so much as how schools used it.

By the close of its first year in government, the full extent—if not yet the full implications—of the schools revolution was becoming evident. It was clear that one of the principal aims of the Tory-dominated Coalition was dramatically to dismantle the role of local authorities in relation to education. A democratically accountable public service, nationally directed but locally administered, was fast being replaced by a state-subsidised and centrally controlled quasi-market. Under proposals published in late May 2011, successful schools were to be allowed to expand—despite serious questions concerning the practicability, not to mention desirability, of such a plan—and so-called ‘poor’ schools were to be allowed to wither and die. In July, the Guardian confirmed that civil servants privately advised ministers that schools should be allowed to fail, if government was serious about reform.³³

Schools policy was increasingly rigged in favour of the academies and free schools, that were granted a range of special freedoms and funds. While six local authorities awaited the government’s verdict on its earlier decision to axe their school building programmes, Michael Gove announced £800 million worth of capital funding to refurbish dozens of academies around the country. A footnote to the new draft admissions code intimated that academies and free schools—but not maintained schools—were to be allowed to prioritise children on free school meals in their admissions policy. Predictably, this proposal was represented in the media as a bold and innovative move towards greater fairness. But if implemented, it would not only hand the ‘new’ schools valuable extra revenue—via the pupil premium—but might open the door for some schools to ‘cherry pick’ higher-attaining children on low incomes, further destabilising the intake of neighbourhood maintained schools. By May 2011, the Department of Education website did not even list community or comprehensive schools as one of the chief school types in England. Only faith schools got a mention. From being the great reviled, they had become the officially disappeared.

At the heart of the new schools revolution was a canny political con trick: the swift but steady transfer of resources from the needy to the better-off, in the name of the disadvantaged. While the government was not yet facing the kind of opposition that its proposed changes to the NHS had by now provoked, there were many, including some from within the Coalition’s Liberal Democrat partners, who were angered and dismayed by the speed, range and brutal consequences of the government’s education policy. These included Councillor Peter Downes who declared of the new funding arrangements for the academies: ‘This is directing resources to the most privileged. In this way, life gets harder for schools at the bottom of the heap.’ Faced with reductions in both central government grants and with further money clawed back from the Dedicated Schools Grant, now used to fund academies, Downe’s own authority, Cambridgeshire County Council, had to make significant reductions in services to black and ethnic-minority groups, disabled children, early years services, teenage pregnancy programmes, special needs teachers, and sports and hobbies grants for vulnerable young people; further cuts were planned in music programmes, services to disabled children and early years work. Cambridgeshire’s share of the ‘top-slice’ cut was £1.7 million. The Cambridgeshire Cabinet took the decision to protect funding to the Children and Young People’s Services area for the year 2011–12. According to Peter Downes, ‘Had they not done so, the service reductions would have been even more severe. But we hold our breath for next year when the Cambridgeshire top-slice rises to £3.1 million.’

‘Savage’ was the summing up of former Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley Green, who claimed that society’s most vulnerable—those in care, disabled children, young carers, young offenders and those with mental health issues—would bear the brunt of a decline in services that were already inadequate, following further cuts to the Connexions career advice, Future Jobs fund, Youth Opportunity Fund, Youth Capital Fund and Working Neighbourhood fund. His conclusion was chilling. ‘We are witnessing the destruction of many of the building bricks of support for children and young people to achieve their full potential in life. It is desperately worrying. I see little in their place to inspire confidence that this generation will be looked after by government. It could spell the end of hope and expectation for many of them.’³⁴