“It’s consultation Jim, but not as we know it” – the inverted world of Free Schools

WFDSS has now received letters from both Oasis and Tauheedul Free Schools in response to our ‘democratic challenge’. Our letter to both organisations did three things:

• It sought details of what consultation had taken place with the community prior to both organisations submitting their proposals to the DfE
• It set out what we expected both organisations to do to show that they were consulting in a meaningful way with all the stakeholders in our community.
• It called on them to confirm how they were going to meet this expectation.

The basic point is that the minimum that citizens in a democratic society should be able to expect of anyone who intends to set up a school is that the people doing it can demonstrate that they have taken into account the impact their proposal on the community, on the other schools in the borough and the local area.

The responses are very revealing about the strange, inverted world of Free Schools.

Oasis’s reply asks us to post the letter in full for all our supporters to see, so here it is. It contains no details either of past or future intentions over consultation. Instead, the letter says,

“I am writing to advise you that a full response will be made after we have heard whether our application for the proposed new school has been approved by the Department for Education. We are expecting this announcement to be made in the next few weeks; it may be after the 10 May 2013 deadline stipulated in your letter.”

Tauheedul’s response, which you can read at the bottom, is similarly unenlightening. Vague claims are made about the past consultation and about intentions to consult in the future but without concrete details. Tauheedul claim they have been

“actively working with members of the local community for over 18 months. During this time, we have engaged in a regular dialogue and consultation with a whole range of individual and community stakeholders, including the Local Authority and local residents. We have taken on board their comments, aspirations and concerns in developing our proposal for the 'Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls' that is currently being considered by the Department for Education. We are aware of our obligations regarding statutory consultation. Should we receive initial approval from the DfE, the current plans are to engage in a comprehensive consultation between June and July 2013. The detailed plans will be on our website www.tauheedulschools.com.”

In sum, both organisations are distinctly vague and evasive about their past consultation. Tauheedul’s statement, for example, talks about ‘a whole range of individual and community stakeholders’ but provides no details, nor does it mention schools. Neither organisation makes any effort to commit to meet our expectations. We will be pursuing the claims made in Tauheedul’s statement, in particular. This is not as easy as it might sound. Interestingly, a google search on Tauheedul's proposed 'Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls' produces only the document at the DfE that lists applications received. There is no other information about the proposal available via the internet.

But the crux of the issue would appear to be this. The Department for Education is going to make a judgment about whether these school proposals should be approved without any publicly available evidence of any meaningful consultation or impact assessment.

If full details of the two applications are not made public until after the DfE gives approval, in what meaningful sense can the DfE decision be said to take account of informed local concerns? How can the DfE show that it is aware of any concerns raised by the community in deciding whether to approve the school or not?

Secondly, if comprehensive and consultation follows DfE approval, can any consultation launched fulfil the statutory obligation to consult on the question of ‘whether’ there will be a free school or not, or will it in effect be about how an already approved free school is set-up? How can consultation be said to be at a formative stage when the proposal has been approved by the DfE?

The government seems to have designed a profoundly anti-democratic system for setting up new schools. A government department makes decisions that will have a deep impact on our local schools without any evidence of any democratic process, either formal or informal and we cannot hold them accountable. Organisations wishing to set up a new school appear to feel under no obligation to hold any meaningful consultation, take account of the impact of their proposals or uphold the basic standards of transparency and accountability required of other public bodies.

If or when the Department sees fit to pronounce on the proposals they have in front of them from Oasis and Tauheedul, people in Waltham Forest who have concerns about Free Schools, academies, government education policies, increasing segregation or even just basic democracy will have to make their voices heard, because the system appears to have been designed not to listen.

***

 
Tauheedul’s response, dated 12 May 2013:

Dear Jonathan,

 

Thank you for your e-mail.

 

 

We appreciate the time that you have taken out in learning about our project.

As you may be aware we have been actively working with members of the local community for over 18 months. During this time, we have engaged in a regular dialogue and consultation with a whole range of individual and community stakeholders, including the Local Authority and local residents.

We have taken on board their comments, aspirations and concerns in developing our proposal for the 'Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls' that is currently being considered by the Department for Education.

We are aware of our obligations regarding statutory consultation. Should we receive initial approval from the DfE, the current plans are to engage in a comprehensive consultation between June and July 2013. The detailed plans will be on our websitewww.tauheedulschools.com.

We have looked at your website and do share your aspirations for greater choice and a better standard of education in Waltham Forest. We hope that all members of the community can work together to address these challenges in the coming years.

Fiona McGrath

Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls

London’s school places crisis (and how academies and free schools are not helping)

Last week saw the publication of a very interesting and hard-hitting report from London Councils, the body that lobbies central government and the Mayor of London on behalf of the capital’s Local Authorities.

The message of ‘Do the Maths’, which made it to the front page of the Evening Standard, was stark enough. London is facing a shortfall of 118,000 primary and secondary school places up until 2016/7. It accounts for 42% of the total shortfall in England, yet it is only receiving 36% of the capital allocation it needs for 2013 and 2014.

The report says, ‘schools need to be expanded and new ones built’. Yet London’s funding settlement for schools is only for one year, making effective planning of provision very difficult, especially as it takes at least 18 months to build a new school.

The report makes an impassioned plea for an improved capital funding formula that fully recognises London’s unique pressure and for longer funding cycles to enable proper investment and planning.

The document needs to be seen for what it is, a lobbying document designed to put pressure on central government to relax the funding environment. But the problems are real enough.

It might be thought that this was meat and drink to the advocates of new Free Schools in Waltham Forest, for example. But things aren’t quite so straightforward.

In an interesting passage near the end of the document, the report notes that ‘there are currently 229 secondary academies within London – this represents over half of all secondary schools in the capital. This affects where local authorities can expand capacity as academies are under no obligation to expand as they are outside local authority control. In the case of free schools [effectively the same as academies in this case – outside local authority control, ed.] the challenge will be to ensure that their location best supports areas where there is a particular pressure on places’ (p. 9)

There are two interesting things here:

1. Academies are making things worse. Operating outside of local authority control, they can act independently in what they see as their own interest, regardless of the wider social need. There’s nothing the Local Authorities can do about this. And as noted above, building more free schools will simply aggravate this.

2. The local authorities identify it as a challenge to ensure that free schools are built in the right places. That decision is not made by the local authority but by the sponsors and the Department of Education.

And the evidence suggests that free schools are not being built in the right places. Indeed the Local Schools Network has revealed many instances of free schools being built in places where there are surplus places. In addition to which these schools are getting favourable treatment in terms of capital funding, while the capital’s established community schools are starved.

In the same week that the London Councils report was published, the Public Accounts Committee published its own report into the Department of Education’s spending on the academies programme and it was scathing.

The PAC found that a £1 billion overspend on the academies programme was caused by the ‘excessively complex and inefficient academy funding system’. £400 million had been taken out of funds earmarked for intervention in underperforming schools and spent instead on funding academy conversion, even where the schools in question were already Good or Outstanding (Thomas Gamuel, anyone?). The committee was also deeply concerned about the lack of accountability of academies. Even Tory MP Richard Bacon said that the lack of transparency in spending, especially in chains like Oasis, was ‘mind-blowing’.

So, to summarise. We have a genuine shortage of places that could be tackled by an expansion of existing local authority schools and the building of new schools. This would be most efficiently done by building local authority schools which could be expanded or contracted according to need and which could be allocated to the areas where need is greatest (as argued on this site, here).

Instead, government policy means that money will be wasted on converting schools to academies and building free schools wherever people shout the loudest, increasing the number of schools competing against one another and entirely outside of local authority control.

It looks as though the government is more intent on smashing up the democratically accountable comprehensive system than tackling the very real issues of provision in London and our children are to pay the price.