Free schools work, so don’t let Labour or the Lib Dems dismantle them
WE WRITE as current and former headteachers and school leaders of good and outstanding autonomous schools across the country committed to the very best in state education. FASNA — the Freedom and Autonomy for Schools National Association — has helped build a consensus over 25 years which recognises that diversity and self- determination help shape outstanding education. We are firmly committed to the maintenance of current academy freedoms.
International evidence shows that the most successful education systems benefit from schools with academy-style freedoms.
The freedoms which have come with academy status have helped FASNA schools to improve education for children in our own schools and also enabled us to work better together to raise standards in other schools.
The evidence shows that primary schools which have converted to academy status are doing better than other schools — they are more likely to be ranked ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted and are more likely to improve from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’.
Secondary schools which have converted to academy status outperform other schools by a margin of almost 10 per cent.
But as school leaders we are concerned that recent statements from Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians suggest they might not protect all the freedoms which schools and teachers now enjoy and which are helping to drive up standards across the board. Though Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt said that Labour would not ‘go back to the old days of the local authority running all the schools’, Ed Miliband has said Labour would ‘ have a proper local authority framework for all schools’.
And a Liberal Democrat education spokesman told a recent FASNA conference that he could not support the freedom for schools to vary pay and conditions or to vary the curriculum, and he felt that schools needed local control.
Any erosion of school freedoms through local authority or government regulation or overbearing ‘middle-tier’ structures will reduce the capacity of schools to perform well in the future.
We call on all political leaders to guarantee that all current academy freedoms, including those relating to pay and conditions and the curriculum, will be maintained after the General Election.
This is not the time to stop something that is working to the benefit of so many children in schools.