Could a small-scale political project, close to the heart of successive Conservative prime ministers, really have been put ahead of such a fundamental aim as keeping children safe at school?
This troubling question was provoked by an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme last week, in which Jonathan Slater, the Department for Education’s permanent secretary from 2016 to 2020, warned that ministers had prioritised opening more free schools – one of the Conservatives’ high-profile policies from 2010 – ahead of rebuilding work for the rest of England’s 21,600-school estate.
Free schools, in which local people, teachers and academy trusts were given the chance to open state-funded schools if they could convince the government there was local demand, were initially an element of David Cameron’s “big society” idea.
The interview, of course, was prompted by the crisis over school buildings, with almost 150 schools in England kept closed or partially closed at the start of term because of DfE concerns about the use of ageing reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) in their construction.
Slater said: “The top political priority in respect of school buildings when I was the permanent secretary was in opening new free schools … For me, as an official, it seemed that it should have been second to safety. But politics is about choices, and that was the choice they made.”
Slater was not going out on a limb. In his 2017 book, Coalition Diaries, the Liberal Democrat former schools minister David Laws criticised the prioritisation of the policy by Michael Gove, education secretary from 2010 to 2014. Laws wrote: “I began to be very concerned that spending on a few hundred new free schools of yet unproven quality … was becoming grossly disproportionate when compared to spending on other crucial areas of the capital budget.”
I have now used government spending information to check these claims. And the statistics, which are staggering, show that Slater and Laws have had Conservative ministers absolutely bang to rights. Scandalously in itself, the government has only made public the amount it has spent opening free schools in relation to one in three projects in England. But what it has revealed is still damning.
Between 2011 and 2018, £1.7bn was spent on site acquisition and construction for 221 free schools. On average over this period, that is £959,000 per free school, per year. By comparison, a National Audit Office (NAO) report published in June revealed that, from 2016 to 2023, annual spending across the remainder of England’s 21,600 state-funded schools on “major rebuilding and refurbishment” equated to just £26,070 per school, per year.
The amount being spent building new free schools, then, was vastly more, per school, than the average amount allocated per school to rebuild England’s existing classrooms. A pet political idea was put ahead of a much broader, if less eye-catching, objective: maintaining school buildings so that children are kept safe.
This development also contains some wider lessons on problems possibly created by the Conservatives’ ideological approach. State-funded schools in England were once overseen by some 150 local authorities. In recent years, ministers have advocated a system whereby all would be run by quasi-private academy trusts, reporting only to central government. Currently, approaching half of England’s schools – 10,500 – including free schools, are supervised by 2,400 academy trusts, while the rest are under local authorities.
In its report, NAO warned that: “As many schools become academies, leading to local authorities no longer directly overseeing schools, estates expertise may be diluted.” Some smaller trusts lacked the expertise and capacity even to apply to the government for maintenance funding, it said. School estate managers also reported that they struggled to interest academy trust chief executives “in the strategic management of the school estate”.
In other words, the political drive to create a now clearly fragmented system of school organisation may have undermined strategic oversight of school buildings, as local authorities are marginalised and smaller bodies find it hard to keep up with administrative demands.
Slater was correct to imply that politicians have the right to set priorities for England’s system. Austerity has also clearly played a major part in the current crisis, with Conservative spending vastly down on the New Labour years. But politicians also need to be held to account when signature initiatives fail to take into account a wider public good. There could scarcely be a clearer case of that than this.
Warwick Mansell is a freelance education journalist and founder of the website Education Uncovered
