You only need to put a preferential financial gain in being under the LEA. After all if budgets are cut something has to go, whether teachers' salaries or other things
LEAs? You think they'll survive till 2015? It only takes a third of schools to convert to academy to make LEAs financially unviable. They are losins staff they can't last! And schools that don't convert will go under financially and a lot that held out last time the tories tried to get rid of LEAs ended up losing teachers.
Blair might have reversed that trend and brought all schools back under the LEA in 1997 but this time Gove has built in seven year legal contracts so seven years notice is required on either side for schools to un convert. My second childs school hasn't converted and has lost at least £250,000, we did convert and have also lost substantially but not as much as we would have done.
Smaller courses won't run any more at either school, like gcse drama or A level RE and possibley A level physics. And we're feeling the consequences now, we have no HR facillity and will have to buy it in, no help with SEN, having to search now for technical services and PAT testing (the LEA are charging more to academies for those services cos they've lost economies of scale). We no longer have a health and safety comittee which should be fun.
So there will be a real reduction in choice within existing schools and no real choice outside unless you are ok with submitting your child to some kind of weird experimental notion dreamed up somewhere.
Provided there are other schools to go to, a year by year reduction in the number of pupils could get some of the loonier schools to fold.
Provided other schools survive financially! Gove is starving them of funds. But free schools are being fully funded. Including money for new builds - if ECC had been approved it would be building a brand new school - how much do you think they cost in these financially strapped times, including land.
Most of them will need "ordinary" children to fill their rolls and hopefully their parents would soon twig what was going on and pull them out.
Yes but that requires choice of somewhere else to go. If there is a shortage of places freee schools fill the gap. If the other schools are full there is nowhere but the free school. Parents are free to pay for a Steiner nutty education if they want, but eventually for some it'll be the only place for their child no matter how much they want a real education.
Also most of them will be starting with a single-year intake - they may get a nasty shock in the second year.
He said, hopefully.
They are untried and untested and a substantial number are being proposed be people with agendas or weird ideas like Steiner or creationists. They are costing a fortune but they are Goves little baby so I doubt he'll let them fail. A lot seem to be applying for small class sizes. That is expensive and suggests they'll have to get more help or go under. To save money we're increasing class sizes. We'll be cramming 20 kids into an A level lab that only seats 15 and currently holds 18 next year.
Already the only free schools that seem to be filling or even oversubscribed are the ones that are closest to normal schools - like Toby Youngs. The more off the wall ones like Maharishis schools seem to be struggling to reach their numbers. Suggesting that what parents actually want is what every single survey shows - good normal local schools to learn normal science, history, maths english art etc. Not religious or ideological places. Only a weird minority has ever expressed any interest in free schools. And thats the sort of minority that opens things like CST or Steiner schools.
People moan about falling standards and Govt interference in education, and some things like specialisms were stupid, but we've had 13 years where education generally has improved dramatically for a lot of kids. My kids are far better educated than I ever was. And Gove is dismantling it all very quickly. Schools really are struggling and the whole free school idea is just insane. It is a charter for lunatics as we've already seen. And a very expensive one. And academies will eventually follow.
