Flagship school policy unravels

After issuing an unreserved apology for avoidable errors in information released about the curtailment of the 55bn Building Schools for the Future programme, the Education Secretary's flagship 'free schools' programme appears to have suffered a setback.

Mr Gove could not have been clearer, and David Cameron for that matter, when the pair marched symbolically with members of the Birkenshaw, Birstall and Gomersal Parents Alliance in the final week of the election campaign.

These parents, they promised, would get a new school – and it would be among the first community-led schools created by the incoming Government. Mr Gove even went further, he went on to describe the leading campaigners as his "heroines".

Yet an unintended consequence of the scaling back of the BSF programme is the possibility that Kirklees Council will have to delay its own school shake-up plans – and the proposed site will not be immediately available.

Of course, the campaigners may have other sites in mind, or Kirklees Council chooses to vacate Birkenshaw School sooner than expected. That remains to be seen, given the prevailing confusion after Mr Gove's department withdrew BSF funding this week for a Kirklees school that had, in fact, closed in 2006. This bureaucratic blundering hardly inspires confidence.

Not only does this confusion show how difficult it is for politicians to honour pre-election pledges, but it also exposes the extent to which the free school policy is totally reliant on redundant buildings.

Yet, if such sites have been declared surplus to requirement, why is there a need for them to become semi-autonomous schools at a time when the need for efficiency savings has to remain paramount at all times?

As well as failing to adequately explain how the admissions procedures will work for the free schools , Mr Gove has yet to set out, convincingly, how these schools will be funded – and how they will be regulated.

It was easy to sidestep these details when in opposition, but they are now Mr Gove's responsibility – and it's up to him to provide far more assured leadership, and joined-up policy-making, than he has demonstrated thus far.