John O'Connell: A charter to give schools the freedom to raise standards

THERE have been some recent setbacks for Michael Gove's attempts to encourage new free schools. The abolition of Building Schools for the Future (BSF) – a costly and horribly bureaucratic capital investment programme – was announced with an error strewn list of which schools would continue to receive funding from BSF as the programme wound down.

His opposite number, the experienced political street-fighter Ed Balls, ruthlessly condemned this and with it tarnished Gove's broader plans for reform at the same time. This is a great shame.

While there were undoubtedly mistakes made by Gove and his team in rushing out these lists put together by the quango Partnerships for Schools, and with it falsely inflating the hopes of many teachers and pupils, there still remains a unique and vital opportunity to radically reform education for the better. It will come by freeing schools from

the bureaucracy of Westminster and town halls.

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To see how successful this policy can be, we can cast our eyes over the Atlantic. Back in 1999, charter schools began opening up across New

York City. They are funded by the taxpayer, but with one crucial difference to traditional state schools: they are not run by the city.

Ah, I see: as the schools are independent, they must simply select the brightest pupils in the area, or those from middle class families. Right?

Wrong – they are not selective. Places are usually distributed by a lottery; no past transcripts are looked at; and selections are often as random as pulling a student's details from a pile of applicants.

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What's more, many of the charter schools in New York are based in poorer areas, meaning that children often go into them with near-identical familial and social backgrounds to those attending the least successful traditional state schools. They have drastically improved educational attainment in some of the historically worse-off areas in the city, most notably in the borough of Harlem.

Parents are desperate for their children to win places at charters,

and it's easy to see why.

An academic study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University revealed that the gap between Scarsdale, an area of New York with a notoriously good education system, and Harlem was drastically closed when pupils attended charters. In fact, attendance would close about 86 per cent of the "Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap" in maths and 66 per cent of the achievement gap in English.

All the more remarkable as charter school applicants are more likely to be poor than the average student in New York City's traditional state schools.

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It is not just education that improves in charters. Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute, in an article for their publication City Journal, offers a fascinating insight in to how these groundbreaking schools have changed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers. He found that when evaluating a traditional state school in Harlem called ACE, New York City Department of Education's annual survey asked teachers to rate the statement "I feel safe in my school". Some 79 per cent of ACE's teachers "strongly disagreed," while the remaining 21 per cent said they disagreed.

In Democracy Prep charter school, all of the teachers said they felt safe – it's directly across the road from ACE. In fact, thanks to random selection of local children by lottery, most students in the two schools are neighbours. It is a key aspect of charters' success; discipline and behaviour are seen as important drivers of attainment.

Crucially, charter schools are free to set their own pay, too. Not only do teachers enjoy better and safer working conditions, schools are not hindered by unions demanding defined benefit pensions and centralised pay deals. This means some charters can pay their teachers more than traditional state schools do.

These are lessons we would do well to heed in the ongoing debate at home, as the NUT and the LEA bureaucrats do all they can to block much needed reform. A free schools model exists in Sweden but it has been criticised by the unions for encouraging segregation.

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They have also stoked fear of private companies coming in to make a profit by cutting teachers' wages. But charters show that selection is not inevitable; pay is not necessarily driven down. The lessons from the Big Apple of giving schools the freedom to set standards, improve discipline and control their finances are clear. Let's just hope sensible debate is not clouded by vested interests and party politics.

Of course, in a perfect world, random choices shouldn't determine whether a child receives good or bad education. But state education in the UK is at a crucial crossroads and there is a real chance to improve the standards of millions of children.

For a lesson closer to home, academies in the UK were this week found by the National Audit Office to be performing well on improving educational attainment. Imagine what they could do with genuine freedom.

John O'Connell is deputy research director of the TaxPayers' Alliance.