Free schools are supposed to create opportunities for choice, community involvement and relevance in education, but how do these principles work in practice? Critics suggest that free schools will also encourage inequality and decrease the quality of teaching. Professor André Spicer, WBS, has been researching free schools in Sweden, in conjunction with members of the KILO research group at Lund University. Based on an article co-authored with Dan Kärreman, of Copenhagen Business School, Andre argues here that success or failure of free schools greatly depends on the school system that they replace.

One of the first education policies rolled out by the coalition government was ‘free schools’. This is an idea that has been borrowed from Sweden and the USA. It is based on familiar catch-cry in education, that the government should allow teachers, parent and local communities to set up their own schools. Under the free schools model, the government would give parents a virtual voucher that is roughly equivalent to the cost of educating a student in a state school. Parents could then choose to spend this voucher at any free school which has been approved by the state.
The policy of free schools is supposed to create some factors that have been sorely missing in UK education: choice, community involvement and relevance. All this might sound good in principle. But some people think free schools might look good as a policy but will be disastrous in practice. They point out that out that free schools will further entrench inequality, lead to crack-pot groups dictating the curriculum, and drive declining quality in teaching.
While there have been a lot of heated debates about free schools, there has been little light cast on what the actual impact of free schools has been. With researchers in Sweden and Denmark, I studied some of these Swedish free schools. In our research we found that these schools delivered on some of the great hopes, but also created some new problems.
The first thing we noticed about free schools was that they created a surprising degree of innovation. Until the education reforms were introduced in the mid-1990s, Swedish education was hugely standardized with little space for innovation. Today, there are a whole range of schools from across the spectrum that parents can choose from. Some are faith-schools, some are set up by education movements like Steiner and some look more like design studios of dot.com companies. The way some schools were run began to resemble large companies. Teachers were monitored to see if they were ‘buying in’ to the corporate values...
The free school format has also driven innovations in teaching methods. For instance, some schools have purposely employed people who are not teachers to deliver courses. Others have tried to shift the focus of the curriculum from learning traditional content-based subjects like mathematics and languages to ‘student centred learning’ and more fluffy ‘self-development’ courses. In one school we looked at, there was a significant emphasis on personal coaching in the education process rather than traditional chalk and talk class-room work. When we asked why they had adopted these new teaching methods, school leaders often pointed out that they were in line with new ideas of learning that emphasized ‘active learning’. However, we also found out that these innovations were often significantly cheaper to deliver. Project work and self-directed learning involved significantly less teacher time.
There were some significant changes in the way free schools were run. Many of the free schools copied practices from the business sector. This involved cost cutting drives, brand building activities, and a greater emphasis on business objectives. The way some schools were run began to resemble large companies. Away days, visioning exercises, and corporate culture training became ubiquitous. Teachers were monitored to see if they were ‘buying in’ to the corporate values and effectively communicating them to students. In some cases teachers were asked to stop seeing themselves as teachers. Instead they should be ‘coaches’, ‘trainers’, or ‘facilitators’. Many school leaders tried to model themselves on the kind of ‘charismatic leaders’ and ‘celebrity CEOs’ who have become so common in the corporate sector.
We found that teachers initially were very enthusiastic about free schools. Many of them left the state school system because they found it too constraining and stifled student learning. They thought that the free school would give them an opportunity to experiment and really focus on individual students. However, in some free schools we noticed that over the course of a year or two this hope would wane. Teachers would become very disillusioned and feel under high pressure to not just teach students but also 'buy-in' to the culture. This resulted in high stress levels, extremely high staff turn-over rates, and endemic conflicts between school management and teachers.
The teachers we spoke with pointed out a possible hidden costs of free schools. They would usually admit only the most ‘normal’ students. This was because normal students do not usually cause problems or require costly extra assistance. Those with special learning needs or behavioral problems were seen as a liability who would eat into the school’s bottom line. This meant many students with special needs were often pushed back into the public school system. Free schools tended to cream off the best students who literally ‘teach themselves’ while the public schools became lumbered with increasing numbers of difficult (and expensive) problem students.
Despite these problems, parents seem to be relatively happy with free schools. They give them a feeling of choice in what was once a very standard market. Free schools have now become part of the landscape of Swedish education. However we must remember that free schools work in the case of Sweden, a country that has a long tradition of social welfare, community involvement and significant equality. The evidence for free schools in the more unequal USA has been a lot more mixed. Recently, one of the most famous educationalists in the USA, Diane Ravitch, released a book pointing out that the obsession with parent choice had been one of the most significant drivers of the rapid fall in standard measures of education attainment in the last couple of decades. This reminds us that the success or failure of free schools may have a lot more to do with the existing social context and school system than the policy itself.
So in many ways the coalition government is right. Free schools certainly do deliver innovation, choice and community engagement. However, they also can come with hidden costs: curriculum padded out with fluffy subjects and self-directed learning, disgruntled teachers, and increased inequalities. As we see free schools being rolled out in the next few years, we need to be mindful that they are no magic bullet which will solve the educational problems in the UK. Rather, like any school system, they pose a series of tricky challenges that leaders need to approach with wisdom, humility and courage.
Suggested Reading:
Diane Ravitch (November 2010), 'The Myth of Chartered Schools', The New York Review of Books.
André Spicer and Peter Fleming (February 2003), 'Working at a Cynical Distance: Implications for Power, Subjectivity and Resistance', Organization, vol.10 no.1 157-179.
Prof Spicer previously researched and taught organisation studies at Otago University, New Zealand, and at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently Associate Fellow of Centre for Globalization and Regionalization at the University of Warwick, visiting Research Fellow at the University of Lund, Sweden, and visiting Professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Management Studies, and editorial board member of Organization, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly and Social Movement Studies. His research interests include power and resistance; institutional change; entrepreneurship; social movements; workplace architecture and space.