Hi my friend! I want to say that this post is awesome, great written and come with approximately all significant infos. I’d like to see extra posts like this .

I am against free schools because they are a grant for the better off a cut in their private school bills.However the way to drive them out is make state schools so good they cannot justify to themselves paying for education,after all money talks with these people.When the NHS improved so well the private health companies started taking big hits,it was only NHS work that kept them afloat.As with education we had many well off parents wanting to move back into the state sector (BEST SCHOOLS GOOD AREAS OF COURSE) when their finances were suffering.Now the Tories have given them an out again to protect not them but the elite schools !
Finally stop charity status for the rich and pay your wack for schooling and every other aspect of your gold plated lifestyles !!!! !!!

This article is rank small "c" conservatism. If the Labour party goes down the path of opposing radical change to public services to make them more efficient and responsive to people's needs, well that way lies perpetual opposition. Just ask Scottish Labour who for the last decade have taken such an approach. Oppose all change and propose nothing.

In reply to Toby Young:

You quote research by Machin and Vernoit (2011) in support of free schools, this is wrong as Labour's academy programme was very different from the coalition's Free School programme. "The first point to make is that they are different from the Labour academies in that they are not necessarily about combating disadvantage. And unlike the poorly performing schools in deprived areas that converted to academies prior to the 2010 act, these new academies tend to be better-than-average schools."

We do not know the effect of Free Schools as it is just too early to tell. See the piece from Machin himself: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/apr/09/labour-academies-researc...

"But if your main concern is that free schools (and academies) will have a negative impact on the academic performance of children at neighbouring schools, there's no evidence to support that worry and plenty of evidence to suggest it's baseless"

And this is a pile of nonsense. One, free schools have only just opened here so there is actually no evidence at all as to what impact they will have in the entirety of the educations systme and secondly, using the closest possible comparator of city academies, only one piece of in-depth evidence which Young cites, the methodology of which has been seriously called into question, exists to assert his assertion.

And of course Tom Baldwin has never worked in education and knows not the first thing about it.

Toby Young writes:

I don't know how you're defining "neighbouring schools", but the five closest schools to the West London Free School as the crow flies are Godolphin & Latymer, Ravenscourt Prep, Latymer Upper, Sacred Heart and Flora Gardens. Since the first three of these are independent schools and the proportion of children on FSM at Sacred heart is 7%, I can assure you the average proportion of children on FSM across all five is not 32%.

The proportion on FSM at the WLFS is, in fact, 23.5% – slightly lower than the borough average for state secondary schools, admittedly, but considerably higher than three of the borough's state secondary schools, all of which are maintained schools. But so what? One of the arguments for free schools is that they'll appeal to parents who would otherwise send their children to fee-paying schools, thereby reducing the amount of educational apartheid in England and increasing the number of genuinely comprehensive schools.

The true test, it seems to me, is how reflective the school's intake is of the borough as a whole, not just those people in the borough who currently send their children of secondary school age to state schools. And on that basis, we pass with flying colours. Amazingly, the proportion of households in the Hammersmith Broadway ward, where the WLFS is located, where the annual household income is < £16,500 is 23.5% – exactly the same as the percentage of children at the school on FSM.

In order to make the argument you're making, i.e. that the opening of a new free school has an adverse impact on the neighbouring maintained schools, you'd need to show that the percentage of children on FSM at the neighbouring schools increased as a result of the free school opening (not the same thing as showing that the percentage of children on FSM at the free school in question is below the borough average) *and* that the academic performance of pupils at the neighbouring school suffered as a result. Is there any evidence to support these two assertions? I mean, apart from a single quotation from an unnamed minister in a far away country which has a completely different education system to ours?

The best point of comparison we have, I think, is with Labour's city academies programme – and I note that in the past you've been as opposed to academies as you are to free schools (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ukf9t5OVM). According to the most exhaustive research study carried out to date into the impact of Labour's city academy programme (Machin and Vernoit, 2011), while it's true that academies tend to attract a more affluent cohort of pupils than neighbouring schools, and this does tend to have a negative impact on the "quality" of pupils at those schools, educational attainment at the neighbouring schools *actually improves* as a result of an academy opening next door. Here's the key passage from pp.43-44: "Table 13 shows that it is possible for neighbouring schools to experience significant improvements in their KS4 performance despite the reduction in the ‘quality’ of their pupil intake. That is, the beneficial performance effects, which stem from increased choice/competition and also from the sharing of the academy school facilities (and expertise) with the wider community (Curtis 2008), seem to outweigh the detrimental effects, which stem from the increased pupil intake quality in academy schools (and the corresponding reduction in the pupil-intake quality in the neighbouring schools) and also from a teacher recruitment policy in academies that targets some of the most talented teachers in their neighbouring schools." (http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps//ceedp123.pdf)

Of course, there are other objections to free schools that are ideological and don't purport to be evidence-based – they aren't as locally accountable, for instance, though I'm not sure what redress there is at present for dissatisfied parents in boroughs where there's never any change in control.

But if your main concern is that free schools (and academies) will have a negative impact on the academic performance of children at neighbouring schools, there's no evidence to support that worry and plenty of evidence to suggest it's baseless. If your objective (like mine) is to drive up standards across the piece, Machin and Vernoit's research suggests that "increased choice/competition" is the way to go.

On the cost point, even if we take your most pessimistic estimate, i.e. that the total capital cost of the first 24 free schools is £130m, that's still less than it cost to deliver new schools under the last government. The average cost of building a new school or refurbishing an existing one under the Building Schools for the Future programme was £28m. That compares to an average free school cost of £5.42m according to your own figures.

Finally, you claim that the WLFS receives, on average, £12,416 per pupil. If only! We receive exactly the same per pupil revenue funding as the neighbouring maintained schools, i.e. between £6,500 and £7,000 per pupil.

As a Conservative, I take no pleasure in pointing any of this out because it would clearly be in my party's interest if Labour went into the next general election pledging to dismantle free schools. But I don't think Ed Miliband (or, more likely, Yvette Cooper) is quite that suicidal. All the evidence points to the fact that (a) free schools will reduce educational apartheid; (b) have a positive impact on the academic performance of both their own pupils and the pupils at neighbouring schools; (c) are a more cost effective way of providing much needed additional school places than the method devised by the last government; and (d) cost the taxpayer no more in terms of revenue funding than maintained schools.

So lisa, I can't fault Adonis argument ,myself