Commercial Free Schools benefit teachers and disadvantaged pupils

Civitas, 17 December 2010

When school choice emerged as a popular policy proposal for the UK, the pro-Whitehall control contingent in the education debate began latching on to any argument to suggest it couldn’t work. Now a new report by Gabriel H. Sahlgren puts many of their concerns to rest.

In 2008, we released a report on choice in the Swedish school system. The report found evidence of small but significant improvements in educational attainment in districts where Free Schools were established. In particular, evidence suggested that children with special needs and from minority ethnic backgrounds benefited. It was not just those who attended the Free Schools themselves who improved, but also those attending other local schools that now had to be compete to maintain their pupil roll.

Opponents of choice began scratching around for evidence that the benefits were not real, and that the costs were too great. One source of criticism was a disgruntled Swedish bureaucrat who had not really engaged with the academic evidence in favour of school choice. In another case, a report published in Research in Public Policy was trumpeted as knocking the proposal for six. On closer inspection, however, the report revealed only that some of the benefits of the Swedish school reform were not as large as hoped and that they were not evenly distributed. This was hardly the damning indictment that the anti-choice brigade were trying to find. It did highlight one potentially valid criticism: school choice might be driving greater segregation between schools with more ambitious parents sending their children to more prestigious schools further away from home. Instead, it was suggested that those from more disadvantaged backgrounds tended to stick to the local schools and this was to their disadvantage.

Now a new report from the IEA revisits the question, this time with the benefit of data from more recent years and when the Swedish education sector has become more competitive. Like Rebecca Allen, Salhgren is keen to acknowledge that school choice is far from a panacea for all educational woes. However, contrary to what the critics feared, the benefits that do exist are more concentrated on those from less privileged backgrounds, not the more privileged. School segregation is mostly down to Sweden’s increased residential segregation, not the existence of Free Schools. Moreover, Sahlgren finds that teachers benefit from increased salaries in areas where Free Schools are competing to employ them.

Sahlgren echoes previous reports in emphasising a key feature of the Swedish scheme that has yet to be fully accepted in the UK: Free Schools can be run for-profit. This allows and encourages successful school chains to expand rapidly to fulfil demand. By contrast, non-profit schools tend to expand to a size they are comfortable with, and thereafter become more selective in the pupils they try to market their education too. In other words, it is the incentive to profit that drives schools to compete for all pupils rather than the few.

This means that, not withstanding Sweden’s totalitarian attitude towards home schools, the Swedish model of school choice can have genuinely progressive and egalitarian benefits for children, besides allowing greater independence for schools and teachers. School choice is hardly going to guarantee better teachers and a sound curriculum on its own, but it can certainly make a valuable contribution to a package of reforms.