The charity that advises free school proposers is under fire for refusing to reveal its funding sources
A thinktank headed by a former adviser to the education secretary, Michael Gove, has been awarded £500,000 in public money by his department. The award to the New Schools Network, which was publicly announced last month, is to provide "a personalised – and cost-effective – service" to anyone interested in setting up one of the free schools which Gove has made his flagship.
The decision embeds NSN at the heart of a policy that was inspired by Sweden's independent state-funded schools, by giving it a hand in the application process. The department's website tells parents: "All proposers interested in setting up a free school must contact the New Schools Network to discuss their ideas." The guidance goes on to say that unsatisfactory forms, which need more work, will be referred back to NSN.
Although the department refers to NSN as an "established charity", it was set up only last year by former Gove aide, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf. The body is also, in Wolf's words, "helped out" by another associate of the education secretary, Dominic Cummings, who used to be Gove's special adviser. Wolf says Cummings's current involvement is "purely voluntary", and reports that her total staff, which currently numbers six, is now likely to grow to 12 to 16 people. She also points out that NSN is "strictly non-partisan", counting former aides to Tony Blair among its advisers.
For Labour, Ed Balls decries a "lack of transparency in [the] whole process", and promises to table "parliamentary questions about the award of this significant government contract". Wolf points to a letter in which the department set out its decision, explaining that it was keen to get the ball rolling immediately and wanted to use NSN because – in her words – "ours was the only organisation in the country that specialises in the sort of support and liaison work that we do".
The educational campaigner Fiona Millar, who opposes free schools, says: "The award of public money to an organisation linked to Michael Gove will inevitably raise charges of cronyism. But the more serious question is whether this secretly funded outfit is in a position to provide parents with the objective advice they need. The NSN needs to say whether it has ever received funds from organisations with a vested interest in the drive to remove education from the maintained sector. They are well-represented among its advisers and trustees."
Balls adds: "If this organisation is getting public money they must disclose their other sources of funding." Wolf answers: "Like many charities, we have donors who wish to remain anonymous", but she is happy to vouch that the organisation has never received cash from "profit-making schools companies".
According to Millar, one group of parents who are campaigning for a conventional new school – a maintained institution within the local authority family – went to the department after the election and were told to "go away and talk to the New Schools Network". "The question that raises," she adds, "is whether parents will get the choice that they want, or whether instead they will be forced to swallow undemocratic, privately run schools."
Wolf, however, says she would be happy "to provide support to campaigning parents, regardless of the type of school they might prefer", adding that NSN has already worked with one group campaigning for a maintained school.
Wolf is also quite clear that NSN "only talks to parents and others who want to talk to us". When Education Guardian pressed the department on how this could be squared with the guidance that it has been providing to parents since mid-June that "they must" talk to NSN, it eventually admitted that this guidance was "a mistake" that would now "get changed".
So consultation with NSN might not, after all, be compulsory. But it remains the department's "preferred route", which still potentially puts it in a position of influence over the new generation of schools, since it will be advising parents and teachers as they fill out the forms in which they must specify their educational aims. But speaking to Wolf, who comes across as sincerely committed to diversity, it seems obvious that she is not pushing any particular teaching philosophy.
The department points out that NSN's role is not an entirely new departure. The last government hired private companies, such as KPMG, to support academies, an acknowledgement of the fact that parents and teachers might lack the managerial skills and the contacts to set schools on an independent basis.
But in the newly harsh fiscal climate, the chancellor has made much of cutting consultancy, and one NSN insider acknowledges that "there are officials within the department who would be well placed to liaise between parents and providers". The Lib Dem peer and former Labour education secretary, Shirley Williams, commented that "it is odd for a department of government to tell people they cannot answer inquiries directly in the first instance, but must instead refer them on to somebody else".
Gove may have been moved to outsource the task because he suspects that the department tends to drag its feet over new schools. Some officials might think they have enough on their plate with existing schools; others are sceptical about whether the drive towards independent institutions will truly raise standards.
The academic evidence is mixed. Rebecca Allen, of London's Institute of Education, has recently reviewed the literature on the Swedish experience, having previously surveyed the papers on American charter schools. She has no doctrinal objection to independent state schools, arguing they are "a good way to get diversity into the system – if that is the aim". But she says the evidence "does not suggest any consistent effect on average test results". She also reports worrying findings on segregation, saying less-educated Swedish parents use free schools less often, while second-generation immigrants use them much more.
Gove and his team are more bullish, and Allen describes an unremittingly positive dossier of evidence that the coalition recently published as "deliberately selective". She warns: "It's dishonest to pretend to the public that the evidence is all one way."
For her part, Wolf accepts that free schools can fail if they are poorly implemented. But she insists that where things have been done properly, they have proved "transformational", especially for the poor. Perhaps that is true in some settings. It is certainly what parents will hear when they inquire about setting up a new school.