100 more free schools to join Gove revolution

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100 more free schools to join Gove revolution

July 14th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By
James Chapman, Political Editor

PUBLISHED:

19:53 EST, 13 July 2012

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UPDATED:

19:53 EST, 13 July 2012

Battle with the unions: Michael Gove

The state’s monopoly on education is being smashed as groups of teachers, parents and businesses line up to open dozens of ‘free schools’.

David Cameron and Education Secretary Michael Gove yesterday announced that 102 new schools – freed from local authority control but funded by the taxpayer – have been approved.

The Prime Minister said they would open ‘in September 2013 and beyond’, while 50 already in the pipeline will open this September.

The latest approvals bring to almost 200 the total number of primary and secondary free schools, which ministers hope will be as transformative as grammar schools were in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mr Cameron said the Government’s reforms were using ‘competition to drive up standards across the system’.

More than half of the approved applications are from teachers, existing schools or educational organisations who want to run new state schools themselves.

They include a secondary school to be run by a group of teachers from the Cuckoo Hall Academy chain, based in a deprived area of North London, and a primary school in Manchester led by the group responsible for the Big Issue in the north of England.

Other specialist free schools will include one in South London for vulnerable pupils, including teenage mothers and children expelled from mainstream schools; a sixth-form college in East Manchester supported by Manchester City Football Club; a ‘faith-sensitive’ co-ed in Oldham; and secondaries backed by universities in Birmingham and Plymouth.

However, organisers behind another proposed free school in Oldham – the Phoenix School, which was to be staffed by Armed Forces veterans and backed by General Lord Guthrie, former chief of the defence staff – were angered that their application was turned down.

It is hoped free schools like of Aldborough E-ACT in Redbridge will drive up education standards across the country

Mr Cameron said free schools ‘symbolise everything that is good about the revolution that we are bringing to Britain’s schools: choice for parents, power in the hands of Teacher, discipline, rigour, high-quality education in areas that are crying out for more good local schools’.

He added: ‘The free schools revolution was built on a simple idea. Open up our schools to new providers, and use the competition that results to drive up standards across the system.

‘Get behind parents, charities and committed teachers who are trying to make things better, and give them the freedoms they need to transform our education system.

‘That is what we have been doing, and the message from the first two years is clear and unambiguous. Free schools work and parents and teachers want more of them. So more is what they are going to get.’

Free schools can be established by groups including parents, teachers, faith groups, businesses, universities and charities. They are given the power to decide how they spend their budgets and set their own curriculum, teaching hours and term-times.

The reforms have pitched the Coalition into a battle with the teaching unions, who suggest they can adversely affect neighbouring comprehensives when they open in areas with no shortage of spaces.

The Department for Education insisted that 88 per cent of the primaries approved yesterday are in areas with a shortfall of places.