Gove’s school reforms approach a tipping point

Today marks something of a milestone for Michael Gove’s school reform agenda. Free schools – i.e. ‘Academies’ which are independently run, yet within the state sector – now account for more than 10 percent of British secondaries. This is what I have always thought of as a tipping point – where independent schools offer real competition to council schools (i.e. those run by their local authority). One hesitates to sound too confident, but the genie of choice seems to have been yanked out of the bottle, and a few facts are worth nothing:

1. There are now 407 Academies open, twice the amount in May 2010. The 400 mark was, for Tony Blair, totemic – a goal that he made Gordon Brown sign up to as a condition of the handover. It has now been achieved, after a doubling of the inherited figure under Michael Gove. When Ed Balls became schools secretary, he made sure that he pace slowed, and that the Academies’ independence was diluted.