Gove to Treasury: let schools borrow!

For all the good intention of Michael Gove’s school reforms, there have been only a few dozen new schools so far. When I interviewed him for The Spectator earlier this month, I asked if there was much point to all this if the successful schools could not expand (and, ergo, add capacity to the system). Crucially, Academies cannot borrow because the Treasury doesn’t allow it – a relic from the Gordon Brown control freak days. How much of an impediment is this? I didn’t run his answer in the magazine version of the interview as this is a fairly technical point. But as Brown knew, it’s on seemingly dull issues like borrowing powers that can decide the success or failure of public sector reform that he so loathed. Anyway, here’s the exchange.

FN: Even a corner shop can’t expand without the ability to borrow. Is this not a huge, obvious and unnecessary restraint on the expansive creative abilities of the good schools to who you have just given freedoms?
MG: Yes, it is.