A FUNDAMENTAL problem with the Government’s free schools policy is the name. It is open to the widest of interpretations.

It is, in essence, a political slogan and much of the debate surrounds what the word ‘free’ means in the UK education context. It obscures the substantive issues.

Supporters of the policy read the ‘free’ in their name as in ‘free from state interference’ and ‘free from bureaucracy’; opponents read it as in ‘free from supervision’, ‘free-for-all’ and ‘free rein for big business or religious extremists’.

Supporters want free schools to have the same freedom as private, independent, schools to teach what they like and employ unqualified teachers if they want. But that is not comparing like with like. The key difference is state funding.

Private schools do not take public money, and are free to fail. Free schools do, and aren’t.

But that doesn’t mean they should be strangled at birth as the teaching unions and some others would wish. The early examples of free schools in this region suggest that they will, so to speak, plug a gap in the education market that the current landscape of local authority-run, semi-detached academies and private independent schools can’t.

Inevitably, the rules that allow for the very creation of free schools will mean there will be disasters that the inspection system is now beginning to throw up. The freedom these new schools enjoy is the freedom to be innovative and to set high standards, but it is also the freedom to fail.