New free schools are planned for the North of England, with a report today linking them to new claims of a North-South divide in school standards.
Hartlepool, Knowsley, Middlesbrough, Redcar, Stoke-on-Trent and Stockton-on-Tees are being targeted with plans to open new free schools.
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Large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook are reported to be in talks about opening a sixth-form college, while national arts organisations are planning to open an arts free school. There are also hopes for a specialist cricket free school.
New free schools for the North
Unity Howard, director of the New Schools Network, the government-backed charity that champions free schools, said: “We’ve had some great successes with Saracens Rugby Club and Everton FC setting up free schools, and we’d love to see that replicated with cricket - just think of the impact on white working-class aspirations that a cricket school fronted by someone like [England cricket star] Ben Stokes could have in a town in the North West.”
Ms Howard first mentioned the idea of a specialist cricket free school in an interview with Tes in September.
However, she added: “We are keen to see a whole range of new and innovative free-school sponsors - cricket is just one of those we are interested in exploring, alongside arts institutions and the tech sector.
“More importantly though, we want to see a further push for free schools into northern towns so that these areas can benefit in the same way that so many in the South have.”
The plans are being linked by the The Sunday Times to figures that the newspaper says show that pupils are being “let down by schools in North of England”.
It reports that 15 per cent of northern children are making below-average progress between the end of primary school and their GCSEs, compared with 8 per cent of children in the South.
However,progress scores have been shown to be more to do with pupils’ socioeconomic backgrounds than school effectiveness. And today’s data does not take pupil background into account.
Schools in less affluent areas have claimed that such progress measures are unfairly penalising them. They say the differences in the figures are likely to be largely a reflection of the large disparities in average income between the North and South.
But former Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw suggested the gap was to do with quality of schools.
“I don’t see a lack of aspiration in white working-class communities,” he said.
“I took an assembly recently in a state school in Blackpool and asked how many kids wanted to go to university.
“Ninety per cent of hands shot up. These children want to be taught by good teachers in a school that is well led. There are one or two good academy chains in the North but not as many as in the South. We have to start closing the gap.”
