Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Evans of Bowes Park and Lord Storey

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 203 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Free schools have played an important role in raising educational standards over the last 15 years, with their benefits felt most strongly in communities that have needed them the most. As I set out during our discussions in Committee, last summer’s exam results underline their impact: free schools outperformed other non-selective state schools at GCSE and A-level, pushing up standards, particularly in areas of significant deprivation and low educational achievement. Giving school leaders the autonomy to innovate, whether through a longer school day and more stretching curriculum or developing closer links with business and universities, clearly has a measurable impact on school outcomes.

This success continues: only last week, 62 students—over a quarter of the year group—at the London Academy of Excellence, one of the earliest free schools to open, learned they had secured Oxbridge offers, surpassing the success of many of the country’s leading independent schools. This outstanding achievement makes it even more regrettable that, in December, the Government chose not to go ahead with a new sixth-form free school in Middlesbrough, backed by Eton and Star Academies, which aimed to deliver similar outcomes for its students. It was one of 26 proposed mainstream free schools that were cancelled after a long delay, to the dismay of the teachers, parents and communities that had championed their plans.

It is not just one free school or trust making a huge difference: research from the NFER shows pupils attending secondary free schools get better grades at GCSE, have lower absence rates and are more likely to take A-levels and to go to university. Will the Government publish the quantitative thresholds that were used to judge community need, demographic demand and the impact on existing schools that lay behind the recent cancellation of each of the 28 mainstream free school projects, and will they publish the assessment scores for each cancelled project? This would be extremely helpful information and a transparent way for the groups that put a lot of effort into these projects, and the parents, who obviously may not have been privy to conversations with the DfE, to understand the reasons for the decisions.

Free schools have provided a route for new ideas, energy and educational models to join the state system. Indeed, the Government themselves have acknowledged that

“the free schools programme has been crucial to meeting demographic need and pioneering new models that can raise standards”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/25; col. 45WS.]

Yet Clause 58 will mean fewer chances to innovate and less opportunity for the best-performing academies to expand and replicate their models. It is disappointing that the Government, despite some of their words, seem unwilling in practice to recognise the contributions free schools have made, and indeed could continue to make, to improving our education system—an achievement in which we should all take pride.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I wonder if the Minister in her reply could tell us this? Presumably, some of these schools are not going ahead not just because of the demographics but because the birth rate is falling in that area and, going back to our previous discussion, it would be stupid to build new schools if we are seeing the birth rate decline.