Eighteen free schools closed without building and site costs being publicly disclosed

Eighteen of the government’s free schools have closed without the cost to the taxpayer of opening them ever having been disclosed –in most cases years after the closure actually happened.

The Department for Education has still only disclosed building and site costs for fewer than one in three of the free schools it has opened since 2011, with no public disclosures on this subject for three-and-a-half years.

Now fresh analysis by Education Uncovered has shown that projects going back right to the policy’s inception, in 2011, have seen costs remaining undeclared, including some schools which closed years ago.

This fresh data trawl was prompted by a minister’s answer to a Parliamentary Written Question, asked by the Labour peer Lord Watson. This had asked whether the government intended to update its published data on the capital costs of free schools, and why this spreadsheet had not been updated since February 2020.

The academies minister Baroness Barran replied: “The department publishes capital costs for all schools on GOV.UK once all works have been completed and costs are finalised. Given that these can be large and complex projects, this can take some time between first opening and publication. A further batch of costs will be published in due course.”

What has the government published?

It might seem reasonable to argue that such disclosure does indeed take time.

However, delving into the public datasets shows just how slow the DfE has been to reveal the costs of these flagship, and often expensive, projects.

Of the 744 free schools* opened to date, only 221 have had costs published. That is a publication rate of just 29.7 per cent.

Cross-referencing the DfE’s disclosures against its list of all open and free schools from its “Get Information About Schools” database shows that 10 free schools which opened way back in the second year of the project, 2012, have not had the cost of acquiring their sites and their construction overheads disclosed.

In total, 523 free schools have not had such costs disclosed, with 32 projects which opened in 2013 still not having costs published, 41 among those opening in 2014, 28 from 2015 and 37 from 2016. On average, these free schools which have yet to have costs disclosed have each been open 4.6 years.

Most staggering are the 18 free school projects for which costs have still not been disclosed even though they have closed.

Three schools – Steiner Academy Frome, Somerset; Sandymoor in Halton; and Central Academy, Birmingham – all of which opened back in 2012, have not seen their capital costs disclosed despite all having now closed. Some six free schools which opened the following year, 2013, have not had costs disclosed despite since closing.

It is true that most of the free schools which are classed as having closed have not actually ceased to exist in any form. Ten of them, for example, including the three 2012 openers above, have been listed by the DfE as having been given a “fresh start,” typically through re-opening under the control of another academy trust.

However, others have closed outright, for example the International Academy in Greenwich, south-east London, which opened in 2016 and closed in 2021.

Other schools which were technically closed in order to transfer to other trusts, such as the former Steiner academies in Frome and Bristol, Parkfield School in Dorset and the Plymouth School of Creative Arts, saw building work carried out many years ago, but with costs still remaining unpublished.

As Education Uncovered revealed earlier this month, what data releases there have been show that the DfE spent £52.6 million on 15 other free schools which have closed. I also wrote about the DfE spending £1.7 billion overall on opening costs for the 221 free schools where these have been disclosed, or £959,000 per free school, per year, versus £26,076 for other state-funded schools, per year.

It is hard, then, to see how Baroness Barran’s statement fully justifies this database not having been updated since 2020, with no opportunity for the public to hold the government to account for spending on this flagship policy since then.

*University Technical Colleges and studio schools are also listed by the government as types of free schools. But for this analysis, I have focused only on free schools which are not UTCs or studios.