Free schools: a flight of fancy?

View my Youtube video of my visit to the site in August here

As a symbol of the lack of planning which has often surrounded education policymaking in recent years, the insights provided by the history and site surroundings of a free school near England’s south coast could scarcely be bettered.

There is a deafening roar as a large passenger aircraft, operated by the budget airline Ryanair and bound for Barcelona’s Girona airport, fires up its engines and rolls down the runway ready for take-off at Bournemouth Airport. Less than 100 metres away from this jet, as its crew conduct their last checks before turning right and blasting into the sky, is the new permanent home of a free school for children from the age of four to 16. I went down to see the outside of the site for myself in August, a couple of weeks before it opened for children for the first time. (You can see the photo I took of the edge of the school, with the Ryanair jet in the background, above.)

The story of Parkfield free school, which opened in temporary accommodation four years ago and was originally meant to find a long-term home in central Bournemouth but which ended up on this site six miles away after a desperate search for premises in the centre of the town drew a blank, is a troubling and sometimes bizarre tale of what can happen when policymaking goes wrong. Those running it clearly believe that this story will nevertheless have a happy ending. But its history suggests the collective patience of all must have been tested to the limit, in what has been a case study of successive setbacks which casts the national policy in a chaotic light.

Parkfield’s origins