Launching a free school – the beginning

Ever wondered what the process of launching a free school really involves? Dave Lewis is just starting to find out...

I’ve done lots of different and demanding things in my teaching career, including currently running my own school in Cyprus – but, whilst life is great and relatively stress free, I’m now at the stage when I’m getting itchy feet and want to do something with a little more challenge.

I pay regular return visits to my home town in Hampshire and often hear gripes from friends with young families about the education provision there. Increasingly often, their children are being turned down at their first and second choice schools and have to attend another that is several miles away.

You see, our little town is in an area of rapid and continued growth, with nearly 1500 family homes built over the last ten years, and plans for many more. The time has come now when parents and the community as a whole have had enough of making do. They’re fed up with getting caught up in the school run traffic, having their children educated far away from where their friends live, and being given little or no choice in the matter.

Free choice

Whilst in Cyprus I’ve kept abreast of changes in UK education, including the introduction and development of the Free Schools programme. With me wanting to return home soon, then, it seemed a worthy challenge: to set up and run a school that’s badly wanted by the parents and the town (an essential requirement if permission to proceed is to be granted), and that would enable a new vision for the education of local children to be realised. Hearts set on this, a small band of parents, educators and sundry other experts are now beginning the long journey towards creating a place of learning that solves the overcrowding problem and can offer something inspiring, imaginative – and sufficiently different to be successful. The Free Schools programme is very interested in a potential school’s ‘vision’ and of course, if you don’t have one you’re not going to attract the people you need to make the plan a success, so we set about putting together a framework for discussion. The members of our group are from different areas of education and the world outside of it, so it was important to get a proposal together that covered all of our aspirations, and which would appeal and be relevant to families in the community. So far, points of agreement include:

> Teaching the National Curriculum – free schools can deliver any ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum, but we decided that prospective parents need to have some bedrock on which to build their aspirations for their children’s future.

> Wrap-around education – our town is commuter land, so longer opening hours would give parents greater flexibility in managing their own commitments.

> Community engagement – concerts, community projects and charity work all feature strongly in our vision, as we believe that a sense of belonging to a community only comes from being involved in it.

> Mentoring – we want to develop confident children, who know that people who matter are interested in what they do. We are looking at operating a mentoring scheme, linking pupils with volunteers from the community and local businesses.

> Developing individual talents – we hope to link with local sports teams, artists, authors to enable individual children to practise and develop their talents with professionals, as well as asking specialists in their fields whether they’d be volunteers to work with our pupils more generally.

Plans for the future include a ‘school outside school’, where a virtual learning environment enables children to access learning from home and on mobile devices.

We realise that we have to retain some flexibility; we’ve already had suggestions over adopting a religious umbrella for our school, becoming a forest school, and other great ideas – and of course, once we move further down the road, we may have to tailor our plans to meet the needs of the families we hope to attract. For now though we have our initial vision and need to strengthen our team to ensure we can take it forward successfully.