Free schools have been around since 2010, when the coalition government’s all-ability “free schools” policy was launched in a bid to introduce competition and innovation into the school system. But how successful have free schools been in supporting student outcomes?
The National Foundation for Educational Research in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), set out to answer this question by undertaking the most rigorous research to date into .
Our research is timely because the policy of opening more free schools is currently on ice. In October 2024 the current government announced that it would be pausing progress on any mainstream free schools that have been approved and not yet opened.
The impact of free schools
Using data for all students in England entering Year 7 from September 2011 onwards, we compared free school students with their siblings who enrolled in secondary school prior to the free school opening, benchmarked against sibling pairs where neither sibling attended a free school. Doing this enabled us to isolate the impact of attending a free school from other background factors, such as parental education.
We estimated a large positive effect on GCSE outcomes for students enrolled at a secondary free school.
This was equivalent to an average student’s likelihood of being awarded five GCSEs graded 9-4/A*-C (including English and maths) increasing from 56.5 per cent to 61.1 per cent.
Our analysis also estimated the absence rate of students enrolled at a free school during key stage 4. Attending a free school is associated with an average student’s absence rate falling from 7.2 per cent to 6.5 per cent. This finding was similar, but slightly smaller, for KS3 students.
Our estimates for outcomes beyond secondary school also show that free schools have longer-term impacts: students enrolled in free schools are more likely to take one or more A levels and more likely to enrol at a university.
Effect on disadvantaged students
While the priorities of the free schools programme have evolved over time, as a means of increasing educational performance in areas of economic disadvantage.
We did a separate analysis of outcomes for students enrolled at free schools and living in the most deprived areas.
While there were generally positive findings, similar to those for all students enrolled in free schools in any area, the findings for disadvantaged students were not markedly different. In other words, free school students living in disadvantaged areas did no better than free school students living in all areas. But the effects on students in the local area are less clear.
We also ran a separate analysis to investigate the effect of secondary free schools being opened on all students living in their catchment area, including on those who attended other types of school in the same area.
This analysis was therefore broader, looking at effects of free schools on their local areas. We analysed data separately for each year of free school openings, and although we found some significant positive results, results overall were not conclusive.
The reasons for success?
Together our findings paint a broadly positive picture of the impact that secondary free schools have had on student outcomes.
But the schools set up by the free schools programme were diverse. It is unclear what made these schools successful; for example, while our results could be explained by innovative practice in some free schools, they could equally be explained by the fact that many free schools have had smaller class sizes as they have become established.
Further research is therefore needed to understand what it is about secondary free schools that has been particularly effective. This would inform whether the significant investment involved in opening these new schools is justified and if the policy of opening new free schools should be continued.
Andrew Smith is senior evaluation analyst at the National Foundation for Educational Research
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