SUPPORTERS of the free schools and academy programmes pretend this handover of Department for Education cash and resources to a bunch of businessmen, conservative and religious ideologues is some kind of grassroots social movement driven by “charitable” impulses.

But look at the accounts one of the key “charities” involved, the New Schools Network, and it is obviously all a government-funded front pretending to be from the “grassroots.”

The New Schools Network was founded in 2009 by Tory activists to promote Conservative education policy. From 2011 on it started getting government grants from the Department for Education. The New Schools Network was paid to promote academies and free schools. 

Under the academy programme, existing schools are transferred to new private management, run by boards typically made up of businessmen and religious or political activists. 

It is a huge privatisation programme, where these new private bodies take over state education, absorbing vast sums of Department for Education money to pay teachers and running costs, with buildings thrown in for free. 

The academies are private but supposedly non-profit institutions, although they do pay high salaries to their management and have been caught giving lucrative contracts to their “sponsors.” “Free schools” are supposedly new schools set up by concerned parents, which also then rely entirely on government funding,

The New Schools Network itself shows how these “charitable” enterprises were just a government backed campaign of social engineering. The accounts for the New Schools Network show the DfE gave grants to the “charity” between 2011 and 2022 worth £17.2 million. The grant represented 78 per cent of the New Schools Networks income in those 11 years. A “charity” that relies on the government for all but 22 per cent of its income is not “independent.” In the latter years, in 2021 and 2022, the New Schools Network was 96 per cent government-funded.

The New Schools Network used that money to both promote government free schools and academy programmes, and to give jobs to top Tories.  

In 2019 the director of the New Schools Network, on a government funded £90,000 salary, was former Theresa May’s special adviser Luke Tryl. 

He took over from previous New Schools Network director, offensive Tory loudmouth Toby Young, who took over from Theresa May’s adviser (now a Conservative MP) Nick Timothy.

In 2022, the New Schools Network finally lost its long-standing government grant to promote free schools. The results show how the organisation was completely hollow. 

Without a grant, its income fell from around £2m a year to just £8,299 in 2023 and £25,560 in the recently released accounts covering 2024. Its income has reduced 1,000-fold.

Labour Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is limiting both the free schools programme and the academy programme but she is certainly not undoing either. There is no Labour plan to take these privately run schools back into local education authority control. But she stopped the latest wave of free schools, and is moving away from Tory plans to force all remaining state schools to become academies. 

The latest New Schools Network director is Meg Powell-Chandler, a former Boris Johnson special adviser and failed Tory parliamentary candidate. She and the Network have launched a “campaign” against Phillipson’s policies, claiming her reforms “threaten to bring an end to the successful free schools programme and create new restrictions and bureaucracy for all academy schools.” But without a huge chunk of government money to help them push this message, the New Schools Network has become a much less listened-to voice.

Trainline terminated?

THERE looks to be a real back-and-forward over the future of Trainline under Labour’s slow renationalisation of rail, involving much lobbying.

Trainline are a rail ticket selling app. The business relies on the mad fragmentation of rail operators under privatisation: all the individual rail operators all have their own ticket-selling sites. So Trainline can make money because passengers are willing to pay extra to avoid this confusing mish-mash created by rail fragmentation. Trainline can also make money out of other absurd wrinkles like “split tickets” created by rail fragmentation. Trainline sells around £5 billion worth of tickets every year, making £48m profit.

But if the railways become nationally integrated, the logic for Trainline disappears. A unified rail system can sell its own tickets in one place.

This almost happened under the Tories. Grant Shapps announced “a new Great British Railways ticket retailing website and app” in December 2023. Trainline’s share price slumped.

The Tories’ plan for “Great British Railways” left the rail firms in private hands, but introduced enough national co-ordination to threaten Trainline. So surely the Labour’s plan to actually take ownership of the rail operators in a more genuinely integrated national service would definitely kill off the business?

In 2024 Trainline thought they were OK. It announced that “in April 2024, the Labour Party launched their rail policy at an event held at Trainline’s London offices. They confirmed to Trainline that they have no plans to revive the current government’s previous proposal for a national retailing app.”

Trainline clearly worked hard to cosy up to Labour, hiring Labour-linked lobbyists like Arden Strategies. It probably helps that Trainline’s head of government affairs, Martin Sheehan, was No 10’s head of strategic communications under the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown until 2008, when he left for corporate lobbying.

However, Labour appears to be having second thoughts: In January Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander announced Great British Railways will have an online ticket selling app after all. 

Trainline’s share price has dropped. However, there is a qualification: Alexander says the new Great British Railways app will “work alongside a thriving private sector retail market” — meaning Trainline — adding “the private sector will continue to play a key role in driving growth through innovation and investment and encouraging more people to choose rail.”

Which makes it sound like the Great British Railways app will not be “innovative.” So will Great British Railway put Trainline out of business or will the official app be deliberately clunky and uninnovative so Trainline can stay in business? We all know what would be the better outcome, but it is very much in the balance.