Parents out, chief executives in: our schools will be anything but free

Parents out, chief executives in: our schools will be anything but free | Peter Wilby

Nicky Morgan’s plans to force all schools to become academies will unleash the market and remove accountability

Over the past six years Conservative ministers have introduced three grand reform schemes to turn public services upside down. The first was Andrew Lansley’s awesomely complex top-down reorganisation of the NHS, now widely recognised as a disaster. The second was Iain Duncan Smith’s equally complex scheme for welfare, known as universal credit, which has also proved disastrous because it entailed spending at least £700m in development costs for zero result. IDS has left office with his universal credit “rolled out”, after nearly six years, to just 141,000 people.