The Department for Education needs to open up

"Under David Cameron there is no convincing evidence that schools policy has delivered improvements for children in England." Or that's what Labour want you to think. What they don't mention, responding yesterday to a new report on Academies and Free Schools by the House of Commons Education Select Committee, is that there also isn't any convincing evidence that the Tories haven't done this. There isn't much convincing evidence either way. But the report does raise serious concerns about transparency and accountability at the Department for Education (DfE).

Since 2010, England's schools have changed enormously under the reforming fervour of the previous Education Secretary Michael Gove. Labour's Academies programme, which created non-selective, publicly funded schools that were free from local authority control, was dramatically expanded by Gove, to the point where more than half of England's secondary schools are now academies. The government also introduced free schools, a type of academy which is set up by groups of parents and other local people. This trend towards greater independence in schools leads, its supporters claim, towards greater "school autonomy."

The debate around autonomy is fierce and—given the number of children and schools affected—very important. Many supporters of the approach exhibit a kind of religious fervour. Chief among them is Gove's former special advisor Dominic Cummings, known for his passionate, and occasionally intemperate, outbursts towards political enemies. Those most critical of autonomy tend to be on the left, and worry about the disruption and competition that, they argue these policies bring with them.

The problem is that there isn't enough information to have a full and frank debate, and when there is, that information often isn't objective enough.

In part this is a question of timing: given the speed at which academies have sprung up since 2010, Ofsted inspectors and other investigators haven't yet been able to give an opinion on a significant proportion of them. Attempts to use evidence gathered on schools opened before 2010 to denounce or support the success of the post-2010 programme have been rejected by academics as inconclusive. Graham Stuart, chair of the committee that produced the report, tells me that the timing explains why we don't know how much academies and free schools have contributed to improvements in schooling in this parliament.

But clearly the DfE also has a problem with the amount of data it collects and publishes. The report points out, for example, that the DfE publishes documents predicting what the impact of a new free school will be on its area, but then doesn't publish follow up reports checking whether its predictions were right. It also recommends that the department should publish details of how it chooses which applicants for free school funding are successful, as well as more information on the applications themselves. Laura McInerney, the educationalist and editor of Schools Week, has been locked in a battle with the department since 2012, when she submitted a freedom of information request asking for the application forms sent by people who wanted to start free schools, and the decision letters the DfE sent back to them. She still hasn't got all of what she asked for. McInerney thinks the DfE has a problem with transparency, highlighted by yesterday's report. "I think there's no such thing as too much transparency when you're taking people's wages and their kids," she says.

The DfE did respond to a request for evidence about academies and free schools when the Select Committee asked as part of their inquiry, but the department delivered what the report calls "a sustained paean of praise to the success of the policy," which did not address the inquiry's terms of reference. For Professor Toby Greany, of the Institute of Education, the key issue here is not so much transparency as "even-handedness:" "When you read the Select Committee report, it appears to say that the Department for Education has been so desperate to demonstrate the success of the initiative that they have lost the sense of objectivity that you would normally expect from a government department," he says. "It was a disappointment," says Stuart of the department's submission. In this spirit, the DfE declined to respond to specific recommendations from the report, but put out a glowing statement from the current Education Secretary Nicky Morgan saying that "this report recognises our plan is delivering what parents want—more chance than ever to send their child to a good local school."

As the election approaches and voters look to evaluate this government's progress, the academies programme will stand out as an area in which informed debate is virtually impossible. In part, this is unavoidable—as Stuart points out, it takes children a long time to go through school. But in refusing to be open about its procedures, the Department for Education can only foster an atmosphere of mistrust. And in failing to set out details of longer term approach, it makes it hard to guess what will happen if it remains under Conservative rule come 7th May. As the report puts it "the DfE has much to gain from transparency and clarity," if only it would stop "seeing every request for information as an attack on the policy."