David Willetts: A good lesson for the Tories in opposition – that our freedom agenda really works

David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation.

These are bad times for the Conservative Party – and there is a lively argument about the direction the Party should go in. One very useful clue to a way forward is the Conservative response to the Government’s legislation on Children’s Wellbeing and Schools.

Its measures on Children’s Wellbeing are pretty uncontroversial. But the measures on schools have encountered intense opposition from Conservatives.

The second reading debate on the Bill in the Lords last week brought out the scale and passion of Tory objections. There were former Education secretaries, campaigners such as  Toby Young, and benefactors who have supported free schools. It was rightly observed that Phil Harris (Lord Harris) has, with his creation of the Harris academies, delivered more actual social mobility than just about anyone else in the country.

Michael Gove’s creation of new schools and greater freedom for academies was one of the great successes of the last government. Now those freedoms are under threat. Academies are threatened with losing crucial freedoms over the curriculum, pay and recruitment. Those freedoms have been crucial to our success in raising school standards.

The National Curriculum is heavy-handed, with some very peculiar features which baffle children and exasperate their parents such as all the stuff about formal grammatical terms. Academies relish their freedom from that.

Pay rules are restrictive and academies have much greater freedom to offer performance-related pay. New teachers are not required to have qualified teacher status making it easier to recruit from a wider range of talent and experience – including experienced older people picking up teaching as a second career.

Developing this agenda for opening up the supply side of education was not easy, and is a reminder of how difficult opposition can be. As shadow education secretary I thought the party had become too focussed on the demand side of education (such as elaborate systems of top-up vouchers) and not enough on the supply side, i.e. creating more good schools.

Moreover, we were so keen on academic selection that we were in danger of losing the argument for the creation of more good schools if it was seen as a device to bring that back. So my speech in 2007, which launched the Conservative free schools agenda, also ruled out creating more grammar schools.

The row that followed was one of the trickiest of David Cameron’s leadership in opposition. But Gove picked up and delivered one of our most popular policies – and academies do have to operate within the national admissions code.

More freedom for schools is not, now, an issue which divides Conservatives and gets into those destructive attacks about who is or is not really conservative at all. Instead it does the opposite and broadens the Party’s appeal – it has been backed by some of the Blairite reformers who also promoted academies. Creating alliances with others is an effective way to broaden the Party’s appeal in Opposition.

Ironically at the same time as supporting more freedom for schools, the party is so hostile to universities that it appears tempted to intervene and take the power to close specific courses at specific universities. We could end up in the odd position that academy schools have more freedom over the curriculum than universities!

One of the reasons our universities are so highly regarded around the world is that they have more autonomy than universities in say France or Germany, where they are part of the public sector.

We should support institutional autonomy in higher education too, and avoid drifting into bringing them into the public sector. Our policy on freedom for schools should be applied consistently, as part of a wider message about direction and strategy.

The decision to oppose the Football Governance Bill is another example of opposing heavy handed intervention – and also a clear distancing from the last government. There is also the critique of the extension of company obligations in the Employment Rights Bill to the first day of employment. It goes too far and threatens job opportunities for young people entering the jobs market.

There are lessons from all this for the leadership. One of the party’s best slogans has been “Conservative Freedom Works”. That can strike a chord today. One reason it is such a good slogan is that it is not an ideological appeal – it is a practical one. That is what links these three issues today: practical support for children in good schools, for football clubs and their supporters, and for young people trying to get their first job.

So even now, when the Party is in such difficulties, we can discern a theme that may just help with recovery and renewal.