It is quite tricky to find data on Free Schools, but with perseverance it is out there buried on the DfE website. Recently the SoS for Education has made quite a big thing about Free Schools, so I've been digging. I've just put together some Tweets (or maybe they are Xs these days). This is no attempt at prose, rather the headlines from my data trawl of the past few days.
From 23/08/2023
Worth mentioning that there are only around 660 Free Schools as well, so are they really making a significant difference across education (22000 state schools in England)?
(this is a very quick and shoddy chart, and there are some categories missing, but it does show roughly the distribution of state school types in England)
From 26/08/2023
I've had a DFE Free Schools data evening!
Lots in the media about Free Schools this week.
602 Free Schools (out of about 660) have their pupil numbers listed. In total this is around 220k, which is around 2.5% of the pupil population.
But of those 602 schools, only 183 are filled to within 10% of their capacity, that's 30% of these Free Schools.
In fact the capacity of these 603 schools is around 335k.
Interestingly 83/602 are currently filled at below 20% of capacity!
I suspect these are filling from Y7 or Y1 upwards, but still an interesting number (well it is to me).
I need to do a more thorough analysis (not on a Saturday evening) to get to the bottom of this.
In terms of free school meals, nationally the fsm % is 23.8%, in Free Schools this is 23.3%, therefore the difference is probably statistically negligible. So Free Schools are neither better or worse at helping children from more deprived backgrounds.
This covers Free Schools, Free 16-19, Special and AP.
Possibly more to come (or possibly not depending on workload
)
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