For several months now I've been expecting some local Conservative councillors to attack the Party's free school policy and it happened this morning. Paul Carter, the Tory leader of Kent County Council, told the BBC that if a Conservative government makes it easier for parents and voluntary groups to set up academies, the amount of money available to local authorities for maintained schools will fall. "At the moment the more academies and free schools you operate, under the current academy funding arrangements, the less maintained schools would get," he said.
That's true, but misleading – the sort of point you'd expect a Labour opponent of the Conservatives' education policy to make, not the leader of a Tory council. If a failing maintained school in Kent becomes an academy, then, of course, the total amount of money the local authority receives to educate children in Kent will fall since it will have one less secondary school on its books. The money follows the pupils, so if a local education authority is educating fewer pupils it will receive less money. But it's per capita pupil budget won't change. That's the situation at present – not a change the Conservatives are proposing to make. (To read more, click here.)
