THE abrupt demise of Durham Free School, the closure of which was announced by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan after a damning Ofsted report, will come as no surprise to critics of the free school movement.

The brainchild of former Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and inspired by experimental schools in Sweden and the United States, free schools were part of the Coalition Government’s Big Society initiative.

Influenced by libertarianism, the idea was to allow parents, teachers, charities, businesses and religious groups to set up their own schools.

The vision was that free schools would be an independent but state-funded school which was open to all abilities.

Crucially, like mainstream academy schools, the new free schools would not be controlled by their local educational authority.

But free schools would continue to be subject to the same schools admissions code as all other state-funded schools.

Free schools are governed by non-profit charitable trusts that sign funding agreements with the Education Secretary.

In order to set up a free school, founding groups must submit detailed applications to the Department of Education.

While there are additional start-up funds available to new free schools, mainstream funding is on the same basis as other state schools.

The new model has spread slowly around the country and the North-East still only has a handful of examples.

One of the most long-running campaigns to set up a free school was in Ingleby Barwick. Backed by an enthusiastic and determined group of parents, concerned by what they said was a shortage of secondary school places in their area, the result is the new Ingleby Manor Free School.

Opened in a former factory on an industrial estate, it currently has about 74 pupils but the plan is to have 600, including 150 in the sixth form, in five years.

Despite the opposition to the free school principle by the Labour Party, the setting up of the Marchbank Free School, in the former Teachers’ Pension Agency office in Mowden Hall has been supported by the Labour-controlled Darlington Borough Council and the town’s Labour MP, Jenny Chapman.

The first special school to become a free school in the North-East, Marchbank was set up for purely pragmatic reasons when a group of special school teachers led by principal Mandy Southwick realised that free school funds could be used to improve facilities for special needs children.

Apart from the closure of the Durham Free School, the Department of Education has previously pulled the plugs on the Discovery School in Crawley, West Sussex in 2013 and the secondary wing of the Al-Madinah Free School in Derby. Despite these failures the Govenrment argues that more than two-thirds of free schools are rated as good or outstanding.