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school last September. And demand is projected to rise, with an anticipated need for an extra 3,000 primary places by 2015.

Though the Government claims free schools will help raise standards for some of the most deprived pupils, the Bristol Free School’s elite admissions policy allows it to discriminate against such pupils in favour of a more affluent intake.

The school is located in the BS10 area that includes Brentry, Henbury and Southmead. Its admissions policy, however, enables it to take 80 per cent of its pupils from the more affluent BS9 postcode, which includes Westbury, Henleaze and Stoke Bishop. It does so by defining a separate ‘admissions centre’ close to the site it originally planned.

Just 20 per cent of places are set aside for pupils living closest to the actual school site, which is in the far north-east corner of the school’s self-designated catchment area. Just 10 per cent of its initial pupil intake were eligible for free school meals, compared to a Bristol local authority average of 23.3 per cent, and only 7.5 per cent had special educational needs, compared with a Bristol average of 21.8 per cent.

London Borough of Wandsworth

A new secondary school, the Ark Bolingbroke Academy, is due to open in September. Yet the NUT has found that in the borough there is a surplus of 1,287 secondary places across 11 secondary schools. The council estimates it will take until 2020 to reduce the number of surplus places to its aim of 5 per cent spare capacity.

Meanwhile, the borough has a shortage of 115 primary places and will be 600 places short by 2015.

Another free secondary school, Michaela, plans to open in 2013. It failed to secure premises in time to open in 2012.

Primary schools

Unlike Wandsworth and Bristol, some other parts of the country have a surplus of primary places and new primary free schools are threatening to destabilise existing provision. An NUT head teacher contacted the Union in May to describe how a new nursery and primary free school due to open in September was poaching children from the existing six primary schools in the area, not all of which were full.

The head stated: “Surely if they are taking pupils from the other local schools there is not the need for places. Is there anything at all that can be done about this before I lose all my children and have to close due to lack of pupil numbers?”

Where is the money coming from?

The NUT has been monitoring payments by the Department for Education (DfE) and its agencies on its free schools policy. Our research reveals that there were 133 full-time equivalent staff working exclusively on the free schools’ programme in September 2011 – an increase of 31 in a 12-month period at a time when DfE staffing as a whole fell by 85 posts. Over the same period the annual cost of salaries for the free school team almost doubled to £6.15 million in 2011, from £3.93 million the previous year.

“Free schools are absorbing an increasing proportion of DfE staff resources at a time when the department as a whole is shrinking. This programme will create a chaotic and unaccountable education system,” warns Christine Blower. “Michael Gove must urgently rethink this policy, which is neither needed nor wanted and is a dreadful waste of public resources and money.”

• Celia Dignan is NUT Principal Officer, privatisation.

Is a free school planned near you?

Your local division or regional/Wales office (contact details at www.teachers.org.uk/contactus or head office (email academies@nut.org.uk will be able to put you in touch with your local campaign. If there isn’t a campaign, you could set one up – it’s vital the community knows what’s going on.

There is more information on the free schools page of the NUT website at www.teachers.org.uk/freeschools