Inside the ‘black box’ of competition: do schools respond to new competition and, if so, how?

Policies allowing new providers to open independent state-funded schools typically assume these new schools increase choice and competition and, in turn, incentivise existing schools to improve their academic quality. Drawing on the first survey of schools (N = 363) in England that experienced the opening of a new free school nearby, we test these claims through multivariate statistical analysis of neighbouring school leaders’ perceptions of competition and collaboration, impacts of the nearest free school on their school and action-taking due to the free school’s presence. We find competition was the dominant perceived relationship with the free school, but academic quality was not the main component of this competition. We also find a strong relationship between competition and action-taking, but this varied by types of action. The strongest association was to actions on marketing and promotion, followed by ‘accountability’ actions emphasising inspection grades, exam attainment and core subjects. By contrast, schools rarely reported actions relating to the quality of classroom teaching. We discuss why free school competition spurred neighbouring schools to work on their appeal and, to a lesser extent, performance in external metrics, while rarely acting on teaching practices, and we review the implications for policy claims about academic quality.