Education free for all: outsourcing, contracts and conflicts of interest in the UK

Legislation introduced under the coalition government had removed the provision of some schools’ services from local authority control and forced the hand of schools to offer contracts to private providers. This was a surreptitious encroachment of the free market into schools that was ratcheted up still further under the majority Conservative government from 2015. All schools are responsible for a wide range of contracts, and Academy chains have particularly large numbers of contracts to award, but for Free schools and Academies, there is little oversight as to how such contracts are conferred. These contracts allowed for-profit companies to enter into education provision (companies which, in many cases, had no previous knowledge of schools).