Celebrating the success of the free school system

This is a welcome success in the free school system that we should celebrate:

The government’s flagship free schools programme has been dealt a blow with the announcement that a third school is to close after a damning Ofsted report found that leadership, teaching, pupil behaviour and achievement were all “inadequate”, the lowest possible rating.

Durham Free School, which has a Christian ethos and opened in September 2013, has had its funding agreement terminated after being put in special measures by the schools watchdog, Ofsted, after an inspection in November.

It follows the closure of the Discovery New School in east Sussex, which was forced to shut last year because of poor standards, and the partial closure of Al Madinah in Derby, the country’s first Muslim free school, which had to close its secondary school after a critical Ofsted report.

No, we haven't gone mad. We really are using the failure of a school or three to celebrate the success of the system. Because this is actually the point of said system. People get to try out new things. Some of those new things will succeed, others will not. But this is exactly what we desire to happen. To have people try new things so as to see what will succeed and what will not.

This is also the defining feature of this capitalism/free market hybrid that should be the prevailing ethos of our society. That failure quickly becomes obvious and thus fails and fails fast. All experimentation will produce failures and without experimentation there will be no advances. So, we desire a system that experiments and one that quickly identifies those inevitable failures, closes them down and gets on with another round of experimentation.

TYhis is just what the free school system does: it's therefore a success story that a failure has been spotted and dealt with. Because that's the damn point.