When I've made this argument before, the standard objection is that it's not fair to treat children as guinea pigs in a laboratory. We can't take a risk with their education because if something goes wrong they won't get a second chance. 

The problem with this is it assumes the risk of sending your child to the local community school is lower than sending him or her to a free school. Not true-419 schools in England were rated "inadequate" by Ofsted last year; only one of them was a free school. Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, estimated that in 2012 at least two million English children were attending schools that were either inadequate or required improvement, which might explain why a fifth of school leavers are functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate. That was the conclusion of a government-funded study carried out by Sheffield University in 2009. Professor Greg Brooks, one of the study's authors, said this had been true for at least 20 years.

What defenders of the status quo fail to acknowledge is that a significant percentage of comprehensives aren't fit for purpose. It's not the risk of children being let down by free schools they should worry about, but the certainty they will be let down if they attend a failing community school. Earlier this year, the OECD found that young adults in England rank 22nd out of 24 nations for literacy and 21st for numeracy, behind Estonia, Poland and Slovakia. Thanks to the last government's failure to address this systemic failure, England is the only country in the OECD survey where results are going backwards, with 16-24-year-olds performing worse than the older cohorts. Inevitably, the poorest performers are those on the lowest incomes — precisely the people whom the critics of Gove's reforms say they want to protect.

It's too early to say whether children at free schools will do better than their equivalents at community schools. The real test will be in 2016, when the first cohort of children to be admitted to the WLFS and the other free schools that opened in 2011 will get their GCSE results. I'm optimistic they will, and that the schools will pass other tests, too, such as lowering the attainment gap between children on free school meals and their peers. At the WLFS, the group that outperforms all others in standardised tests are girls on free school meals. This suggests that free schools are not a "dangerous ideological experiment", but a vital lifeline for children who might otherwise be submerged in poverty. As someone with a PhD from Oxford, Tristram Hunt should welcome this experiment rather than threatening to end it.