But if that's all that's meant by the charge, the policy's opponents are scarcely less culpable. After all, they're usually on the left of the Labour Party — often trade union leaders — and their hostility to free schools stems from their belief in the state as an instrument of social justice. In particular, they believe the state should be the sole provider of public services. That isn't just because they think state-run institutions are less likely to fail (see above), but because they believe education, like health and social security, is part of the commonweal and, as such, should be the exclusive preserve of the state. They object to free schools for the same reason they object to any dilution of top-down control in the public sector, whether the NHS or the Prison Service. It's a violation of what they hold to be a sacred principle and many of the policy's most vociferous opponents were also against New Labour's public service reforms. Such quasi-religious devotion to the state feels at least as ideological as the support for free schools among conservatives.

However, there's another, specific meaning of "ideological" when applied to those who support the Coalition's education reforms. Opponents of free schools and academies frequently claim Michael Gove has a secret agenda to break up England's public education system so it's more susceptible to takeover by profit-making corporations — and Hunt has referred to "the sinister ambitions of the government to pursue a for-profit model in our schooling system". In this doomsday scenario, which is often coupled with the name of Rupert Murdoch, Gove's talk of wanting all parents to have access to a good local school is dismissed as a rhetorical smokescreen.

Not surprisingly, there's little evidence to support this conspiracy theory. It was the last government that made it possible for commercial organisations like Tribal and NordAnglia to enter the public education sector — allowing them to carry out Ofsted inspections and run school improvement services, for instance — not the present one. Since 2010, more than half of England's taxpayer-funded secondary schools have become academies but not a single one is owned by a for-profit company. They're all owned by charitable trusts, as are the 174 free schools. Those trusts cannot become for-profit companies and hold on to their assets, such as school buildings and playing fields, without running afoul of charity law. If Michael Gove is planning to serve up state schools on a platter to Rupert Murdoch he's going a funny way about it.

There's one final meaning of "ideological" and that's when it's contrasted with "evidence-based" to imply the advocates of a particular policy are bug-eyed zealots with no regard for social science research. (Hunt has complained about "a zealot's approach to school reform".) But in the case of free schools, both sides claim international evidence supports their point of view, most of it drawn from Sweden. 

Opponents point to Sweden's decline in the OECD's Pisa league tables since free schools were introduced in 1992, citing this as proof that increased competition between taxpayer-funded schools hasn't raised standards. But this is far from conclusive since there's no way of knowing whether Swedish schoolchildren would have fared better or worse in the absence of free schools.

Defenders of the policy cite the work of Anders Bohlmark and Mikael Lindahl, two social scientists who've shown that free schools have had a positive impact on overall attainment in Sweden. Not only are test scores above average in free schools, but they have a beneficial effect on results at neighbouring municipal schools too.