The opponents of school reform, however, have turned their attention to what they correctly see is now the more important battleground, free schools. Academies tend to use their independence to make smaller or more gradual innovations (with exceptions like the Ark or Harris chains). As free schools become more numerous (50-100 may open next year and potentially more than 100 per year from 2013), their capacity for radical innovation poses a huge threat to the status quo. 

This opposition is led by the two main unions (the NUT and the NAS/UWT), the Anti Academies Alliance, and the recently formed Local Schools Network. The latter, headed by Fiona Millar, has condemned the free school movement and encouraged legal challenges against schools converting to academy status. Despite couching their arguments in the same language as those who nobly champion the many successful maintained comprehensives in England, they are in fact defending schools which have failed poor children for decades. Most worryingly, however, Nick Clegg has recently expressed scepticism regarding greater independence for free schools. This indicates that the Left of the Liberal Democrats (whom Clegg is under pressure to placate) might be willing to join the Left of the Labour Party in opposing education reform. 

That someone as intelligent and reform-minded as Nick Clegg should want to place further restrictions on free schools demonstrates the fragility of the progress made in English education over the last decade. Academy schools have achieved remarkable results (this year one of the first, Mossbourne Academy, which serves a downtrodden area of Hackney, sent nine pupils to Oxbridge). Free schools can build on this progress and enact a change more substantial, radical and lasting. It is this that poses such a threat to the vested interests which oppose them. 

As the Bronx nativity play drew to a close, one parent recounted, with a broad smile, how her older child has just started at an elite Ivy League college after attending KIPP Academy. She simply could not understand why anyone would oppose the school which had changed her child's life. But many do, vehemently, and the same opposition is already mobilising to undermine free schools in England. Whether it is between unions and free school providers, or around the Cabinet table between ministers, the battle for the soul of English education has begun.