Adam Smith Institute

66. "Schools should provide our children a risk-free environment."

There is no such thing as a risk-free environment. There are degrees of risk and there are ways of managing risk. Growing up is not a risk-free zone. Children learn by making mistakes. They hurt themselves and each other at play. Each day has its coterie of bumps and bruises and grazes. On more serious occasions bones are broken.

Schools cannot be risk-free. They have hard surfaces and corners, desks and chairs. They feature sports and games. Children will injure themselves. There is a balance to be struck between recklessly exposing children to potential dangers and maintaining such tight controls that they have no independence or learning experience. Schools which ban marbles because people might slip on them or swallow them, or which ban conkers because a child might get struck by one, are in effect banning part of childhood.

The attempt to be risk-free leads schools to abandon foreign visits such as ski trips, and adventure holidays such as canoeing or camping. Even educational visits can be banned because of the risk of traffic accidents en route. None of this does the children any favours. It denies them learning experiences, and it even denies them the carefree fun and excitement that childhood should involve.

Part of the problem is the litigation culture which assumes that everything that happens is somebody's fault, and that someone has to pay every time any child is injured. Part of it is the health and safety bureaucracy seeking to cover itself. Anything that happens will be laid at its door, so its officials seek to anticipate all eventualities and allow nothing that could come back at them. They try to make schools places where no-one has cause to sue, or to blame health and safety officers for failing to anticipate accidents. In doing so they make schools unfit for children. Schools, like childhood itself, cannot be risk free.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the UK's new school admissions policy, it will be a political disaster.

At present, middle class parents get their kids into good state schools by moving into the catchment areas of the best ones. So the plan is to allocate school places by lottery rather than catchment, so that poorer parents have an equal chance (and so that schools would get a wider social mix too).

While the parents whose kids get into good schools under this scheme will be pleased, they won't exactly be marching on City Hall to express their pleasure. But the middle-class parents whose kids don't get into nearby good schools will be absolutely furious, and campaigning in their thousands. And poorer parents whose kids don't get into their preferred nearby school will be marching alongside them.

And whatever the merits of the policy, its inevitable result is that kids will have to travel longer distances to get to school. That means they are going to be walking or cycling greater distances along busy streets, and (come winter) more are going to get killed or injured. Already there is a spike in road fatalities around the age of eleven, when kids transfer from their neighbourhood primary schools to the more distant secondary schools. The first case of a kid being killed on one of these forced cycle trips will get the media, and parents, baying for ministers' blood.

A better policy would focus on incentivizing state schools to improve, not rationing them by throwing dice. For some ideas, ministers should check here.

52. "Schooling should seek to make children equal."

The trouble with notions such as this is that they end up by restraining the talented. Children are not equal. Some are cleverer, some are stronger, some are faster. Some have musical talent, some linguistic and some mathematical. Any attempt to impose an artificial equality on them inevitably reduces down to the lowest common denominator.

Equality is not a good thing in itself. Diversity is. People of different talents will do different things, and be of service to their fellow men and women in different ways. It should be the aim of schooling to try to avoid any waste of talent, to bring out in each child the maximum of his or her potential. This is not achieved by pretending that everyone is equal, and by denying the talented any recognition.

Children might be equally worthy of consideration as individuals; they might be equally entitled to fair treatment. They are done no service, however, if they are taught that a poor performance is the same as an excellent one. Schools which avoid competitive sports or prize-giving ceremonies do their children no favours. The real world outside school is not like that, and they will be ill-prepared for it.

Even equality of opportunity has its limits. Some children will have more thoughtful or more loving parents. Some will have educational opportunities for foreign travel because their parents choose such holidays. Others will have more access to books because their parents keep them about the house. The ultimate logic of total equality of opportunity is the state battery farm. It is, however, a worthwhile goal for society to try to develop the potential of each child, and not to discriminate against any particular groups.

If children are diverse in their talents and abilities, then schooling itself should be diverse, enabling the parents of each child to find an education suited to it.