This is hardly an onerous goal being set, is it?

The usual suspects are shouting about how the education system is to be starved of that funding vital to all that is good and holy:

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that school funding would fall by nearly 3% by 2021 even with the additional £1bn a year, after adjusting for inflation and a rise in students enrolled.

“Taking account of forecast growth in pupil [numbers], this equates to a real-terms cut in spending per pupil of 2.8% between 2017–18 and 2021–22. Adding this to past cuts makes for a total real-terms cut to per-pupil spending of around 7% over the six years between 2015–16 and 2021–22,” the IFS said.

And we're afraid that we don't quite see it.

Firstly, it isn't true that the marginal costs of another pupil are the same as the average costs of a pupil. Education spending is far more lumpy than that. One more pupil into an extant school might cost the number of pencils they'll chew in a year but not much more than that.

Secondly, and much more importantly, this isn't actually a big ask. The education system is being asked to improve productivity by 1% a year or so. That's very much less than any private sector organisation tries to manage. And anyone at all who thinks that there isn't 1% a year to be ground out of the cost base of a British public service just sin't dealing with reality.

It's entirely true that the recently departed William Baumol had his Cost Disease, that it's more difficult to increase productivity in services than in manufacturing. But do note that he said more difficult, not impossible.

1% a year improvement in productivity, 1% a year reduction in costs? Pah!