The Adam Smith Institute and its supporters think that a range of policies covering every area of government is needed to improve life and prospects in Britain. We think that a flat tax would improve the economy and the range of choices open to people if they could spend more of their own money. We think that universities would do better if they secured their independence from government and were free to pursue their own admissions and tuition practices. We'd like health services that responded to the needs and priorities of patients, rather than to the targets which government and its managers preferred to deliver. We think that much of the regulatory burden could be replaced by industry wide codes of practice and a legal regimen that specified general objectives whose details could be filled in by accumulated case law of test cases and tribunal decisions.
The list of these desirable and necessary changes is a long one, but if we had to pick one out for fast-track priority action, it would probably be the schools. Long an ideological battleground, a social laboratory, and a factory for inculcating fashionable attitudes, many of the state schools have failed to bring out the full potential of their students. Indeed, all too many have even failed to equip them with the basic educational skills needed for a decent life.
It is not that state-produced education needs to be changed; it needs to be ended. Schools should be independent, setting their objectives according to the wishes of parents, headteachers and governors. It should not be a decision of government to replace A-level examinations by a certificate, or to abolish oral tests from language qualifications. It should be up to the school to decide which exams are appropriate for its students, and for various exam boards to offer different alternatives.
City academies are not the answer, and neither are grammar schools. Both are part of the answer because the desired outcome is of a variety of different types of school so that parents can choose one they find suitable. Government's role should not be that of running schools and employing teachers, but of ensuring that everyone has access to a decent and appropriate education. If they were allowed to spend the state funding in schools they choose, like the Swedish model, all parents would be able to choose quality education for their children.
This should be coupled with moves to make it very easy for new schools to be set up, whether by parents and teachers getting together, or by educational organizations taking the initiative. The key factors are free choice for parents and a wide range of choices for them. Yes, we need all the policy changes in other areas, but we need this one most of all, and we need it soon.
I imagine that many reacted as I did to the news that a minimum of five hours of high culture is to be included in schools. These ministers come and go, making these announcements as they pass, but little happens on the ground. I wonder if these 5 hours will come before or after the compulsory 3 hours of sport previously promised (but not happened)? Or maybe they'll come after the compulsory cookery hours to be introduced? Perhaps they could be fitted around the promised lessons in "What it means to be British."
Ministers and bureaucrats sit at the centre signing pieces of paper to commit schools to each popular fancy, while hapless teachers shudder and groan at each straw added to an already over-burdened and top-heavy curriculum. Then the fuss dies down, the gloss wears off, and there are no more column inches to be gained, so the initiative is quietly forgotten.
Isn't there a case for giving teachers more discretion in this? Shouldn't head-teachers draw up proposals and put them to parents to see what they think of them? Couldn't education be decentralized so that local schools could offer an education they thought suitable. That way lies parental choice, with the money following the child. That way lies the transformation of education from a monolithic state system into one which tailors itself to the needs of parents and children and the talents of teachers.
In the meantime, would anyone care to guess what the next ministerial initiative will add to the school timetable?
34. "Education is a right, not something to be bought and sold."
Education is bought and sold. It costs money to produce, because resources and personnel have to be allocated to its supply. The question is not whether it should be bought and sold, but whether government should have a monopoly on the transaction.
Education has to be paid for, and people have to be directed to the production of it. This can be done, albeit inefficiently, by having government decide on the appropriate level, and by levying sufficient taxation to pay for it. Education then takes its place in the queue of demands on public funds. Extra allocation depends on political pressure, and what level of taxation the government thinks will be tolerated. It also depends on the level of public outcry at the standards which the state manages to achieve.
Alternatively it can be provided in a market way, with people spending on it what they think it is worth, and to the level which they think is advantageous. People engage in supply activity to meet, and even profit from, that demand. A wide range of choices is available for a range of widely different personal circumstances. In both cases it is a commodity, not a right. People have a scale of priorities; they have to balance how much they care to spend on housing, how much to other things such as consumer goods and holidays, and how much to personal services such as health and education. This is done very diffusely and imperfectly through the political process, where individual preferences have to be averaged.
People may decide that in a humane society, everyone capable of benefitting from education should have access to it at appropriate levels. Instead of being done through mass state provision, this can be achieved by ensuring that affordable school places are widely available, and by helping where necessary through vouchers or assisted places.
Sir Roderick Floud, former vice-president of the European University
Association, said the UK was a clear market leader in higher education
in Europe, which by 2010 would offer a potential market of one billion
people as a result of the Bologna Agreement, designed to unify higher
education systems across the continent.
"I
find it completely extraordinary and short-sighted that British
universities are so well represented in recruitment terms in south Asia
and the Far East, and so badly represented in the rest of Europe,"
Floud told the Guardian's Higher Education summit in London.
As Sir Roderick recently (March 2006) retired as President of London Metropolitan University, his surprise is. umm, surprising. The reason universities try to recruit overseas students is because they can charge them lots of money for attending their elite insitutions. Domestically sourced students have their charges capped...and one part of the delights of the European Union is that students from other parts of the EU are to be treated as domesticaly sourced. Thus they can only be charged the (c.) £3,100 a year that a Brit would pay while someone from South Asia or the Far East might pay £11,000 or so.
These fees from overseas students have in fact been the lifeblood of the entire sector for some years now: possibly a third of the entire fee income of the whole higher education sector. This isn't extraordinary nor is it short-sighted: it's simple economic rationality.
A market of one billion people in a population of just under 500 million also looks a bit of a stretch.
So does the phrase finish with "those who can't teach, administrate"?
The future of medicine lies in the hands of researchers, doctors, and most importantly – private funders.
Imperial College London's Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBE) was founded in 2004, the first of its kind in the UK. Recently profiled in the Financial Times, it serves as a model for other institutions. Gone is the day that University researchers fear commercial involvement in their work, for as the FT put it:
IBE staff have been enterprising not only in spinning out companies – seven so far – but also in raising money to build and run a postgraduate research institute at the heart of Imperial's South Kensington campus. A particularly innovative feature of IBE's £28m fundraising was the £10m invested by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a charity that focuses on culture, education and the environment.
Although this foundation is a charity, the investment was purely commercial. In return, any future spin-outs or licensed agreements have a portion returning to the Foundation. Rather than relying on government funding to raise money for big capital projects, some universities also have similar deals with financial institutions.
Successful biomedical engineering programs require excellent medical schools and engineering programmes – and also private funding. This is exactly what the Johns Hopkins University has, and being the top BME programme in the US with nine spin-out companies, one can see why.
The Whitaker Foundation, established in 1976, supported the enhancement or establishment of educational programmes in biomedical engineering, especially encouraging the formation of departments. Over 30 years it has given $805 million in funding to institutions like Johns Hopkins. It is private donations such as these have made the US a world leader in this field.
Oxford University has recently launched its own IBE with a similar structure of private funding. As an alumnus of Johns Hopkins BME and a current Imperial IBE student, I’ve benefited from this structure. Other universities should follow suit and create similar opportunities, allowing a higher standard of education for more students.
According to a survey of 3,000 people commissioned by UKTV Gold, a satellite TV channel, Britons are increasingly confusing fact and fiction when it comes to their historical knowledge. While 58 percent believed Sherlock Holmes was a real historical figure, 23 percent believed Sir Winston Churchill was fictional.
On seeing the results of this survey I assumed that I had overslept and woken up on April 1st but, alas, no. It appears to have been a real survey of real people – something which, humour aside, is very worrying indeed.
9. "It is wrong to allow bright children to go to special schools. This deprives the ordinary schools of their beneficial influence."
If you regard children as the property of the state, existing to serve it, then it is explicable why the bright ones should be regarded as a scarce commodity, and rationed accordingly. The idea of allocating their "beneficial influence" equally through society follows from the same twisted logic. It is a pity that this is only applied to intelligence. Why should not the good-looking children be shared out equally, so their peer group has equal access to the pleasant sight of them? Perhaps the kind ones should be spread so that all may benefit equally from their sweet disposition?
The vicious notion is that children, whether bright or not, should be regarded as the instruments of the ends of others, instead of ends in themselves. Children do not exist to serve the purposes of the state, it is the other way round. The concern should be with what is of benefit to the individuals concerned, rather than with how they can be made to serve some ideological view of society.
Behind the idea often lurks the doctrine of egalitarianism, and the feeling that children really ought not to be brighter than each other. With this comes the determination that nothing should be done to encourage it. And this involves the rejection of special schools where the bright children can feel the competitive challenge of their peers, and be pushed even further.
Not only is the view a malicious one to the children concerned, it is adverse to the betterment of society. It is very often the bright children who go on to become the achievers, and develop the new products and processes, and the new ideas that benefit the rest of society. By holding them back when they are young, we may prevent the development of that ability.
My true love sent to me: seven swans a-swimming. In the song, this could refer to the seven sacraments, or the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which include things like teaching, service, and leadership.
Teaching, of course, is another of those things where there is far too much government, and far too little service and leadership. As in health, it is not that the staff are bad - but they are just badly managed, and the sector is too centrally run. The top-down Stalinist way of running things didn't deliver in the Soviet Union, and it doesn't deliver in health, education, and other public services. So we end up with sink schools from which parents and kids - usually those in the most deprived areas - have no escape.
Now, though, the world is building up experience that decentralization actually works. Instead of the state running every school, give parents and teachers money to run their own. That has led to a flowering of new schools in poor, often black areas of America where the state schools had been overwhelmed with drugs and violence and underwhelmed with learning and achievement. Now Sweden has a similar system - the money follows the choices of parents, not bureaucrats, so it tends to be spent better: and all sorts of new education providers are springing up as a result. A model for the UK? Well, we certainly think so.
The New York Times ran an article a few days ago lamenting the decline of tenure track positions in American universities. While frustratingly indicative of a fall in teacher quality and a high turnover of part time and non-tenure-track university professors, advocates forget that a high number of tenured professors probably will not improve teacher quality.
Teacher’s unions fight for tenure because it supplies the ultimate job protection; after teaching for a given number of years a teacher simply cannot be fired. Visiting professors might only stay for the year but can carry the hope and the incentive to do well, in case they might be offered a tenure-track position. Tenure-track professors will work hard too because they are faced with the incentive of increasing their rank and achieving job security. Tenured professors, on the other hand, have lost all incentive to perform at a high level. University professors are also different from teachers in lower education; many, especially at larger institutions, enter the profession not because of a drive to teach, but often because they had completed advanced study in an area and needed a job. Once offered tenure, these professors might stop teaching all together in favour of their research or publications.
Adam Smith said that teachers must have proper incentives of pay and job security in order to properly instruct students; anyone whose pay is not linked to their work will necessarily under-perform. The ability for improvement and the threat of pay cuts improve any profession, and teaching is no different. Professors must always have opportunities to advance, not a position which completely removes the incentives to do their job well.
In his most recent announcement on education, Conservative leader David Cameron pledged to provide of 220,000 new school places by allowing independent organisations to set up schools that would receive state funding on a per pupil basis. Under the Tory plans, a legal presumption that any "fit and proper persons" should be able to set up their own state-financed schools would be created, and planning rules would be shaken up to release more land for educational purposes.
All of which is excellent, and could make a real difference to our ailing education system. Supply side reform like this, which harnesses market forces to create good new school places, is vital if demand side reform (i.e. school choice) is going to be effective. Indeed, the proposals are very similar to those in our recent education report Open Access for UK Schools(which popped up again in the Guardian this week).
Unfortunately though, I worry the Tories still haven't quite 'got it'.
The whole point of establishing independent schools within the state-funded sector is that in return for greater accountability (the school sinks or swims on how many pupils it is able to attract) the schools are given operational independence. This is the surest way to raise standards. Yet the Conservatives seem unable to move beyond the idea that when public money is being spent, the government has to regulate. Thus these new 'independent' schools would have to stream pupils by ability and teach synthetic phonics, and so on. Of course, these requirements may be sensible ones, but surely such decisions are better left to parents and to teachers? As soon as you allow government to regulate, the rules start piling up and you're back where you started – city academies are a shining example of this.
I imagine that many reacted as I did to the news that a minimum of five hours of high culture is to be included in schools. These ministers come and go, making these announcements as they pass, but little happens on the ground. I wonder if these 5 hours will come before or after the compulsory 3 hours of sport previously promised (but not happened)? Or maybe they'll come after the compulsory cookery hours to be introduced? Perhaps they could be fitted around the promised lessons in "What it means to be British."
Education is bought and sold. It costs money to produce, because resources and personnel have to be allocated to its supply. The question is not whether it should be bought and sold, but whether government should have a monopoly on the transaction.
The future of medicine lies in the hands of researchers, doctors, and most importantly – private funders.
If you regard children as the property of the state, existing to serve it, then it is explicable why the bright ones should be regarded as a scarce commodity, and rationed accordingly. The idea of allocating their "beneficial influence" equally through society follows from the same twisted logic. It is a pity that this is only applied to intelligence. Why should not the good-looking children be shared out equally, so their peer group has equal access to the pleasant sight of them? Perhaps the kind ones should be spread so that all may benefit equally from their sweet disposition?
