Arguing about apprentices

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Apprenticeship schemes can be beneficial to the labour market, and in turn the economy as a whole. If run efficiently and led by firms they can produce highly skilled young people with a higher degree of specialisation in their field. This helps promote high quality domestic industries.

The reason these schemes tend to work is that firms know that they are investing in high quality staff who can be nurtured to suit their needs, creating a reliable and efficient workforce. So when the quality of the apprenticeship schemes becomes questionable, the entire system is undermined. This is the problem with the governments interference by proposing a quota of 400,000 places to be on offer by 2020.

By producing such a quota, the government is effectively artificially boosting the supply within the market for apprentices, consequently devaluing the benefits they bring to firms and the economy. By ensuring that there are always places available on these schemes, the government is disincentivizing young apprentices, making the market less competitive. The government needs to be aware of possible unintended consequences that could harm the long-term interests industry.

As this article says, these targets are facing some stiff opposition and may not actually come into play. Let's hope so. Apprentice schemes should be left in the hands of the private sector. Ultimately, they know that if they invest in young employees, educating and training them, they will reap the rewards later on.

Education, Education, Education!

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This was the slogan of Blair’s government; the next’s should be vouchers, vouchers, vouchers!

With Obama as new President, and the UK election on the horizon (at least by 2010) it is elementary that we begin reassessing policies on both sides of the Atlantic. Government intervention in education is justifiable under paternalistic concerns and the positive neighbourhood effects resulting from investment in humans. However, whilst this line justifies government funding, it does not validate a government monopoly over the running of schools.

These arguments have been well learnt since Friedman’s insights into “The Role of Government in Education" in 1955. However, the point needs to be hammered home.

A progressively based voucher scheme for approved privately run schools would benefit the vast majority. A market for education would reduce inefficiency and facilitate true social mobility. Vouchers provide a great improvement over the current system of schooling. They provide choice and schools are motivated to tailor for the needs of parents and students. In addition, they serve to help the disadvantaged the most by providing new opportunities. (I should emphasize that I do not regard vouchers to be a comprehensive solution.)

Focusing on the UK, I recently had the opportunity to talk with Chris Woodhead, the once controversial Chief Inspector of Schools, and it is clear our educational system is in dire need of change. Declining academic standards (in real terms), decreasing social mobility (despite Ed Balls’ claims), high truancy and other problems have yet to be solved by the ‘innovative’ government reforms of academies and ‘deep’ learning. Cynically, it also appears that our future plans will only continue this trend.  Political parties and politicians may claim to be agents of ‘social mobility’ and ‘change we can believe in’, but until they address the issue of education with radical and far-reaching reforms, progress will be limited and our system will continue to limit the real opportunities provided to our youth.

See our 2007 report Open Access for UK Schools for more info.

Too much testing

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Alice Thompson, writing in The Times, thinks that standardized testing in schools should be abolished. Noting that English children are formally tested 70 times by the age of 16, she makes a very good case:

Our four-year-old must be assessed on everything from personal hygiene to knowing what a phonome is. By 7, my eldest son was expected to meet a series of “attainment targets" in 14 areas, from religious studies to citizenship as well as sitting his SATs. These range from “creating and performing dances using simple movement patterns, including those from different times and cultures", to realising “that family and friends should care for each other", to being able to “record calculations, using the symbols +, -, x , ÷ and = correctly"... By Key Stage Four, at the age of 14 to 16, the curriculum resembles a giant boa constrictor wrapped around schools, squeezing the life out of them.

Once you consider the lunacy of this whole system, it's really no wonder that Britain has slipped so far down the OECD's education rankings (from 3rd to 13th) since the 1980s. The astonishing degree of over-testing is indicative of a service that is not run in the interests of its customers – the pupils and their parents – but rather to serve the purpose of its political masters. As the old saying goes, "He who pays the piper calls the tune." In this instance, the government pays, the schools play their tune, and then the children have to suffer through it.

The solution is pretty simple. All schools should be independent and self-governing, free to set their own curricula, choose the exams their pupils will sit and pick the qualifications they will be entered for from the wide range of competing options already on the market. Ultimately, what matters is that schools are made accountable to parents, rather than to the state.

Free education

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It is rare that one can agree with any views of the modern trade union movement. So when they talk a semblance of sense it is worth mentioning. This rare concurrence of views comes in the teaching union's response to news that schools in England are to be held to account on a wide range of measures of pupil 'well-being'.

Schools will have to provide information on how well they promote healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle, how well they give good guidance on sex and relationships and discourage smoking, alcohol consumption and drug use. This will be taken in the form of surveys of parent and pupil opinion.

Children's minister Baroness Delyth Morgan said: "School-level indicators will help schools to assess how well they are promoting the well-being of their pupils. They will build on data about pupils' attainment and progress, so that wider aspects of children's lives can be benchmarked nationally."

Head of education at the NUT, John Bangs, rightly responded saying: "The danger is we get into a mechanistic evaluation but with highly subjective information on pupils' perceptions"; going on to call the plans "the height of absurdity - the logical end of an absurd evaluation structure." Quite right, but let's not forget that the teaching unions are just trying to cover their teacher’s backs, their primary concern is not for pupils and parents.

More centralization, more standardization and more testing have not rescued (nor ever will) state run education. The much-publicized Conservative policy to 'free' education goes some of the way, but in truth the poisonous ties politics holds over education will need to be further cut. And it is not enough to devolve power to local politicians as some demand; freedom requires that parents are free to set up and send their children to schools completely outside of the state system, with no interference from the politicians.

Markets in Education

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I  fear that Melissa Benn doesn't understand one of the reasons that we like markets so much.

And there is now a surprising amount of agreement across the political spectrum about what constitutes a good school.......There is widespread recognition of the need for human scale institutions, be it smaller classes and now smaller schools. It's also widely agreed that we need good order in the classroom; more engaging teaching; strong, autonomous heads, and more spending on those with the greatest needs; the so-called "pupil premium".

That these things are now agreed right across the politicl specturm means, according to Ms. Benn, that all schools should thus be like this in one rigid system. Which is to miss one of the basic reasons why we have markets at all: they're the way that we can have innovation, the way that people can try new things and see what works.

Leave aside the point that what everyone now agrees makes a good school was exactly what everyone agreed did not make a good one in former decades, leave aside education itself in fact. We don't presume that we now make the very best computers that anyone will ever make, there are any number pointing out that cars need to be powered differently, there are, you might have noted, those who wonder whether our method of financial regulation is quite the best one that could ever be devised. And how are people to try out the possible new ways of doing things? By doing them of course and seeing what works, what people actually want at the price that it can be done. In a market in other words.

Exactly the same is true of schools and education: it's the height of hubris to assume that we, now, have had the revelation denied to all previous generations as to how a perfect school system should be run, that those who follow us will not devise better methods. And for them to test what may or may not work we need a market in alternative methods of education organisation rather than one huge system devised from the centre.

After all, it was the fact that we did not have a single rigid system, that there were alternatives to central State control, that led us to overturn the previous orthodoxy and agree now on the above list of things that does make a good school. Arguing that we should now abolish such markets in organisation to to argue that we abolish the very thing that allowed us to uncover this precious knowledge.

New schools galore

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The Tories' plan to permit up to 5,000 new independently run schools to be set up would be a major step towards improving Britain’s education system. Their plans are based upon the Swedish model for education, which was established during the 1990’s.

Swedes are the world leaders in promoting ‘free-market education’ based upon a system where organisations or individuals can set up an independent school that is then funded by the state.

Such a free-market approach to education seems the most sensible way to increase both competition and efficiency. This new breed of schools would work at its best if given greater freedom. By being able to select which examinations are taken (for example the International Baccalaureate, European or American exams), students can choose to join a school at which their needs will be more accurately met. This extra competition within the market would mean that students from poorly performing schools would be free to move to a better one, forcing underperforming schools to either close or improve the quality of their service.

In order to meet the demands of students, firms such as Kunskapsskolan (who have already nodded towards an expansion into the UK) have developed and specialised within Sweden. This specialisation allows them to innovate to provide better quality services.

This type of system would focus the attention of education towards meeting the needs and choices of students and from away meeting targets set by Whitehall and the national curriculum, resulting in a much more effective use of resources.

For more on the Swedish model of education reform, see our recent publication Open Access for UK Schools (PDF)

Education or social justice?

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With a target of 50 percent of school leavers going to university by 2010, the government is encouraging more students than ever before to enter higher education. As with any target setting, there will be a divergent relationship between the quantity and the quality of education received by students.

But this target is not the only way in which the government is meddling with university admissions. They are constantly encouraging universities to accept more applicants from ‘lower-income’ backgrounds. The argument is that they may not have been able to afford the private school fees or tuition that middle class children may have benefited from. But by interfering with such blunt schemes the government is inevitably disadvantaging other students. The latest addition to the UCAS (University and Colleges Admission Services) form is a declaration of the students’ parents’ occupations – as if this gives any indication as to the aptitude of a candidate to study!

Why does the government continue to disadvantage certain young people of equal opportunities? If a child receives extra football coaching outside of school they aren’t told they must play with their shoelaces tied together to make it fair on the opposition!

As the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University stated recently, universities are designed for educating students rather than acting as ‘engines for promoting social justice’. Essentially, the government is trying to cover up its poor performance in education, but by making it easier for certain students to gain university entrance the government is reducing their incentives to study whilst at school. This benefits nobody.

Freeing education

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Traditionally, higher education has been a luxury - something for wealthier people, and wealthier countries. Over the last 35 years, however, it has become more of a necessity. Whatever their income, people are getting more of it. Countries today are sending a higher percentage of their youngsters through higher education than countries with the same GDP level back in the early 1970s. People think of the US as the leader in higher education, but in fact countries like Korea and Japan have higher penetration: modern technology needs well-educated workers.

And countries with higher proportions of young people have higher life expectancies. Maybe it's just that richer countries can afford more education and more healthcare. But there's more to it. After the collapse of the Soviet system, Russia's GDP nosedived. So did life expectancy. But the life expectancy of university graduates continued to rise. Perhaps education helps people to deal with changing events.

The link between education an longevity has another aspect. Inequalities in GDP between different countries haven't changed much since the 1970s. There has been a slight narrowing, but a gap between rich and poor persists. However, even the very poor are now getting more education, and living much longer than before. And people value life very highly: when you take that into account, world inequality is much less than the GDP figures suggest.

With graduates earning more and living longer, there are certainly gaps, even within countries. But you don't close that gap by taxing graduates. Higher education delivers a good return on investment: you want more of that, not less. And the way to create a thriving education sector is just the same as for other sectors, be it manufacturing, utilities, telecoms or transport – end the state monopolies and let competition flourish.
 

Lines in the sand

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An article on the BBC’s website entitled ‘UK slipping down graduate league’ attracted my attention. Interesting, I thought, this must be an evaluation of how the quality of students popping out of British universities has slipped below that of other countries. Not the case. Instead, the article read like a fistful Blairite nonsense about the knowledge economy, and how we need more people in universities in order to compete with the rising economies of China and India. You get the idea.

The article suggests that politicians may need to suck us for more taxes to raise the number of young people going to university to upwards of 60 percent. No thanks. As I was wisely told when I was a kid: “just because everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean you have to". Countries competing in graduates to improve their economies remind me of synchronized swimmers at the Olympics: a lot of splashing, looks pretty, but not much result. A lesson can be learned from Eastern Europe. When working in a bar to pay for my own questionable education, a fair number of the ubiquitous Polish waitresses had been educated ad infinatum, persuaded by massive state subsidies. Little good it did them. There were no jobs in Poland. Their universities did not deliver a growing, competitive economy.

The solution to all this is simple, but frankly beyond the stomach of most politicians. Free universities from the state, and in so doing allow the market to decide the price for education. If it is value for their time and money, the student will choose to go to university. We don't an aribitrary target, be it 50 percent, or 60 percent, or whatever. The economy is far more dynamic and flexible than that.

What about the poor? Well, the poor are not stupid. And if they are, they really should not be thinking about going to university. Thus, if it is worth their time and money, they can borrow the money to invest in their future. If people don’t go to university they can do an apprenticeship, start a business or get a job. All potential paths to personal wealth that will also benefit the economy. Simple.

Go west, British students

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Last week The Times reported that the America's Ivy League group of elite universities has begun to actively target Britain's top students. I'm pleased to hear it – the competition will do Britain's complacent universities some good.

It's not hard to imagine the UK's brightest school-leavers being tempted across the atlantic. For starters, being private (rather than state-financed) institutions, the Ivy League schools have built up enormous endowment funds to help people pay for their studies. At Yale, for instance, " students with a family income of less than £34,000 a year do not have to pay for anything. Even those whose parents earn a joint salary of up to £70,000 are eligible for some support." Better funding also means better facilities, smaller classes, and so on.

But I think the main reason British students would want to go to the US is that universities there actually teach their students. Because they rely on their students (not the government) for funding, American universities are much more attentive to their needs and requirements. Of course, there are some excellent universities and top-notch academics in the UK too – but all too often what Adam Smith said over 200 years ago still stands:

"[T]he great part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching."

And...

"The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters."

The solution? More independence from the state, and more private funding. You can read Terence Kealey's briefing on 'Transforming Higher Education" here.