A balls-up in education

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Ed Balls plans to give parents and pupils a list of legal rights, with guaranteed standards, and the right to challenge schools through an ombudsman, and in the courts, if the provision of this 'bill of rights' is not met.

This shows everything that's wrong in schools - and public services generally. They are centrally planned and uniform, and unless you have lots of money, customers (in this case, parents) cannot escape and go elsewhere. In competitive businesses, providers have to focus on customers and serving their needs. In monopoly state services, there is no need to bother. So as the complaints mount, ministers send out one central directive, then another – Stalin-style. None of it does much good, and the complaints continue. So then they move to give customers 'voice' – saying they are guaranteed this standard, that standard, this right and that right, and can have a say in how things are run.

This has never worked. Most parents, patients, and public service users do not want to sit on a governing board or have to bother with constant public meetings and elections (I sat on a school board for four years, and became an elector for my local hospital, and I must say that both were a complete waste of time). Public service users certainly don't want to be bothered complaining to an ombudsman or spend the nervous energy going to court if their treatment is poor. They just want a decent service. In a competitive sector, like supermarkets or filling stations, they can just take their custom elsewhere. They don't need to sit on the board of Tesco or Asda – they just go elsewhere, and that sends a vital signal to the providers about what customers actually want. Exit is far stronger, and easier, than voice.

It really does give the impression of beleaguered government strategists pushing phantom armies across the map. In a statement that shows the system's complete contempt for customers, school heads have said it will be a 'whingers charter'. Well, we need more people to whinge at bad service. But we also need to give them the power to go somewhere else. That is why a Swedish-style state-money-follows-the- child voucher system, which the Tories are considering, looks so attractive.

Dr Butler's book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback.

Schools Bill

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This is another missed opportunity to unclog Britain's sclerotic education system. Giving parents a right to request one-to-one tuition for failing children is a promise that is unlikely to see the light of day given the awful state of public finances. This might be a good thing, as the policy would be unworkable in practice. Deciding upon whether a child is failing would prove a bureaucratic nightmare. As children have marked differences in skills and abilities across subject areas, failing could not be determined by tests alone. This would lead a mammoth waste of resources, the misallocation of limited financial resources and a system even more confusing for parents than is currently the case.

Instead of instituting extra teaching for children outside the school day, the government would do better to consider why so many state run schools are failing them for the six or so hours they are under their care.

Creating five-yearly checks on teachers’ competence is another distraction from the imperatives of reform. In the same way that schools should compete with each other for places, schools also need to be able to compete with other sectors for talented individuals. The only way for this happen is to inject the workings of the market into the current system, with better teachers being paid for success and poor teachers losing their jobs.

Philip Salter is Programmes Director of the Adam Smith Institute.

Tories getting there on education

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It does not really matter what colour of government reforms our schools, but it must surely be the number two priority after putting the economy to rights. It begins to look as if it might be the blue party that does it. Having embraced the Swedish model, they seem to have quietly dropped the idea of excluding for-profit schools in the mix.

Now comes an announcement from Michael Gove, shadow Schools Secretary, that groups of teachers will also be allowed (and he suggested 'encouraged') to start their own schools. He has been looking at the successful US experience of the Knowledge Is Power Programme (KIPP), which has seen several new schools started by teachers.

We meet quite a few teachers in the Adam Smith Institute through the ASI's programme of school visits, 6th form ISOS seminars, and even our Power Lunches. There is practically a unanimity that talented teachers have their time wasted and their enthusiasm blunted by the acres of paperwork which flow across their desks, and by the need to comply in detail with minutiae set by civil servants who have not entered a classroom since they were children themselves.

It is reported that the recently-formed New Schools Network has already been contacted by significant numbers of teachers keen to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Education will be the key, and new schools are an essential part of its ability to open new doors of opportunity and quality education, especially for students in deprived areas. Some of the current failing schools might well reform and improve once parents can exercise choice of schools, and direct state funds to those they have chosen. Many, though, will fail and pass unmourned into oblivion. Their place will be taken by high quality new schools. Some will be started by entrepreneurs, some by parents, and now, we are told, some by teachers. They bring a knowledge and a commitment that are needed.

This is a very welcome move, and one that suggests that the Conservatives finally have the right policy on schools, and might just have the nous to implement it.

Madsen Pirie's new book "101 Great Philosophers" is now available.

Yes, you can have too much education

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Yes, it really is possible to have too much education. Not just in the sense of the absent minded professor either (as the saying goes, the more educated you become you know more and more about less and less until as a senior professor you know everything about nothing).

It is entirely possible for both an individual to have too much education and for a society to be educating too many people too highly:

The oversupply of college graduates started in 1999 when Chinese leaders decided to counter some of the effects of the Asian financial crisis by boosting university enrollments. They had hoped that a generation of well-heeled educated urbanites would boost domestic consumption and help reduce China's dependence on exports. Enrollment rose quickly, from 3% of college-age students in the 1980s to 20% today......Some 6.1 million graduates entered the job market this summer, 540,000 more than last year. In 2008 the employment rate for graduates was less than 70%. This year nearly two million of graduates, many of them postgraduate diploma holders, are expected to be left without job placements......An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers.

That has to be a blow, the highly educated scions of the urban middle classes are valued at less (for their labour at least) than the peasants just in from the fields. Yes, education itself is valuable and life enhancing, but this idea that we should push as many as possible through the universities simply does not make economic sense. Our own experience in the UK is that trying to get 50% of all to have a degree is, well, it's already been reported that an Arts degree for a man is not cost effective, it detracts from lifetime income. It's one thing to say that education is good (as I've said it is, as part of personal development) but this mania that it will be the economic salvation of us is nonsense.

For us to take people out of the workforce for three years, at great expense to both themselves and the taxpayer, simply doesn't work as part of economic development. We are actually destroying value, not building it, by doing so.

As is so often true the American vernacular seems to have recognised this long before the policy makers (how about that for the wisdom of the crowds?). One discussion on the correct form for the plural of Starbuck's barista (baristae? baristas? baristi?) ended with the sage observation that it was in fact "liberal arts graduates".

Forced sex education

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Ed Balls has announced that parents can no longer pull their children out of sex education classes in England once they  turn 15.

It is a move away from the government’s position in 2008, when Schools Minister Jim Knight stated that:

I think it's important for individual parents' views to be taken into account in some of these sensitive areas and their right to withdraw from parts of education in those areas that they do not feel comply with their moral views and beliefs and that they will be better dealing with in the home…That would be something that would take us a lot of persuading to move away from.

This is yet more meddling in education. Ed Balls justifies the move by the facts that the age of consent is 16 and the voting age 18. How this relates to forcing even independent schools to teach sex education to 15 year olds is beyond a rational mind.

By taking increasing amounts of power away from schools and parents, this policy is weakening the individuals and institutions that will enable children to be brought up in a way that is fitting for their needs. If schools wish to offer an abundance of sex and relationship advice, then parents should be free to send their children to those schools. However, if instead the parent wishes to offer their child a slower jolt into adulthood than most children get at present, I can think of no reason why the state should be involved in this decision. Depending on the circumstances and the child, different approaches will be appropriate.

Ed Balls argues that this policy will only impact upon a "very small minority" who currently choose to opt out; their wishes are to be sacrificed so he can build  "a strong consensus". Without wishing to come across as too conservative on these matters, much of the strong consensus that makes up the statist fabric of 21st century mores, is worth opting your children out of. As such, on this as with all aspects of education, the state should leave well alone.

Tough on education, tough on the causes of education

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Schools Adjudicator Dr Ian Craig has published his report on Fraudulent Applications; it is a frustrating read. Dr Craig believes that Local Authorities should consider “removing places from the guilty and pursuing them through the courts, possibly using the Perjury Act." In the text of the report, Dr Ian Craig concludes:

The evidence presented persuades me that additional disincentives are required, together with a media campaign to underline the fact that every place obtained by a parent through deception, has the consequence of depriving another child of their ‘rightful’ place. This is not right, nor should it be tolerated in a ‘fair’ admissions system.

The report was doomed from the start. Its remit was to look at:

• The scale of the problem at local level; 
• The effect on fairness of local admissions; 
• The Chief Adjudicator’s view of whether ‘withdrawal of places’ in the Code (paragraphs 1.50 and 1.51) is sufficient to dissuade fraudulent application, and - if not – his recommendations on how this could be addressed.

Within the body of the report the telling point is made that “fraudulent/misleading applications are only an issue in relation to oversubscribed and popular schools". Exactly. Could you imagine such a situation in any consumer led model of education? The good schools should be expanding at the expense of the bad ones, which should go to the wall.

Interestingly, the report finds that “There was no immediately obvious logic to which types of authorities were reporting a problem, for example in terms of geography, deprivation or size." This is rather telling because many believe the quest to give children a good education is essentially a middle-class pursuit. However, this is not the case as the excellent new book The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley shows. When it comes to education – we have a lot to learn from entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The whole approach of this report is wrong-headed. Instead of castigating parents for wanting a better education for their children, those in power should be asking themselves why parents are prepared to make so much effort to get their children into a good school. They should also look at how the schooling system needs to be reformed to allow this competition for places to engender the opportunities of excellence in education for all, rather than trying to cut it off at root.

We need more private schools, not less

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Can the Conservatives learn from Sweden's school voucher system?

Another blow for the left this week as the University College Debating Society threw out a motion calling for the abolition of private education. Camden LibDem candidate Jo Shaw and I, opposing the motion, expected to be defeated, but at the end of the debate our calm and precise arguments gave us a 2:1 majority.

Not that the argument is difficult. Scrapping private education would place a huge additional burden on the state – leaving it with larger class sizes, or leaving taxpayers with higher taxes – all to fund the education of wealthier kids who the rest of us aren't paying for right now. And why do it? Frankly we should be growing more independent schools, because they perform better. It's not just that they get brighter kids with more motivated parents. Or that they charge more than the state spends. The fact is that they make their budgets work harder. Pound for pound spent, private-school kids get more face time with their teachers than state school kids, as our report A Class Act showed. No wonder they perform better.

Sure, you have to be well off to send your kids to a private school: rich enough to pay taxes to support the state sector, and then pay for your private schooling. What I would like to do instead is make private schooling affordable for everyone – as they do in Sweden, or in Denmark. Sweden introduced a voucher system in the mid-1990s. It means that if parents take their children from a municipal school and move them to an independent school, that school gets the same money from the government that it would have spent on their state education. No fees, no top-ups, not even extra charges for sports kit are allowed. So all at once, the whole population of Sweden can exercise a choice. And around 1000 new independent schools have sprung up, bringing in new ideas and much more customer focus. Even the municipal schools have had to sharpen their act in the face of this new competition.

The Tories have seen the merit of this system. I hope they will be brave enough to let voucher schools go their own way and allow customers, not civil servants, to say how they want their schools run. For instance, we don't need a massive state curriculum, administered by thousands of bureaucrats – parents know whether or not a school is doing a good job, and if it isn't, they will move and take their voucher funding to another. In fact, we wouldn't need much of Ofsted's lumbering regulation at all. Let schools run themselves, and give parents the financial power to make their own choice. That would revolutionize UK education. for the better

Dr Butler's book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback.

A Cameroon education

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On 3rd October David Cameron told the Sunday Telegraph that a Conservative government will "smash open the state education monopoly so that any qualified organisation can set up a new state schoo".

What sort of organisations will be able to qualify? Well, according to the Conservatives' two years old policy document, "The country which provides the closest model for what we wish to do is Sweden".

A major feature of the Swedish system is that profit-seeking enterprises, including PLCs, qualify. Indeed three-quarters of the new schools in the Swedish model are profit-seeking. Furthermore, an impeccable source wrote, in a recent article for the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph that "the Swedish model would not exist without the acceptance of profit-making organisations". Yet it has long been clear that Cameroons have no intention whatsoever of permitting such enterprises to "qualify". After all, that would be private enterprise; strictly passé for the Cameroons.

Or would it? During the conference week, part of the pro-Tory press was willing itself to believe otherwise. Thus on 8th October the Spectator editorial said “Crucially, it now looks likely that the new schools will be able to be run for profit" while in its Coffee House, Fraser Nelson wrote “Michael Gove’s new Swedish schools will, it seems, be allowed to make a profit".

This blog is some 3 weeks late while I have searched vainly for support of these notions.

I could be wrong, but if I am right, the Cameroons are guilty of serious misrepresentation of the "Swedish model". The same goes for another of their favourites – "the post-bureaucratic age" (largely via the internet and the information revolution). But the word "bureaucratic" refers to management in government and the public sector. The post-bureaucratic age is not a result of the internet as Dave the Vague likes to claim. It is the result of Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" – the most powerful information system the world has ever seen – bar none, whilst the internet is a mere side-show which enhances whatever market signals are allowed by the bureaucrats.

To reduce bureaucracy the Cameroons must slash taxes and allow private enterprise to flourish, rather than continue to tax us all and dish the funds out again to a few favoured voluntary groups. A good start would be to allow any entity, especially a profit-seeking institution, to create a school and charge fees directly, with a full tax rebate to those who thus reduce the cost of state education by moving their children out of it altogether. Don’t hold your breath.

When should children start school?

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Children are being attacked from all sides these days. Firstly there is a recommendation that children should not start "formal" education until they are six. As someone who started school at four, I can't imagine waiting so late, but obviously others take a different line.

Dame Gillian Pugh, review author, said, "four and five-year-olds tended to be at a stage where they were just "tuning in" to learning and that they could be "turned off" if they were made to follow too formal a curriculum, too early on." Perhaps, but not for all children. The mandated age for children to enter school is questionable as the parents should decide, an issue Douglas Carswell eloquently puts forward here.

On top of this, or indeed in direct competition to it, the European People's Party believes that children should be given lessons in the benefits of the European Union from the earliest of ages. Of course, some would question how long a lesson it would be.

They claim that, "knowing and understanding, from a young age, the principles, the procedures and the successful history of the European Union, the generations of tomorrow will be immune to any distortion of the perception of the role of the EU and will much better embrace the advantages of this unique project of voluntary sharing of sovereignty." They want to 'instruct' young children in the "benefits" of the EU before they have a chance to formulate their own opinions on the institution.

Clearly both of these examples highlight why government needs to stand aside in the provision of education. The temptation to meddle and mould children's minds to be in sync with the government thinking of the time is too great. Free enterprise in schooling is best for parents, the taxpayer and the children themselves.

Working in the UK

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Recently I was at dinner speaking to an overseas student doing her PhD at Cambridge University. For someone who has only been in the UK a number of weeks, she told the most unbelievable story about English emigration authorities.

I was told that even though she had already done her undergraduate and masters degree in the UK, she had to complete the full application for a visa in order to do her PhD. If this wasn’t bad enough, she also had to pay a £20 phone bill to get an appointment – "you are now number 25 in line, please hold" – to have a new biometric card made, plus an additional £350 fee to get her new visa.

But the struggle is not over for her yet. The UK is very reluctant to let overseas people, who want to contribute to the country’s economy, in to the country in the first place. This means that you can’t apply to live here unless you have been studying here for 10 years, or been working at least 5 years in the UK. This policy means that all overseas students, after doing their degree, are kindly told to leave the country, unless they are able to get a job directly after finishing university.

The good question is now to consider where the overseas students go. Not surprisingly they tend to go to the US along with many of their British colleagues. So what is really happening here is? Students going to university in the UK, who speak perfect English and whose qualifications are requested to go to the US. The most repelling thing about this case is that the UK is estimated to need about 12 million highly educated emigrants during the next 40 years in order to be able to pay for the social benefits provided to an aging population.

The alternative of this would be an increase in taxes of about 10 percent, which would certainly devastate the British economy. You may have a Labour government, but they know nothing about the labour market, which is unfortunately the case of many European governments.