The politicisation and corporatisation of universities

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In a devastating attack upon academia, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has proposed that university funding should be tied to "economic, social, public policy, cultural and quality of life impacts".

The results of its introduction would have awful consequences. Writing in the Telegraph, Professor of philosophy, Ralph Wedgwood, sets out how his own subject would be entirely politicized if the Research Excellence Framework came to pass. Impact would be measured through the ability of arguments to change law, which would inevitably favour academics who pandered to the politicians. The same would be seen across all areas research. Politicians might as well be giving the lectures.

Educators for Reform have been leading the attack against this preposterous idea. They are rightly concerned that it would also corporatise universities, ‘turning our world class research universities into nothing more than functionalist extensions of corporate Research and Development departments’, crowding out private sector research.

This is part of Lord Mandelson’s ideology of controlling research, whereby the lines between government, university and business are blurred. This is both disturbing and bad policy. It is disturbing because politics, business and education should be kept as separate as possible to help ensure power is divided. It is bad policy because governments and quangos will obviously prove unable to determine what research will be of value.

Pygmalion in the classroom

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The investment in future growth By and large scholars in the social sciences accepts the assumption that an increase in the educational level of a population leads to higher productivity, and thus increased wealth. It is therefore thought to be of great importance that a government does everything in its power to increase the educational level of its population. However, first we should ask what is actually within their power.

A popular assumption made by many is that there exists a linear relationship between the amount of money used on education and the quality of the output. To a certain degree this might be true. However, as with many other investments in productive capital, in this case human capital, the marginal product of an additional pound used on education (production) will diminish and after a certain point you will experience a fall in output. Also, the quality of output i.e. the quality of education and the achievements of students is dependent on many other factors apart from funding.

Perhaps psychology plays a part. ‘Pygmalion in The Class Room’ is a study undertaken by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacbosen in 1965. It shows that higher expectations from teachers towards pupils’ achievements increases the knowledge and IQ of those the pupils. In short the achievements of pupils are closely related to the teachers belief in the abilities of the pupils. In fact, an increase in money spent on education might not be as effective as teachers believing in their students. As such, instead of putting more money into education, governments might be better off decreasing the administrative burden placed on teachers. This might allow more teachers the space and time to inspire.

Further education reform

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Further education is oft neglected by the headline grabbing areas of compulsory and higher education. Yet it is also in vital need of reform, as an excellent IEA publication entitled ‘An Adult Approach to Further Education’ by Professor Alison Wolf makes clear.

The problem with further education is familiar one, namely too much government wrapped up in the ubiquitous quangocracy of central planning and control. Of the many intersting findings of Professor Wolf’s paper, crucial is the fact that many of the qualifications that the government promotes have no economic value at all. In fact:

A conservative estimate is that £2 billion a year of further education and skills spending – i.e. almost half of total government expenditure in the sector – is wasted, providing no benefit to individual learners or society at large.

Lord Mandelson, the country deserves an explanation for this failure.

In my opinion Professor Wolf is not radical enough. She suggests that there are valid arguments for some subsidies being continued and calls for the extension of the government run student loan scheme into further education. Instead of government subsidies individuals and employers could do far better job at deciding when to undertake further education and when not to. Where markets are free, supply and demand will be met, while the case of NIIT shows that the poorest in the world can access high quality further education services at no cost to the taxpayer. The introduction of the student loan scheme would be a distortion of the credit market, which only benefits the providers of education who are able to increase their prices in line with the increases in available credit. Government subsidies and loans do not take away the risk inherent in undertaking further education, but instead muddy the waters for consumers and providers of education.

Yet despite my reservations, there can be no doubting the immense step that would be taken if Professor Woolf’s proposals were put into action. If this area is to be subsidised, better to do it through individuals, as she suggests, than rely upon central government and quangos to try to manage over the unmanageable. Professor Wolf sums up the situation as follows: “The idea that one can plan for anything as complex as the modern labour market would be laughable if it were not that we are wasting vast sums of money attempting to do so". How true.

An education revolution

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According to the Guardian, interest in the Conservative Party’s education reforms has been growing. Hundreds are ready, willing and able to overhaul the quality of education in this country.

Parents, teachers, charities and companies have been in contact with the New Schools Network to register their interest and find out more about how to set up schools if the Conservative Party comes to power. It appears there will be no shortage in demand for Gove’s radical policy. So far Ed Balls’ responses to Gove’s position have been unconvincing and uninspiring – defending the dreadful status quo.

The words of Lesley Surman, of the BBG Parents' Alliance, reflect where the drive for improving standards of education will come from: "We are uncompromising on the level of ambition for all of our children, for our school and for our community." The BBG Parents' Alliance is in process of searching for partners to set up their new school.

Provided reform is swift and uncompromising command and control public services will have been dealt a terrific blow from education reform. If done properly, this supply-side reforms can undercut the current vested interests controlling the natural market in individual and familial expectations. Given the widespread monotonous failure of state education, the disillusioned but talented pool of young teachers and the bored, uninspired, untapped, wasting potential of majority of children – this education revolution could not come a moment too soon. For the children of this country, the election could not come early enough.

Now what about the NHS Mr Lansley?

O tempora, o mores

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It is a measure of how far we have come that few headlines have the capacity to shock. The news that Essex police have warned parents not to buy toy guns for their toddlers lest armed police mistake them for drug barons and shoot them dead raises only a flicker. But one story last week managed to raise both surprise and concern. It was the report that in Scotland one-fifth of all adults lacked basic literacy skills.

How sad that the land of Adam Smith, David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment should have fallen so low. Scotland was always prized for the way its education system provided a ladder upward for the poor but talented. The "lad o' pairts" was a stock figure in the success story of Scotland and the Scots. Why is it now so far gone?

I really do not believe there are simple one-off answers like 'state education,' I rather think it might be a compound of several factors which took Scotland's eyes off the ball. One is the purpose of education. The aim of equipping children to have access to life's opportunities and to fulfill their potential became obscured by a desire to turn out right-thinking and socially aware future citizens. A second is the abysmal drop in the status of teachers. From respected pillars of the community they have been reduced to form fillers who meet the targets set by remote administrators. I really do not think the Gordon Brown mantra of "lack of resources" has played any part. Scottish education achieved wonders when it was chaotically under-resourced but featured motivated teachers and determined parents.

What can be done? One answer might be to give schools and teachers their independence. State funding can be routed via the parents and the choices they make, while independence for schools and teachers will result in striving for excellence once again. The sad part is that a generation of children perish in the breach until this is done, and a generation of lives miss out on the opportunities they could have known. Until then, alas poor Scotland…

Madsen Pirie's "101 Great Philosophers" makes an excellent Christmas present.

Higher Ambitions

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The governments new policy report Higher Ambitions reveals Lord Mandelson’s intention to increase social mobility. One way doing this, says Mandelson, is to lower the barriers to those institutions which he believes leads to upward social mobility, i.e. Oxbridge and other “selective" universities.

But stressing the socio-economic background of applicants rather than academic skills increases the risk of lowering the general level of academic training available on those high profile universities.

It also neglects the importance of the reputation of the Oxbridge & Co institutions to the rest of the English universities. Internationally the reputation of English Universities, to a certain degree, relies on the academic level of research committed by those “selective" institutions. English universities are not bad, not at all, but they are not superb either. However, they benefit internationally from two things: (1) the dominance of the English language and (2) by having a reference point in the Oxbridge & Co institutions, which attracts a lot of bright international students and scholars to the British universities.

By lowering the entrance demands at Oxbridge & Co the general level of education will go down thus driving down the international reputation of these top institutions, ultimately leaving the whole English university community worse off than to begin with. This is because talented students will seek other places in order to increase their returns to education. As Grit Laudel states in her article Migration Currents Among the Scientific Elite published in Minerva (2005), you need talent in order to attract talent and if the standards of the students are not good you won’t get the talented ones.

Higher education in Britain

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On November 3 Lord Mandelson launched the policy report Higher Ambitions, in which the government lays out a vision of a society with better education and more social mobility. Those are laudable ambitions. However, problems arise when the government says it wants to “encourage" the more selective universities to give greater weight to the socioeconomic background of their applicants – i.e. Oxbridge & Co should take in more students with disadvantaged working class backgrounds.

Is it productive to force Oxbridge & Co to take in more students with working class backgrounds? The answer to this is that it depends on those students academic qualifications! To discriminate between applicants based on their socio-economic circumstances rather than their academic qualifications, will end up discarding clever students rather than rewarding them. In other words, discriminating in favour of someone on the basis of their socio-economic background means discriminating against someone else on the basis of theirs. The person you are discriminating against has done nothing to deserve it.

In a world where academic skills are the ones focused on, other factors and especially socio-economic backgrounds should not be relevant. To put it another way, the skills you can obtain from going to Oxbridge are utterly irrelevant to people who are not trained to obtain them, regardless of whether they are of a working- or upper class background.

By implementing this policy, the government will risk of forcing the level of education at top universities downwards. This is because the student’s academic abilities, naturally sets the upper bar of the level of the teaching. Assuming that you can teach students a certain amount of knowledge in a certain period of time, the academic level of new students will thus dictate the level of education when those same students graduate. By lowering the standards of admission you will consequently lower the level of graduates.

The business of education reform

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Reform’s latest report, Core Business, does an excellent job of pinpointing some of the main problems with education in the UK, but, to my mind, does not go quite far enough on the solutions.

As the report makes clear, low expectations, a lack of intellectual rigor and grade inflation are serious problems in our schools, while the fact that the most disadvantaged children are pushed to follow non-academic qualifications to boost school league table results is nothing less than a disgrace. A powerful and convincing case is also made that government policies of emphasizing differences in educational potential of children is in fact a symptom of the failure of state education.

On the policy side, there are two recommendations. Firstly, it is suggested that, “all students should be required to study a minimum of five academic GCSEs", while vocational qualifications would be done in addition to, not instead of GCSEs. Yet on its own, this change would offer little for the thousands of children let down by state education. The problem isn’t vocational qualifications per se – just consider the Indian examples of NIIT and GNIIT – but rather the fact that the state holds a debilitating monopoly on education funding and delivery. It might well make the skewed league tables more accurate to ignore vocational qualifications, but as competition between schools is nonexistent, this will not return power to parents in any genuine sense. What we need is for parents to become consumers of education – something which Reform, to their credit, have pointed out in numerous other reports.

Secondly, the report recommends ending Ofqual’s and the QCDA’s control of the curriculum. This makes sense, but replacing them with another Quango run by academics is a Band-Aid solution to a much wider problem. It may prevent grade inflation, but will do little for improving the quality of teaching. Once again, I feel the focus should be on more competition, not just ‘better regulation’.

If the Conservative Party does come to power, they will have a mandate for radical reform of the education system. The failure of state education as things stand is beyond doubt. With a voucher system that allows schools to profit, competing curriculums to better meet the demands of parents and a bonfire of the multifarious regulations, Michael Gove MP could succeed where so many before him have failed. A proper market place with competing brands of schools, teaching methods, exam boards and curriculums is the only way to extract ourselves from the hole we have been digging since 1870.

The Beautiful Tree

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There are plentiful reasons to recommend The Beautiful Tree, a book that challenges and inspires in equal measure. It is the remarkable story of Professor Tooley's discovery of how the poorest of poor are setting about improving the education of their children without the state and the often patronizing efforts of many in the development community. The implications this has for thinking about the history and future of education of children in developing and developed world are potentially profound.

The first thing to hit the reader is the immense task that Professor Tooley and his researchers have undertaken. The work behind the statistics that forms the background to engaging narrative is evident on every page. Beyond the geographical and administrative complexities, the willingness to set himself at odds with his peers in his quest for the truth is a commendable achievement that many in the claustrophobic and stultifying world of academia shy away from. With each step, Professor Tooley pulls away from the establishment as he moves closer to the colourful array of entrepreneurs who are already providing the education that the people want in most challenging parts of the world.

Many new insights are garnered from this work. A fascinating revaluation of the impact of British imperialism upon the Indian private education system is given in the penultimate chapter, while the last chapter answers the hanging question of what the rest of the world can learn from his findings in India, Nigeria, Ghana, China and Kenya. It is an upbeat message that could put private education beyond the moral and regulatory power of our politicians. Find out more here.

Properly subsidized education

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Flicking through a copy of the Evening Standard last week an advert proclaimed, simply: "If your child can pass our exams, we can help you with the sums." In a move that is highly praiseworthy, eighteen London schools (listed here) have joined forces to advertise the educational opportunities to the low earning families of the capital.

Though each school may vary slightly in what they offer, the idea is one that has been at the core of quality education since time immemorial and continues in many countries. In private schools throughout the world, parents of those who can not afford to pay are not asked to. Nothing is as fair, nor simple as that. This simplistic approach gives all equal access to a good standard of education. Yet for some strange reason this model for education is seen as being grossly unfair by many.

Education in the UK is, and will remain, in need of a complete overhaul for many decades to come. The best and brightest will continue to have their minds negatively impacted upon by a poor state education system until schools and parents are released. Either politicians realise they have no right to the children, or the parents have to revolt and disavow the state, either through homeschooling or schools outside of the state system. Until then, hopefully independent schools will be able to offer subsidized places and free some children from the clutches of the politician.