Bad news for free schools

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The Financial Times reports that the Department for Education is not going to meet its target date for relaxing school building regulations. This is bad news for the government’s ‘free schools’ agenda.

The idea behind free schools is a great one: expand the supply of good school places by encouraging private organizations to set up their own schools, which will then receive state funding on a per-pupil basis. This expansion in supply will allow British parents to exercise choice over where their children go to school. That choice will, in turn, bring competitive pressures to bear on the state education system: popular schools will be able to expand, bad schools will wither and die. Standards will be driven up across the board as a consequence.

But there’s a problem. For this to work, you need lots of new providers entering the market. And that’s not going to happen if you’ve got very strict building and planning regulations, which allow local authorities to obstruct the process.

The government always planned make it easier for schools to be set up in pre-existing buildings, like office blocks or empty shops. That’s what has happened in Sweden, where ‘free schools’ have been a huge success. It bodes ill that the government has fallen behind schedule, so let’s hope they can get things back on track quickly.

But there’s another big problem with the government’s free schools agenda, and that’s that they’ve decided to prevent providers from making a profit out of running the schools. But without profit-making chains entering the free schools market, it is unlikely that enough new schools will be established. The whole thing risks ending up a damp squib.

Overall, I have to question the government’s tactics. They’ve got good ideas and good intentions. But they are being too timid. Their opponents are going to make a huge fuss about anything they do to liberalize public services, so why bother attempting to placate them? Be radical and get it over with, I say. Otherwise, it’ll be 2015 before you know it, and you won’t have done half the things you set out to do.

Why we really do need to reform the universities

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No, really, we do, as this campaign shows:

The UK Campaign for the Public University is open to all. It is a broad-based campaign with no party or other political affiliation. It has been initiated by a group of university teachers and graduate students seeking to defend and promote the idea of the university as a public good.

How very nice of them but they really don't seem to know what a public good is. Their manifesto is here and their list of signed up supporters here.

What they are arguing for is the public funding of the universities rather than funding through student fees. But a public good is not something which is paid for through taxation. Nor is it something provided to the public nor even is it something which would be good for the public to have supplied to it.

A public good is something which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. That is, it being had or consumed by one person does not deprive another of it and that we cannot stop someone enjoying the good itself. University degrees clearly meet neither of these restrictions and so are not public goods.

It is true that the results of scientific research are public goods: which is why we will still be subsidising the research even if not the undergraduate degrees (that something is a public good is an argument in favour of their tax subsidy, yes, but not an open and shut case that they should be publicly run or entirely publicly paid for). And it's also possibly true that having lots of well educated scientists and engineers is a public good: graduates of womyns' studies courses less so. Which is why there will still be subsidy for certain scientific and engineering degrees, not so for certain others.

So the campaign clearly fails just as it starts: they've got terminally confused between public funding and public goods.

Which leads us to the proof that academia must indeed be reformed. Several hundred of our finest academic minds have just signed up to a campaign which shows that they don't know what they're talking about. Certainly I would argue that this shows that we must reform academia. Perhaps we could just insist that all of them, each and every one, try to read through the undergraduate textbooks that their own students manage each year? The ones from the economics courses, of course?

A balanced education

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According to Sir Paul Ennals, chief executive of the National Children's Bureau, England's education system is in danger of making pupils unhappy by pursuing exam success at all costs. His gripe is with the potential of certain schemes, such as school breakfast clubs and initiatives to make school meals healthier, being dropped as part of the package of cuts to public spending.

His criticism does make sense. If school budgets are cut, there will be less room around the edges to do the warm and fluffy things that could indeed making students happier. However, Sir Paul Ennals’ conclusion is largely inadequate. Rather than calling on government not to cut various schemes, this issue has to be seen in the larger perspectives of deficit and reform.

All sectors of public sector activity need to be cut. Although some items of spending have better claims to being saved than others (arts vs. cancer sufferers is a no-brainer), there should be no sacred cows. Education has areas in which savings can be made. In tough times most parents prioritise reading and counting over breakfast clubs and healthy meals.

Beyond the unpleasantness of cuts, reforms should continue to be the focus of Gove and all that he surveys. To put it bluntly, state schools need to function as any service industry, responding to the will of its customers. In the case of schooling, the customers are the parents. Despite the extension of academies and the hesitant free schools agenda, their local supermarket is still more accountable than their local state school.

The more government steps back from education, the more room there will be for the side orders that lead to a more balanced education. This could be along the lines of Anthony Seldon’s happiness philosophy or something else entirely. On the whole Independent schools manage to have a more balanced approach to educating children than state schools, so there is no reason why a voucher-based deregulated state system couldn’t compete, if that’s what parents want.

On the seventh day of Christmas...

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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.

At last there is some sign that the UK government might be retreating from all three of these. The decentralization of schools along the Swedish model (basically, parents can choose any school and taxpayer funds follow those choices, creating a competitive market in schooling) may start slow but will, I believe, grow and grow until our school system is massively reformed and improved. Other public services, under the Big Society agenda, are also being decentralized, with private, voluntary, community, and charitable groups taking over things like drug rehabilitation, care of offenders, helping unemployed people back to work, and so on.

It's all about public services being delivered - and led - more locally, and therefore more in tune with the needs of local people. The 'Big Society' can sound like a lot of waffle – and some of it is, because nobody has a clear idea of exactly how you dismantle the bureaucracy of public services and return power to the people, any more than they had any clear idea of how to break up and privatize state industries back in the 1980s. But when it happens, the revolution could be equally big.

Pisa or Babel?

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Peter Wilby writes a broadly convincing argument in TES against taking the Pisa results too seriously. As the former editor of the New Statesman suggests, comparisons can be misleading. A few potential sampling errors are pointed to, some more convincing than others, but whatever the merit of each, overall his thesis is persuasive. For anyone familiar with the fallibilities of the sciences, none of this should come as too much of a surprise.

Mr Wilby is hoist by his own petard, though. After much sound reasoning he ends by using the Pisa results to attack the US and neoliberalism. Quite why he does this after everything written before is surprising to say the least. I think as a rule one should try not to contradict oneself in the same article, while contradictions between articles should always be forgiven. After all, people have been known to change their minds.

Yet Mr Wilby’s point stands. With headlines and policy cobbled together from some tentative results, it would have been much better if these tests had not received so much attention, or perhaps not taken place at all. Like so much public policy, education has lurched from one failed silver bullet to the next. Today it is teachers’ qualifications, while yesterday it was class sizes. The behemoth of the state is tying itself in a knot, leaving no room for innovation. That governments still have such a uniform model of education within its borders is a sign of how stilted things are – Pisa is a sign of how far we have to go.

Rather than rely on the tentative, much better to build upon surer ground. There can be no doubting that the private sector does stuff better and cheaper than government run and regulated stuff – therefore, in education we should keep government to an absolute minimum, only interfering when we can be as certain as we can be that we are not making things worse.

Britain's broken education system

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Just a week after the release of the White Paper on education, new data has been released showing that educational standards in the UK are stagnating compared to the other developed nations. The PISA survey, carried out by the OECD, examines the reading, maths and science ability of a sample of 15 year olds from 65 developed countries. The findings of the tests carried out last year indicate that students in England have dropped from 17th to 25th in reading; 24th to 28th in maths; and 14th to 16th in science compared the previous survey conducted in 2006.

The findings show that, despite the huge rise in spending on education over the past decade, the impact has been limited. In fact, in countries like Germany and Hungary that had similar rankings as England in the survey, the spending per student was just £40,000 and £28,000 respectively while England spent £54,000. It also emerged that only seven other OECD countries spend more per student than the UK. It is not so much the high spending that is the concern here; it is its ineffectiveness. The government have thrown money at education and these results show that it is not the solution.

What is required is the overhaul of the education system. While the white paper released last week is a start, if the government want to see true improvement in educational standards then Gove has to allow Free Schools to be profit-making institutions. Only by doing this can the UK hope to move beyond average and retake its place as one of the best providers of quality education in the world. For-profit Free Schools will create diversity in the system and create an environment where excellence and innovation are at the heart of teaching and education. By changing the way our schools are run the benefits will pass on to the pupil and the education they receive will improve, and as a result the UK’s ranking.

Britain's broken education system

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britains-broken-education-system

Just a week after the release of the White Paper on education, new data has been released showing that educational standards in the UK are stagnating compared to the other developed nations. The PISA survey, carried out by the OECD, examines the reading, maths and science ability of a sample of 15 year olds from 65 developed countries. The findings of the tests carried out last year indicate that students in England have dropped from 17th to 25th in reading; 24th to 28th in maths; and 14th to 16th in science compared the previous survey conducted in 2006.

The findings show that, despite the huge rise in spending on education over the past decade, the impact has been limited. In fact, in countries like Germany and Hungary that had similar rankings as England in the survey, the spending per student was just £40,000 and £28,000 respectively while England spent £54,000. It also emerged that only seven other OECD countries spend more per student than the UK. It is not so much the high spending that is the concern here; it is its ineffectiveness. The government have thrown money at education and these results show that it is not the solution.

What is required is the overhaul of the education system. While the white paper released last week is a start, if the government want to see true improvement in educational standards then Gove has to allow Free Schools to be profit-making institutions. Only by doing this can the UK hope to move beyond average and retake its place as one of the best providers of quality education in the world. For-profit Free Schools will create diversity in the system and create an environment where excellence and innovation are at the heart of teaching and education. By changing the way our schools are run the benefits will pass on to the pupil and the education they receive will improve, and as a result the UK’s ranking.

Fear of freedom

By way of an answer, I would point to the German socialist Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. In brief, Fromm’s ideal state for persons in society is the pursuit of “the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self”; however, many people fall short of this ideal, and instead possess what Fromm calls an “authoritarian character structure.” Such people, when forced to confront an “alienated and hostile” world as they grow into adulthood, feel increasingly alone and powerless; this burden causes neurotic anxiety. Faced with a more powerful whole which is “strong, eternal or glamorous,” such as a political party, a person comes under a compulsion “to tie his self to (it); he cannot bear to be his individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it.” This is, of course, a counterproductive way of living one’s life, and the act of submission only exacerbates personal feelings of insignificance.

These protesters make a textbook case. Faced with the daunting and fearful prospect of having to make a major private decision – that is, whether obtaining a degree is worth incurring a personal debt – they quickly assembled a collective that allowed them to feel as if they had strength. Now, despite their stated opposition to the government, the collective’s members rush headlong into the arms of the State, begging her to keep them as dependants and absolve them of personal responsibility.

To be sure, there are students in this country who will respond to the funding cuts by working hard and preparing for the worst job market in years, instead of occupying buildings while playing acoustic guitar. They understand that all action is individual, and that their own initiative – not the state’s – will determine their personal success.

But for those who, in a panic, choose not take their future into their own hands, I would point again to Fromm for a word of warning: “a man, trapped in a fire, stands at the window of his room and shouts for help, forgetting entirely that no one can hear him and that he could still escape by the staircase which will also be aflame in a few minutes. He shouts because he wants to be saved, and for the moment this behavior appears to be a step on the way to being saved – and yet it will end in complete catastrophe."

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Depending on who you listen to, recent student unrest over government plans to reform education funding is one of two things: either the collective tantrum of a generation of spoilt children, or the righteous awakening of a dynamic generation of radicals. The former opinion was expressed in the Prime Minister’s recent op-ed in the Evening Standard: in headmasterly fashion, he admonished students for not knowing “the full facts about what they're objecting to”. The latter view has been on display from the students themselves: when "occupations, barricades and walkouts” were called for, they duly materialized. It is easy, too, to mistake their organization for confidence – see the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne, who last month gushed hysterically that young people had at long last acquired “the energy to go out and do something”.

This media narrative presents a false dichotomy. There are, without a doubt, plenty of students who either 1) do know the full facts; 2) do not care; or 3) are members of Conservative Future.

So what, then, are we to make of these protesters?

[Continue reading...]

Teaching personal finance

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The ASI receives many contributions on education – and especially how and what children should be taught. What would really benefit virtually every teenager is far more emphasis on personal finance. To be sure, many secondary schools do teach some elements of personal finance, a subject that most adults will need to address during their lives. There are four particular areas – mortgages, pensions, insurance/assurance and social security.

Given that UK owner-occupation is now c70%, a basic understanding of mortgages is especially important, including repayment calculations, endowment policies and loan-to-value data. In the latter case, some borrowers of Northern Rock’s infamous 125% “Together” mortgage might have thought more carefully about the potential downside.

Whilst pensions may seem very distant to a teenager, a basic knowledge of pension arrangements can only be beneficial, if only understanding the concepts of occupational pensions, the many variations – defined benefit v defined contributions – and commutation of pension rights.

The complex area of insurance/assurance – ranging from car insurance to life assurance – is also poorly understood, although virtually everybody will have some involvement with the subject in their adult years.

Lastly, many individuals would benefit from some knowledge of the social security system, ranging from the few remaining universal benefits to the state retirement pension scheme.

Major changes to the £200 billion per year social security programme are currently underway - very few people fully understand how it operates. Aren’t most teenagers better off learning about these four subjects – with direct relevance to their lives - rather than about Henry VIII’s six wives?

Fees hike won't hurt poor students

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Thomas Byrne and Anton Howes, the founders of the Students For Tuition Fee Reform group, have a good post on Comment is Free today arguing that students have misjudged the tuition fees changes proposed by the government, and in fact they would give students a better deal than they currently have.

They make an important point:

People from poorer backgrounds are much less likely to go to university, but research carried out for the Sutton Trust showed there is almost no difference between the participation rates of the poorest students and better-off peers with the same A-level results. . . . The issue here, then, is not fees, but that poorer students are being let down by a broken school system before even thinking about aspiring to university.

This is the key point that many people don't discuss in the fees debate. So few students from poor backgrounds end up going to good universities not because the fee system prevents them, but because the school system stops them from qualifying in the first place. This is the main thing that holds back the poor from better university education and, because the problem takes place long before that point, no amount of bursaries or grants can change it.