The beauty of independence

One of the best things that the splurging of money on education in recent years has done is that it has blown away any pretence that the system’s faults are due to a lack of money.

After a decade of increasing budgets, educating a child to the age of sixteen costs the state £45,000. More than a fifth of them leave school illiterate. No one would voluntarily spend that kind of money on an education so grotesquely useless that it could not even teach a child to read and write. No one, except the Department of Education.

Those who pretend that this is the best that can possibly be expected for this sort of outlay are a mixture of hardened ideologues and professional apologists. There are those who are too narrow-minded to accept any model other than the council-run comprehensive, and those whose fingers wouldn’t be able to pull so much out of any other kind of pie.

Around the comprehensive model, a whole apparatus has grown. Teaching unions, academic educationalists, LEAs and education journalists all rely on this form of state education. They rely on taxes funding council quangos hiring teachers trained by idiots and all reported on by journalists who really ought to be doing something more useful. None of these are necessary to provide a good education.

All of them blame every imaginable devil in the works, every saboteur that they can invent, for the dismal performance of the system they prop up. They blame a handful of public schools for shattering the theoretical perfection of comps. They continue to rail against grammar schools. And inevitably, they call for yet more money.

Let’s take a classroom of twenty-five pupils for an example of why they are so spectacularly wrong. Most comprehensives can only dream of such small classes, and many of their apologists blame thirty-plus classes for the system’s woeful performance.

A class of twenty-five pupils costs the taxpayer about £4,100 each, or more than £100,000 for the class. If you had to arrange an education for this class, and you were given the £100,000 it costs, what sort of education could you afford? You could hire a first-rate teacher for £50,000 a year. Hiring or building space in which to set up a classroom? If you get a mortgage to cover the cost of a small, £4m new school, it works out at about £20,000 per annum per classroom. Put aside a generous sum - say, £10,000 - to cover overheads, admin and nonsense. That leaves £20,000 spare, every year, for books, travel, food, sports, or whatever the school fancies.

You could buy each child a new MacBook in the first year alone. Or you could pay for free lunches every day: not, perhaps, of caviar, but not of catering slop either. I could cook a damn good lunch for thee quid a head. Or you could buy them an instant library of twenty thousand books from your local Barnardo’s bookshops.

Keener on sports? Buy them each a lightweight, all-aluminium Cannondale mountain bike, perhaps. Or you could buy enough professional gym equipment to easily work the flab off twenty-five schoolchildren. Fancy a small fleet of sailing dinghies? A year’s ‘extras’ budget will get you five. Or you could abandon the fripperies, and instead cut each class to twenty pupils.

There is no desperate shortage of money. With only the sum already spent on education, this country could afford schools run according to this kind of budget. A very well-paid teacher in front of a fairly small class, with some money left over for extras. If you put twenty children through a class like this for eleven years, I bet you wouldn’t end up with four or five of them illiterate.

It might sound like some Utopian dream, to run the nations schools on these sorts of lines. But there’s absolutely no reason why it should be. We already spend this kind of money on education. All that’s needed is to devise a system in which money is spent by competent people who have an interest in creating great schools. That means getting the state out of the way.

Declare each school to be an independent trust, and fund them on a straight per-pupil basis. That funding should be fully transferable, able to be spent at any registered school, and it should all go direct to that school. You decide to send your child to Bogsville Academy, and his four grand goes straight into their account. And if anyone thinks they can do better, they should – subject to a few obvious checks – be allowed to set up and register their own.

Nationalising schools was about as good for education as British Leyland was for motoring. Government – any government - has a special talent for reverse alchemy; the art of turning fabulous raw materials into worthless dross. It beggars belief that one could spend upwards of four thousand pounds a year on education, for at least eleven years, and still have a one-in-five chance of being illiterate at the end of it. To create a system that does so routinely takes a truly spectacular talent for uselessness.

Schools need to be accountable to those who care most about getting a great education out of them. The government doesn’t care in the slightest if little Johnny is being bullied to death, if his teacher is incompetent, or if his school is so chaotic that he doesn’t stand a chance of learning anything. All it cares about is looking good enough to win reelection, and since the easiest way to do that is to boast about the amount spent and to then rig the statistics, little Johnny’s education is expendable.

Citizens are quite capable of deciding what is a good school, and what kind of education we would like to buy. Every day, we prove ourselves capable of choosing everything from baked beans to cars, through experience, word of mouth, and expert advice. Every day, we buy things that are much better than in the days when we could only choose between two or three products of the State. Will it be the Austin Allegro or the Morris Marina for you, Sir?

The simple-minded ask how we’ll ration places at the good schools, and decide who’s relegated to the sinks. Unable to escape the straits of twentieth-century statism, they can barely imagine the mechanism that destroys bad schooling – if only we demand it.

We don’t have some immutable ratio of good and bad schools, any more than there’s a fixed number of ‘good butchers’ and ‘bad butchers’. A butcher who can’t provide what his customers want risks going bankrupt, and if his absence leaves a town wanting more meat, then someone more talented and more responsive will take over his business instead. A particularly successful butcher often takes over his inferior rivals, and run them according to his more successful model.

This pressure and this mechanism, ensures that quality goes up and customers get happier, so long as they demand the best and are willing to go elsewhere – or set up their own – if they don’t get it. So long as parents are willing to exercise this power, it will work just as well for schools.

Getting rid of state control has other advantages. No one goes into teaching at a council comprehensive unless they’re willing to be the servant of a bunch of second-rate wannabe politicians. No other serious profession has to accept this submissive rank, to be under the control of people who by rights should be sitting in a corner of their classroom, sporting a pointy hat. Teachers should belong to free and proud schools, not to councils. It would do wonders for the esteem of the profession.

It’s no coincidence that teaching lost most of its status in the period when the state swept in, and the profession started to be swallowed by local bureaucracy. Clever graduates who wouldn’t dream of being shunted off to some Godforsaken dump to be abused by small teenagers might well be induced to teach at a privately run school, where the job is more about teaching and less about surviving.

It’s clear what needs to be done if we’ve had enough of our embarrassing education system. It is equally clear that there is a strong lobby with interests in maintaining the status quo. Under a fragmented, enterprising system of schooling, no teaching union will have the ear of government again. There will be no directives coming from the Department for Balls, alerting schools to the fact that bullying is not nice. Teacher-training colleges would have to provide training that schools valued, or no one would bother going. An entire apparatus faces extinction, if schools are set free.

In other words, the educational establishment is what stands in the way of better education. Delicious.