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.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
The Right's New Toe-hold in Education
It’s a testament to the communications skills of Cameron’s Tories that they have managed to present yesterday’s policy on grammar schools as some kind of radical break with the past. To recap; Cameron promises not to interfere with those grammars that remain, but not to build any more. As political revelations go, this is nearly up there with Tony Benn promising not to privatise the NHS, or Sir Peter Tapsell vowing not to drag the Royal Family down into a cellar and execute them.
No Tory government was going to build more grammar schools. Thatcher did not build any more grammars. Major did not build any more grammars. In 1997 he did promise to build more grammars, because that’s the kind of thing you do when you need to galvanise your few remaining troops for a last-ditch defence. But Cameron was not going to reintroduce the 1944 Education Act any more than he would have reintroduced rationing.
It’s called electoral reality. A promise to siphon off the top one-third of pupils will appeal to those parents who are absolutely confident that their child will go to these fabulous schools. That might be ten percent - the ones who know both that their child is a genius, and that they’re not deluding themselves about it. The other ninety percent either know that their child will go to a bog-standard comprehensive, though one stripped of the brightest and most ambitious, or will be unsure whether their little darling will make the grade and go to this elite school, or be dumped with the skimmed rabble in the other one.
Most of the aspirational parents Cameron wants will be terrified to gamble like this - ‘is little Octavia going to be a rocket scientist or a crack dealer?’ will be the inevitable thought process. Until normal schools are disciplined, safe and civilised, there is no chance of widespread selection.
The only choice for Cameron was whether to make a big deal out of not building any more grammar schools, or to not build any more grammar schools and do it quietly. Being keen to engineer a series of mini-Clause Four moments, the man decided to do the former.
And for once, the old Right took the bait. Grammar schools are something so fundamental to the Hefferite vision of Britain that they bit without thinking. David Willetts’ statement of the bleeding obvious contained nothing that changed policy, just the appearance of what the party wanted. The only choice in British politics is between a New Labour government and a centrist Tory government. If either party swerves off into the ideological wilderness they’ll stay stuck there.
Interestingly, Cameron’s apparent U-turn has almost exactly the same logic as the real Clause Four moment. No one, except the dafter members of the old Left, really thought that an incoming Labour government would nationalise everything down to the corner shop, but Blair managed to connive a small revolution out of his statement of the obvious. As both he and Cameron know, the great trick of democratic politics is to say what people already believe, and make it sound new, interesting and bold. You thus appeal both to people’s aspirations and their vanity.
They know that the real control over politics does not come from politicians, but from the voters' perceptions of politics. Power belongs to those who influence these perceptions, rather than the politicians who obey.
Education policy has long been seen as a left-wing monopoly, partly because the teachers are unionised, and largely lefties themselves. I was once taught about the 1980s famines in Ethiopia, in a class that blamed environmental degradation, cash crops and Western policy in general, but carefully avoided mentioning the fact that the country was a Marxist dictatorship at the time.
But it is also because for a long time, much of the commentariat has managed to ensure that ‘education’ is seen as synonymous with ‘state-run, comprehensive education’, and edged the Right’s views on the matter into a grammar-obsessed corner. And the Right has long been happy to oblige. Most people believe that there’s no alternative to comprehensives, because outside the bastions of the intellectual Right, none are seriously discussed. Politicians cluster around what the masses believe, and the masses believe what a certain class of people tell them is acceptable.
Friedrich Hayek wrote a pamphlet on the subject in the late 1940s, arguing that it was the public intellectuals, the ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’, who were responsible for socialism, not politicians. It was these opinion-formers, the academics, writers, broadcasters, artists, teachers and activists, who control the flow of ideas down to the masses, and decide which are acceptable and which abhorrent. Socialism was originally a movement of the intellectuals, and it took decades to convince the working class to sign up. This is equally true today. Those who control the flow of ideas control the chief moulder of politics.
In a society where all original debate in conducted through the media, those who control how ideas are seen have an immense power. It was difficult to debate the merits of multiculturalism when the mere suggestion would cause TV interviewers to suck in a horrified intake of breath. It was hard to talk about the problems of Islamist politics when the BBC prefaced any mention of the MAB - the UK offshoot of the often-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and first cousin to Hamas - as “the moderate” Muslim Association of Britain.
Once the chief intellectuals change their minds, the terms of debate change for the rest of us. It is much easier to debate controversial subjects like Islam and multiculturalism once the intellectual class decides that it needs to be discussed. It took the intervention of the rather admirable Trevor Phillips to end the farcical official silence on these matters, and allow Question Time audiences to feel that they could applaud Melanie Phillips without actually being a fascist.
Exactly the same process applies to education, and every other political and social issue. Only when those who control the terms of debate have stopped clinging to the failed model of nationalised schools, unionised teachers and illiterate pupils, will we get the chance to create a decent system of schooling. It took 7/7 to start a sensible debate on multiculturalism. The Right now needs to shame the public intellectuals into acknowledging that state education is an embarrassing, ineffective and hopelessly corrupt mess, for there to be any real debate about how we can move forward. But for the Tories, breaking with its obsession with grammers is an essential start.
No Tory government was going to build more grammar schools. Thatcher did not build any more grammars. Major did not build any more grammars. In 1997 he did promise to build more grammars, because that’s the kind of thing you do when you need to galvanise your few remaining troops for a last-ditch defence. But Cameron was not going to reintroduce the 1944 Education Act any more than he would have reintroduced rationing.
It’s called electoral reality. A promise to siphon off the top one-third of pupils will appeal to those parents who are absolutely confident that their child will go to these fabulous schools. That might be ten percent - the ones who know both that their child is a genius, and that they’re not deluding themselves about it. The other ninety percent either know that their child will go to a bog-standard comprehensive, though one stripped of the brightest and most ambitious, or will be unsure whether their little darling will make the grade and go to this elite school, or be dumped with the skimmed rabble in the other one.
Most of the aspirational parents Cameron wants will be terrified to gamble like this - ‘is little Octavia going to be a rocket scientist or a crack dealer?’ will be the inevitable thought process. Until normal schools are disciplined, safe and civilised, there is no chance of widespread selection.
The only choice for Cameron was whether to make a big deal out of not building any more grammar schools, or to not build any more grammar schools and do it quietly. Being keen to engineer a series of mini-Clause Four moments, the man decided to do the former.
And for once, the old Right took the bait. Grammar schools are something so fundamental to the Hefferite vision of Britain that they bit without thinking. David Willetts’ statement of the bleeding obvious contained nothing that changed policy, just the appearance of what the party wanted. The only choice in British politics is between a New Labour government and a centrist Tory government. If either party swerves off into the ideological wilderness they’ll stay stuck there.
Interestingly, Cameron’s apparent U-turn has almost exactly the same logic as the real Clause Four moment. No one, except the dafter members of the old Left, really thought that an incoming Labour government would nationalise everything down to the corner shop, but Blair managed to connive a small revolution out of his statement of the obvious. As both he and Cameron know, the great trick of democratic politics is to say what people already believe, and make it sound new, interesting and bold. You thus appeal both to people’s aspirations and their vanity.
They know that the real control over politics does not come from politicians, but from the voters' perceptions of politics. Power belongs to those who influence these perceptions, rather than the politicians who obey.
Education policy has long been seen as a left-wing monopoly, partly because the teachers are unionised, and largely lefties themselves. I was once taught about the 1980s famines in Ethiopia, in a class that blamed environmental degradation, cash crops and Western policy in general, but carefully avoided mentioning the fact that the country was a Marxist dictatorship at the time.
But it is also because for a long time, much of the commentariat has managed to ensure that ‘education’ is seen as synonymous with ‘state-run, comprehensive education’, and edged the Right’s views on the matter into a grammar-obsessed corner. And the Right has long been happy to oblige. Most people believe that there’s no alternative to comprehensives, because outside the bastions of the intellectual Right, none are seriously discussed. Politicians cluster around what the masses believe, and the masses believe what a certain class of people tell them is acceptable.
Friedrich Hayek wrote a pamphlet on the subject in the late 1940s, arguing that it was the public intellectuals, the ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’, who were responsible for socialism, not politicians. It was these opinion-formers, the academics, writers, broadcasters, artists, teachers and activists, who control the flow of ideas down to the masses, and decide which are acceptable and which abhorrent. Socialism was originally a movement of the intellectuals, and it took decades to convince the working class to sign up. This is equally true today. Those who control the flow of ideas control the chief moulder of politics.
In a society where all original debate in conducted through the media, those who control how ideas are seen have an immense power. It was difficult to debate the merits of multiculturalism when the mere suggestion would cause TV interviewers to suck in a horrified intake of breath. It was hard to talk about the problems of Islamist politics when the BBC prefaced any mention of the MAB - the UK offshoot of the often-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and first cousin to Hamas - as “the moderate” Muslim Association of Britain.
Once the chief intellectuals change their minds, the terms of debate change for the rest of us. It is much easier to debate controversial subjects like Islam and multiculturalism once the intellectual class decides that it needs to be discussed. It took the intervention of the rather admirable Trevor Phillips to end the farcical official silence on these matters, and allow Question Time audiences to feel that they could applaud Melanie Phillips without actually being a fascist.
Exactly the same process applies to education, and every other political and social issue. Only when those who control the terms of debate have stopped clinging to the failed model of nationalised schools, unionised teachers and illiterate pupils, will we get the chance to create a decent system of schooling. It took 7/7 to start a sensible debate on multiculturalism. The Right now needs to shame the public intellectuals into acknowledging that state education is an embarrassing, ineffective and hopelessly corrupt mess, for there to be any real debate about how we can move forward. But for the Tories, breaking with its obsession with grammers is an essential start.
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