Centre Forum nearly right about new Lib Dem education policy

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Having written yesterday about how choice drives up standards in education, a new report landed on my desk today providing further support, and calling upon the Liberal Democrats to adopt education policies that see the money following the pupil.

A liberal education policy, from the think-tank Centre Forum, notes that

Choice is one of the key freedoms in a liberal society. It is also one of the
best ways of driving up standards. Opponents of choice based systems claim that
“people just want a good local school”. True. But that leaves unaddressed the
issue of how these good local schools are to be created. Advocates of choice
systems argue that the exercise of parental choice leads to the creation of more
good local schools by forcing poor schools to ‘up their game’ in response to
competitive pressures. But does this work in practice?

Which was, of course, exactly my point. The authors then go on to add the findings of the Institute of Fiscal Studies:

A recent IFS paper had this to say on the matter: “Is school choice a tide that
lifts all boats? The evidence from the USA suggests that it might be, as it
seems to increase school quality across all schools that face
reasonable amounts of competition. This is what we would have
expected, given what economic theory tells us about the role of competition.
Evidence from the UK is much patchier. This may be because competitive pressures
are limited (school numbers and funding vary little from year to year).
Therefore, it seems to be the case that school competition can be a tide that
lifts all boats, but only if its effects bite financially.” (emphasis
added).

The report goes on to propose that “a greater proportion of education funding … ‘follow the pupil’, either through a system of vouchers or entitlements (the difference being purely administrative).” However, astonishingly it then throws a spanner in its own works by pandering to producer interests in the public sector, massively undermining the drivers that would generate improved quality, when it adds “So as to strengthen, rather than undermine, the state education system, such entitlements should not be redeemable at fee charging schools”.

As I made clear in yesterday’s post, any limitation by government on the freedom of parents to provide the best schooling for their children is iniquitous. As with any other industry or service, if the state sector is not able to provide the best product or service, users should be free to go elsewhere. To force parents to continue to use inferior schools in a misguided attempt to protect the state sector is as flawed as the 'infant industries' theory: rather than “strengthen… the state education system”, as Centre Forum would have it, such a policy would merely insulate it from competition from private, voluntary, commercial, charitable and other alternative providers, which would suboptimal standards and systems to perpetuate.

The only way to ensure that everybody has access to a “Good, local school” is to give everybody unfettered choice to educate their children wherever they see fit.

As Centre Forum themselves note, in Edmonton, Canada, the “the exercise of parental choice has so strengthened the public school system that there are now no fee charging schools left in the city”. Why Centre Forum does not trust the British public sector to respond as positively to competition as their Canadian colleagues, and why the authors think that we should therefore protect the state schools at the expense of the pupils whose choice Centre Forum would limit, is a mystery.

How we can get that “Good local school” everybody wants

I don’t usually do requests, but I received a message from dreamingspire asking me to clarify Andy Mayer’s report of my comment that people may not want choice, but choice is the means to give them what they do want, which is good local services.

My comments came in response to a doctor and Lib Dem councillor who commented firstly that the next nearest schools to her were 11 and 12 miles away respectively, so that her choice was in fact limited; and that most people did not want choice, they just wanted “A good, local school.”

In this latter point she was, at least in part, correct – choice is not an end in itself, but a means. The point of choice (and competition, and markets, and all those other scary things that cause Social Democratic stomachs to knot in fear) is that it is the most effective driver in improving standards.

The reason for this is simple, and one that liberals should consider to be a matter of fact: monopolies do not serve their customer’s interests. By comparison, nothing encourages providers to satisfy their customers more than competition, or “freedom of exit” as one might also put it. It is the fact that I can take my money and spend it elsewhere that makes those firms that I patronise continue to struggle to provide the best goods and services available; while others struggle equally hard to woo me with better offers. So for example, my employer has recently expressed its dissatisfaction with the supplier of sandwiches for lunch meetings by switching to another supplier, which is far easier and more efficacious than trying to make the previous supplier change their methods.

And here is where my frustration with the Defenders of the State(/us quo) begins. For the opposition to choice in public services is in the end a belief that citizens should be obliged to utilise public services that are delivered by pubic servants and managed by the government even if that provision is inferior to alternatives that are on offer. Lest my publically-employed readers and colleagues move to quickly to jump to the defence of the public sector, I should add that nothing in that statements implies that public services do or must deliver poorer outcomes for citizens. What I am saying is that if a patient or parent believes that they can access better healthcare or schooling elsewhere, it is the height of arrogance to deny them their freedom to do so.

This was clearly why Nick Clegg told the Manifesto Conference on Saturday that “every patient should have a guarantee of treatment within a specified waiting time - and to drive the NHS to deliver that, everyone should have the right to receive private treatment, paid for by the NHS, if the waiting time’s not met.” This need not divert a single penny of taxpayers’ money from the NHS, if only it is able to deliver prompt treatment, but if the NHS is unable to deliver on that simple requirement then patients should be free to get their treatment elsewhere, rather than being compelled to wait for months or years (often in acute pain or with consequent deleterious effects to their health and wellbeing) for the NHS to be able to deal with them.

Of course, choice will not be exercised by every citizen, and one of the greatest concerns of those opposed to choice is that it will benefit the articulate and the pushy at the expense of the marginalized. But this is not in fact the case at all, for the choice of some is beneficial to all. If I continually go to the same electricity provider or supermarket without ever exercising choice, I still benefit from the freedom of others to choose, which drives all providers to aim to deliver the best. This is so common in private markets as to go largely unremarked. Yet evidence from districts where parents have been given school choice suggests that the same applies to public services, too: the standards of public schools did not fall when the ambitious parents exercises choice and moved their children to private schools; rather, the public schools responded by “upping their game”, improving their own teaching in an attempt to limit the exit of their citizen/customers.

Hence my interjection at the Manifesto Conference: choice raises standards across the board, not just for those exercising their freedom.

But what of our doctor and councilor who lives so far from other schools that she fears that choice in her village is meaningless? Real choice in fact still exists, because she can exit. The example of the Elmgreen School is instructive: dissatisfied parents, rather than tolerating inferior education for their children, exercised their freedom to exit the public system by taking their public money and financing an entirely new school. In their case, it was a novel idea that required the local authority’s permission, but in theory any group of parents could do just that, using their public money to home-educate, or pooling their resources to set up a local school or merely hire teachers to visit them at key times to teach their children.

Choice is too often seen as a Trojan Horse for privatization, but that is a lie spread by those for whom individual as opposed to collective solutions are anathema. Real choice may very well be private, but it just as equally may be public, voluntary, charity, religious, co-operative, self-help or any of a host of other possibilities. As Clegg went on to say, “the state must oversee core standards and entitlements. But once those building blocks are in place, the state must back off and allow the genius of grassroots innovation, diversity and experimentation to take off”

And as for the much-stated assertation that voters do not actually want or care about choice, I will conclude as I did at the conference by reminding readers of what David Bell, the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, once commented: people may say that they do not care about more choice, but just try taking away the choice that they have already been given!

School vouchers convince me...

...but they have yet to convince James Graham.

An excellent debate is brewing at Quaequam blog, however. I urge all who have strong views on education, liberalism, capitalism and statism to hurry there and make your points.

I urge all who have weak or no opinions to go there and learn

I urge the rest of you to go there and read other posts about 18 Doughty Street or what nonsense fear of Wi-Fi radiation is.

Set parents free to improve the education of their children

Three days at home looking after a convalescing wife has dulled the senses, so my blogging has lapsed.

However, I know how much my regular reader needs their dose of Polemic. So here’s another spanner to throw into the works.

A couple of weeks ago the Economist published a useful round-up of recent studies into school choice. “Choice” is fast becoming a dirty word in the UK, tainted with the vile odour of Tony Blair. That is a shame, and also a misunderstanding. The so-called “Choice Agenda” pursued by the current government is a classic New Labour fudge: like the choices offered by Henry Ford, the citizen can send their child to any school they like, or have their maladies treated at any hospital, as long as it is state-run. They cannot take their hard-paid-for entitlement to free education or healthcare and utilise it in a non-state school or hospital, even if that establishment offers better, swifter, cheaper education or care.

The Liberal Democrats have made some progress, but they are still struggling: our (still extant) manifesto offers “diagnosis by the quickest practical route, public or private”, but fails to extend the same offer to treatment. This is not only a shame but also illogical: if there is value in allowing GPs to send patients to any provider of diagnostics, why is there not the same value in sending patients to any provider of treatment? The answer is, of course, that the benefits are the same, and the sooner we allow patients to seek treatment from the provider that best suits their needs – as determined by them – the better our national healthcare will be.

As I have noted previously, in that haven of Social Democracy that is Sweden, parents are already freer than almost anywhere else in the world to use their tax-funded education vouchers to educate their children anywhere they choose. Sweden has a functional literacy rate of 100 per cent, which puts our education establishment to shame, as a quarter of UK school leavers cannot read and write.

The reason that the Economist article is of such interest, however, is that it establishes what campaigners for school choice have been arguing since 1955: that choice benefits not only those who exercise their right to choose, but also those who do not, and who remain in the state sector. Those who oppose freedom argue that they would be left behind, stuck in state schools as the clever and the driven elbow their way into the best schools. Why those who are clever and driven should be condemned to uniform mediocrity I have never understood, but what matters is that the evidence suggests that these fears are unfounded.

Quoth the Economist: “Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University… has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same.” So school choice, it seems, benefits all school pupils; even those whose parents do not, themselves, exercise it. As the Economist concludes, “It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.”

“Little black boys will join hands with little white boys as brothers.”

British schools face US-style segregation according to Nick Johnson, Director of policy and public sector at the Commission for Racial Equality.

The problem is at its most acute in areas where racial minorities make up a greater proportion of the population than the national average of 8 per cent. Mr. Johnson’s fear is that this will lead to greater alienation, as children grow up never mixing with peers from other races.

Mr. Johnson’s solution is typically Statist. Schools are to be required to have “a balanced and diverse intake”, and the amount of money they receive may be affected by their success in meeting this target. It is sad that Mr. Johnson has not learnt the lessons of the last decade. Government targets do not lead to better public services overall; they merely lead to public services that better meet the targets. Hospitals must see every patient within 18 weeks, so now every patient has to wait 17 weeks to be seen, and may then be seen for a cursory appointment to ensure that the target is met before being referred to the next waiting list. Schools’ incomes are dependent on the number of children getting higher GCSEs, so they concentrate on children on the borderline of grades C and D to the exclusion of those expected to get very low or very high grades.

Hospital and school managers are only human, and are as likely to game the system as anyone else. The result of this scheme is likely to be schools aiming to achieve exactly the amount of racial integration necessary to gain the financial bonus: no less, no more. Whether this is in the interests of the individual child will be less important than whether the school has more money to spend on children in aggregate. And as Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics at Bristol University, notes, there may be benefits for some children in working with peers from the same background.

In fact, schools are already required to promote community cohesion, itself a disturbing piece of social engineering. I still subscribe to the unfashionable view that schools should exist primarily to educate, but I realise that others see school as performing other roles. For some there is nothing unusual about the compulsory sequestering of a portion of our population for long periods of time; it is necessary to keep them off the streets and keep them safe. All well and good, but should we also be using that time to attempt to shape them to be the model citizens we feel they ought to be: complete with citizenship classes and an enforced multiculturalism.

Interestingly, the problem may very well be of the state’s own making, and the solution greater liberalisation. (I have yet to find a problem that cannot be solved by grater liberalisation!). Giving parents the choice as to where to send their children to school has been found to have a positive impact on racial integration: “choice programs … are increasing the integration of whites and nonwhites” notes one study.

If the CRE and Ministers are genuinely committed to greater social cohesion and racial integration in schools, they would better achieve their goals by freeing parents to send their children to school where they see fit. This would be more effective than bribing and cajoling – the usual tools of government – and would remove any opportunity for gaming the system. Real school choice, however – which requires allowing parents to move their children at will in the same way that they move their bank account – is not on the cards. For the government it would require releasing control and trusting the people; for the CRE it needs a change of mindset from protecting specific groups to freeing everybody.

In the meantime, the CRE will continue to urge Ministers to meddle, and Ministers – as ever – will need little persuasion. It is unlikely to create the socially cohesive Britain they desire, but in the process unintended consequences will manifest themselves. Such is the price of government intervention.

Labour’s new gimmick: an education lottery that has nothing to do with one’s postcode

This lunchtime BBC London reported the latest idiotic wheeze planned for education. Apparently, the government is to do away with the “postcode lottery” (a misnomer for what is in fact a postcode auction) by replacing it with a real lottery!

Schools will be encouraged to offer places not based on local catchment areas but on a simply lottery basis: parents put down the name of their children and names are randomly selected.

There is no doubt that the current system is unfair. A friend of mine in Muswell Hill once pointed to a street where the houses on one side of the road were worth £100,000 more than those on the other side, because one side of the road was in the catchment area for a highly rated state school. This new system would, by comparison, be more equitable because access to good state schools would not be decided by wealth, with only the richest parents able to move into the catchment areas of the best schools. Instead, every child would have an equal chance of “winning” a place in the school of their choice.

This raises its own problems, of course. Children would not now be guaranteed a place in their local school but may have to travel for long periods each way for an education. This would be costly – a cost that would probably fall on the local authority and undoubtedly in the end on the taxpayer – and would expose children to stress and risk.

More to the point, however, it represents a complete U-turn by the government that only two years ago promised parental choice. While parents may now have the choice whether to participate in a particular school’s lottery or not, clearly the ultimate decision is now to be taken not by parents, teachers or administrators, but by chance. There seems something strangely fatalistic in a government admitting that a random process is better than a rational decision taken in the interests of a specific child (though I am confident that a random process could be no worse than a decision made about an unknown child by a faceless bureaucracy).

The real problem, though, is that it fails to get to the heart of the education problem – a problem that leaves a quarter of school leavers functionally illiterate, innumerate and without any decent qualifications. The reforms needed to improve educational standards and so enhance both children’s opportunities and our economy’s future are those that would raise standards across the board and tailor education to the pupil. In practice the only way to improve standards is by rewarding success and eliminating failure in education, which can only be achieved by injecting competition into the system. If schooling is to meet the specific needs of individual children it must enable parents to exercise real choice about both the school to which their child goes and the content and balance of the curriculum. In addition, both goals would be served if schools were free to innovate and so explore new methods of teaching.

This will never come about as long as education is provided by a state monopoly and children are allocated schools irrespective of their or their parents’ needs or desires. The solution is to establish a voucher system whereby parents can exercise choice about (for example) whether their child should attend the local school or a particularly good school far away, and whether they should attend one that specialises in science, the arts or language. As the cash would follow the pupil, good schools would expand and bad ones wither; eventually successful providers would take over failing establishments to improve and rejuvenate them – just as the failing Skoda car company was bought out and saved by Volkswagen and is now a successful provider of cars far superior to anything that Czechoslovakia’s state monopoly provider could produce.

A voucher scheme would represent a real revolution in provision that would enable all parents to access good schools and provide the best for their children. By comparison, this new government gimmick is a disgraceful effort to replace an unfair system with a system where nobody bears responsibility. It is the sign of a government devoid of ideas.