Quote of the Day?

Today’s it’s-easy-if-you-cheat competition for which there is no prize is….

Guess which politician or world leader said the following recently:

"The money that we put in the education budget, I say let the [people] take it…

"Put it in your pockets and teach your kids as you wish. You take responsibility.

"As long as money is administered by a government body, there would be theft and corruption".

Sounds like common sense to me.

What does the National Curriculum have to do with a Mao Tunic?

Jerry Kirkpatrick explains that

"The concept of [a] core curriculum is a product of education czars who think they know what is best for everyone. The government today does not run the clothing industry, but if it did, the "core curriculum" in clothing would probably be the Mao tunic. Instead, our free market in clothing performs extremely well in getting our bodies covered and it does so in a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices."

If only we could have "a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices" in education.

Michael Gove attacks lads’ mags and steals the Pupil Premium

Earlier today I attended a speech by Michael Gove at the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR). Loosely entitled Liberty, Equality, Family? Why Conservative social policy delivers progressive ends, it was in fact a statement of the Conservative view of how policy toward the family, children and education can create a more harmonious society with more social mobility and better outcomes for the most disadvantaged.

Coverage in the press has mainly focussed on his attack on the objectification of women in “Lads Mags”, notably Nuts and Zoo. He was condemnatory, but it was interesting that he condemned without threatening action: the most he proposed was to “ask those who make profits out of revelling in, or encouraging, selfish irresponsibility among young men what they think they're doing.” (IPC and EMap must be quaking in their boots!) This is a shame, because this was not the most interesting or important part of the speech, but it seems that near-naked ladies on the covers of magazines, even when they are merely the subject of Tory criticism, are more interesting to journalists than school pupils graduating without any valuable qualifications.

Gove speech was another step in the attempt by the Conservatives to paint themselves as a modern, progressive party (indeed, as the modern, progressive party). He began with a (rather tired) discussion of “Ubuntu”, a Bantu word which, broadly translated, means "I am because you are". Bill Clinton famously used it a lot (notably in his speech to the Labour Party conference) and it was consequently a bit of a buzz-word in 2006, but I surprised Gove dragged it up again in 2008. However, it provided an opportunity for him to discuss Social Capital and the role of the voluntary sector and community politics. “One of the most profound, but under-appreciated, changes that David Cameron has brought to Conservative politics is a determination to put the strengthening of relationships at the heart of policy,” he explained.

Under Labour there is really only one relationship which matters. The relationship between the individual and the state.

The Labour conception of society is a thin, and impoverished, one in which there appear to be only two primary centres of decision-making, the central state organises and the individual is expected to respond appropriately.

Individuals are assessed by the State as economic units in need of upskilling, taxing, monitoring or redeploying as appropriate - according to priorities set, and policed, centrally.

Gove went on the criticise the Government’s depletion of social capital; its closure of post offices and GP practices because of a focus upon a “narrow cost efficiency over enriching personal intimacy”; the excessive regulation that has stifled “autonomous institutions which help bind communities together”. This is all startling stuff from a Tory, and shows how far they are prepared to go to distance themselves from the Thatcher era. It was summed up in one sentence of Gove’s that must have required the most enormous amount of gall: “for Gordon Brown, there really is no such thing as society - only the individual and the State.” So now it is Brown who is the heir to the hated Thatcher (hence, perhaps, that rumoured state funeral!) and the Tories who are committed to the “cause of social justice and the drive to make opportunity more equal”.

And then, while the audience were reeling from that act of repositioning, Gove reached out and deftly plucked a key plank of Liberal Democrat policy:

There is one specific intervention, however, the central State will make which is different from now, and which goes to the heart of one aspect of David Cameron's thinking on relationships which has been under-appreciated.

We're explicitly committed to the creation of a premium to be added to the per pupil funding children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive. We want to ensure educational resources are targeted more effectively on those in need. And we want to create a dynamic by which schools are incentivised to take children from more challenging backgrounds and new providers are explicitly incentivised to locate in areas of greater disadvantage.

I’m not sure how new this is for the Conservative Party, but it is certainly very familiar to Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg made this a key platform of his leadership campaign in Autumn 2007, reiterated it in his 2008 New Year message and in June wrote an article for the Guardian all about it.

Asked (by the author) to explain how his pupil premium “differed from that which Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have been advocating for over a year”, Mr. Gove denied that it was Nick Clegg and David Laws who invented it, saying that it originated with David Willitts or Julian Le Grand. I'm not the first blogger to notice this, and David Laws and David Willitts have had this debate before, on the floor of the House. However, the fact remains that Willitts did not introduce it as policy and that Gove is bringing the Conservatives rather late to the Pupil Premium party.

What is frustrating is that it is highly likely that the Liberal Democrats will get none of what economists call “first mover advantage”. In other words, the Lib Dems will not get the credit for this policy: rather, it will be touted as a new Tory innovation with little reference to the fact that Clegg and Laws have been vocal advocates for this policy for over a year.

Gove went on to argue in favour of increased parental choice, a policy that this blog has long advocated:

We will make schools accountable to parents by allowing parents to choose the school they want for their child. We'll give every parent the right to take the money currently allocated to their child's education and then deploy it in accordance with their priorities, not the Government's.

We'll make it easier for new providers to enter the state system, reforming planning and other laws to increase choice and diversity. Parents will be empowered to
choose the school with the pedagogy, the disciplinary approach, the ethos
and the philosophy they believe in….

Again, Clegg and Laws have argued this case before. So far (and in my view, erroneously) the Lib Dems have been reticent is in including private schools within that choice and allowing parents to top up the public funding. Gove was equally vague: it remains unclear whether one can use one's (lets say it!) "voucher" to fund whatever education one feels is in one’s child’s interests, even where those providing the education might profit therefrom.

What this speech clearly reinforced was Michael Gove’s status as one of the most impressive members of the Conservative front bench. I first had a chance to hear him speak in January 2006 when he debated Vince Cable on the question of whether the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives were the true heirs to Gladstone. Neither dealt a knock-out blow but I was impressed even then by how eloquently he spoke and how reasoned his arguments were. He has since become a regular guest on Question Time.

It is unlikely that Gove will suffer from having blatantly plagiarised Lib Dem policy. Rather, he will have demonstrated once again that in the coming electoral battle, the squeeze is going to be on, and the challenge for the Liberal Democrats is to make sure that they have a strong, distinctive voice and innovative policies. The pupil premium was to be one of those. Michael Gove may very well have shot that fox.

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.

Let the police keep the peace. Teachers should be educators.

Another story about Teachers’ unions, this one triggering not anger and disgust but sympathy and concern (never let it be said I am not balanced).

The Professional Association of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers are having a disagreement over what to do about new powers to stop and search pupils to ensure that they are not carrying knives.

The PAT want staff to be trained and to wear stab vests. The NAHT would rather they called the police if there was any cause for concern.

Mick Brookes is right to argue that "Where there's a clear danger our advice to members is to call the police who are equipped and trained to do just this sort of thing”, but frankly I would go further.

Teachers should not be stopping and searching children. If there is any cause for concern, then the police should be called in. Teachers are not trained to deal with people who are both hostile and armed, and this new practice is inevitably going to lead to a casualty sooner or later.

Rising knife crime is a real problem in the UK, especially among the youth. But using teachers as untrained security guards is a very bad idea.

A much better plan would be to work with local safer neighbourhoods police teams (which would on average have an extra police officer apiece under Lib Dem plans) to check pupils whom teachers believe to be armed.

Let the police keep the peace. Teachers should be educators.

You must be NUTs

Before I discuss the latest example of union brass neck, I need to declare an interest.

Occasionally I dine at the expense of the National Union of Teachers (NUT). They kindly and generously like to lay on a fish and chip supper with complementary wine at the close of the Liberal Democrat Party Conferences (I think they do both), and I have been known to avail myself of their hospitality.

The cynical among you my wonder whether the NUT hopes to curry favour with the Lib Dems through this act of largesse (If only they were trying to curry favour!). Shame on you for thinking so. I’m sure it has never crossed the mind of the NUT to try to gain access to our hearts via our stomachs.

And to prove that there is no link between free food and drink and political favour, I am going to now point out how disgraceful and irresponsible the NUT’s latest pay claim is.

Now lets be honest. Few of us would not like to enjoy a 10 per cent pay rise, with a minimum raise of £3,000 a year. I know I could put it to use. But if we were all to enjoy a 10 per cent pay rise then the 2.8 per cent CPI and 4.5 per cent RPI inflation that Steve Sinnott is using as justification for his demand would soon rise sharply.

Not that the NUT has any interest in the rest of us. It is only interested in its members, which is understandable. However, the fact remains that a 10 per cent pay rise with a minimum rise of £3,000 per annum is greedy and selfish. 10 per cent is way beyond that enjoyed by the rest of the country, and as it would be funded from general taxation, it would further reduce the net gain of those whose pay rises were far more modest.

It would also punch a hole right through the government’s (long overdue) public sector pay restraint. Where teachers lead, doctors and nurses would follow, and soon hundreds of thousands if not millions of public sector workers would be agitating for higher wages. This would necessitate higher taxes – as previous public sector binges have done, pushing the tax burden and the size of the public sector up to record levels – and stoke higher inflation, which is already beginning to escape the iron grip of the Iron Chancellor and push interest rates up to uncomfortable levels.

Again, the NUT are not interested in the rest of the public sector (at least, not that they would admit, though I suspect that all the public sector unions agree that public sector employees as a whole should be paid a lot more). They simply want “pay levels for teachers that are competitive with comparable employment.” But what, exactly, is comparable employment?

As the son of two teachers (another interest I’d best declare) I have spent a lot of time around teachers, and have heard them compare themselves countless times to the other great “professions”: lawyers and doctors. This is largely based on the rather facile fact that educational professionals require a university degree, though these days the same could be said of work in a call centre. While there are undoubtedly many dedicated and well qualified teachers out there (my chemistry teacher had a PhD and my parents used to do marking throughout their evenings and weekends), the fact remains that teaching does not require the qualifications or the training that is required of a lawyer or a surgeon. Nor do they put themselves in harms way (at least, willingly!) as do police officers or fire fighters. Nor again do they need to demonstrate the research acumen of the only profession that really is comparable – that of university lecturers.

Mr. Sinnott is correct about one thing, however: “This is an illustration of the failure of successive governments to recognise the importance of the teaching profession to society. It must stop.” The solutions are straightforward.

Firstly, put an end to national pay bargaining. There is absolutely no logic in paying a teacher in Grimsby the same as a teacher in Gravesend. Salaries should reflect supply and demand, and the sum needed to tempt a teacher to work in any particular school is largely dependent on the local cost of living. National pay bargaining simply transfers money from teachers in areas with high costs of living – who struggle to afford houses and other necessitates – to those in poorer areas for whom the national salary goes a lot further. It is no wonder that it is hard for teachers in the South East. The Government lacks the spine for this, however, and would rather respond to the failure of their meddling with further meddling.

Secondly, if there really is a shortage of good teachers, as the NUT would have us believe, then pay should be based upon an honest assessment of the number and quality of teachers required. If this necessitates higher salaries, so be it. But higher salaries should be based upon an assessment of what is needed to get more and better teachers into the profession, not the self-serving demands of those who represent people who are already doing the job.

Thirdly, break up the public sector education monopoly. The only reason why the NUT has so much power is that its members almost exclusively work for a single employer. If tens of thousands of independent schools were negotiating with their discrete workforces, wages would reflect local need. There would be no government cap on pay rises; nor would the NUT be able to demand a set rise for all. What is more, as schools competed for the most talented educators (and other staff), really inspirational teachers – and we’ve all known some – would be properly rewarded. Meanwhile, the ineffective teachers – and I’m sure we can all think of some of them, too – will be encouraged to move to new careers where their talents would be put to better use. Good teachers would benefit, and so too would some of the bad, but most of all, the children would benefit.

It may very well be true that education is a commodity that we naturally under-consume (or under-fund) because the benefits are delayed or because those who pay are not those who benefit. Nonetheless, I believe that parents on the whole are more concerned with the welfare of their children than the policy officers in unions. Give them the money – through an education voucher scheme – with which to buy their education, from any private, public, voluntary, charity, social enterprise or any other kind of provider whom they choose, and further allow them to top up the voucher with whatever they can afford, and I’m sure that for the most part they will pour far more into their children’s education than the three to four thousand pounds currently spent by the state.

Parents are bound to be more liberal with their money when they can control how and where it is spent. And by exercising choice they will drive up standards in the profession. This may not be what the NUT want, but it is undoubtedly what children need.

All of which aside, I will thank the NUT next time I use their fish and chip supper to line my stomach before a night at the Glee Club.

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.

School discipline to be influenced by race

Racism is racism no matter what form it takes. Discrimination is not defined by treating members of a group worse than others, but by treating them differently. Irrespective of the fact that to treat one group better is to treat another less well, it remains discrimination even if the treatment of two groups is equal, but distinct. “Separate but equal” were the watchwords of American segregation (though in practice there was precious little equality).

So it is with shock and surprise that I discovered that the latest guidance on school discipline published by the Department for Education and Skills specifically advises schools to “take account of a range of individual pupil needs when developing and implementing their behaviour policies” including “groups defined by Ofsted as ‘at risk’ within the education system [such as] minority ethnic and faith groups [and] travellers”.

The whole subject of defining entire races or religious groups as ‘at risk’ is deeply troubling, not least because nobody ever seems to define what they are ‘at risk’ of suffering, doing or becoming. The underlying suggestion is that they are at risk of not fitting into the round hole drilled for their square bodies by policy-makers and the intellectuals who influence them.

How is this to be put into practice? On the one hand, the DfES guidance emphasises “the importance of sensitivity to individual needs”, as though teachers are unaware that their charges are individuals as opposed to homogenous automata. This patronising advice reiterates the belief that Whitehall bureaucrats are needed to tell teachers and nurses how to deliver their service. One wonders what the point of all that training and education was!

On the other hand, a series of warnings are given to take account of “cultural norms” and to avoid discomfort to children whose cultures take great offence at public humiliation. This is a very dangerous precedent. School rules are a form of law, and for them to have any meaning they must be applied fairly. To allow one child to get away with being loud while another is disciplined is discriminatory – especially so if it is based not on the child’s uniqueness but upon views of how a child of that “culture” is expected to behave. To discipline children in different ways because of preconceived notions of how children of a certain type (colour, faith) might react is racism.

This issue goes to the heart of the “multicultural society”. Being multicultural is a recognition that a hundred different languages are spoken in the home; a hundred different forms of dress are worn in the street. Different gods are worshipped and different festivals celebrated, and they are they are worshipped and celebrated in different ways. But if a society is to be fair, its members must be treated equally; the law – even local laws of public institutions – applied irrespective of race or religion. This is not the Middle Ages, where Jews were subject to a different law from Christians, and the religious from the secular. The law is blind for a reason. It is blind so that even though individuals might discriminate, the law never does. For all our sakes let it remain so.

It would be nice to believe you, Gordon

Gordon Brown has published an article in the Times today in which he trumpets the “Education for All” campaign. Before his promise to help educate the 80m children worldwide who do not go to school causes you to reach for the champagne, however, two words of caution.

Firstly, the bottle is already empty, as Brown has been making this promise for years. What is new is his focus on providing what one might call ‘emergency education’ for children who are displaced due to war or disaster. “For the first time, we propose to do for education what the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières already do for healthcare — provide education even in fragile states and war zones.” Which is all very admirable, but it would be nice if Brown gave credit where credit was due. Only two nights ago, Lynne Featherstone told an audience of Lewisham and Beckenham North Liberal Democrats that she had first proposed this at International Development Questions. This had taken Hilary Benn by surprise, but he had agreed to her proposal. Now, Brown is proclaiming it as a great Labour innovation. It isn’t the first time our policies have been stolen.

Secondly, as he has overseen (from the commanding heights of the economy at 1, Horse Guards Road) the UK’s national education failure, one might question whether he is the right man to bring education to Africa. In the UK today, a quarter of school leavers are functionally illiterate. This is a particularly germane statistic at present as the current generation of school leavers are a Labour generation, having known almost nothing of education under any other government. Yet basic literacy and numeracy are beyond the power of this government, despite pouring record amounts of money into education, one has to question whether it will be any more effective in Africa.

Gordon Brown as the solution to Africa’s woes has been an image that the Chancellor has paraded for some time. As his impending promotion nears, expect to see more saintly images of the dour-looking Scot. Pinches of salt are recommended.

Unicef report may be flawed, but there is still much to worry about

The Unicef report on child well-being in rich countries caused an instinctively sceptical reaction in me, partly because of the known left-wing bias within the UN agencies and partly because of its reliance on relative income measures. As I commented to Cicero earlier today (I have since rectified the typos!):

I fail to understand how a poor child in Britain is worse off than an even-poorer child in Slovakia, simply because the British child is able to see a Porsche from her window rather than a clapped out Lada.

Having said that, I’ve decided it’s best to read the report before spilling too much virtual ink. Sadly (sic.), I’m about to disappear off to Cape Town (where the temperature is in the 20s and the sun sets late over the sea) and so won’t have time to read it and write about it until it is quite stale, so I’m going to make a few observations based on the very informative annex, which has the 40 separate indicators which led the report writers to their conclusions.

Having reviewed these, I remain very sceptical of the relative poverty issue. Furthermore, many measures are based on subjective reporting (“aspiring to low skilled work”; “finding their peers kind”; “agreeing with the statement that…”) and others are probably based on surveys that may not be entirely accurate (reports on how many books are in a house or how many educational tools – did the children consider the family computer an educational tool? Or a toy?).

Nonetheless, perhaps a third of the measures were clear, objective measures based on official statistics in which we ought to have at least some faith. The following stand out as cause for real concern:

· Above average infant mortality
· Above average number of births with low birth weight (they say “birth rate below 2500g” but I am inferring what they meant!)
· Below average immunisation against DPT3 and Polio, and significantly below average immunisation against Measles
· Above average number of overweight 13 and 15 year olds (according to BMI).
· Significantly below average participation in education among 15-19 year olds
· Below average number of 15-19 year olds in either education or employment
· Significantly above average number of children living in single-parent and step families
· Significantly above average adolescent (15-19 year old) fertility rate

(For statisticians among you, ‘Significantly’ refers to more than one standard deviation difference, which puts the UK into the bottom quintile).

No matter how you cut it, that means that the UK’s children are less healthy and dying more often than peers in less wealthy societies including the Mediterranean countries, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Malta. They are not undertaking as much further study and are more likely to expect to work in unskilled employment – not a good place to be with a billion Chinese yet to join the global labour market. Traditional family structures are more fragile (though I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this).

I do not believe it follows that the solutions must be more Government intervention in family lives or massive statist structures institutionalising childhood. But there is clearly room for improvement in our public health and education, currently subject to two of the largest Government departments. A more thorough immunisation programme, better sex education and improved technical educational opportunities for non-academic school leavers would be a good start.

One thing is for certain: despite the instinctive scepticism and lingering doubt of myself and many liberal-minded colleagues, this report leaves no room for complacency.

Our parents have mortgaged our future

It’s a good job my father doesn’t read my blog, because I’m about to point the finger of blame firmly at his and his parent’s generation.

Over Christmas I read Living with Leviathan: Public Spending, Taxes and Economic Performance, by David B. Smith, Visiting Professor in Business and Economic Forecasting at the University of Derby and a visiting lecturer at the Cardiff University Business School.

The book is a long and detailed investigation of the pernicious effects of high levels of taxation and public spending on the economy. There are many findings and quite a few prescriptions, some of which even the author recognises are not politically viable.

However, the one bit that sticks out is the results of a piece of econometric modelling in which he estimates that “If government spending, as a proportion of national income, had been held at the level experienced in 1960, econometric evidence suggests that output in the UK would, today, be nearly twice as high as current levels. Total public expenditure would then be higher, albeit as a lower proportion of a much bigger national output.”

This is a startling finding for two reasons. Firstly, the suggestion that the policies of successive UK governments have cost us £1 trillion of GDP per annum defies adjectives. Indeed, I struggle to imagine what this would mean for UK standards of living today. Suffice to say that we would be half as rich again as citizens of the United States, and somewhat higher than Dubai. David B. Smith notes that we could spend far more on public services and still have lower taxes as a result. I might go further and suggest that most, if not almost all, of us would be able to afford to buy private healthcare and education of higher quality than our present, tax-funded system can afford, and still have more left over for fun and frolics.

The second startling fact here is that this lafferesque story of counter-factual economic history does not require us to have foregone our welfare state. By 1960 the welfare state was over a decade old, public expenditure was a third of GDP and our hospitals and schools were in rude health. So the argument often deployed by people who oppose supply-side measures that those proposing them would condemn the poor to ignorance and disease simply does not hold up.

"What's the bleeding time?"

"Ten past ten, sir!"

Sadly, as is so often the way with bureaucracies, costs began to escalate. In the 1960s and 1970s welfare expenditure ballooned until by 1980 it reached nearly half of national output, and despite the “small state” rhetoric of the Thatcher/Major years, it stuck well over 40 per cent. Under Gordon Brown it has risen again to over 45 per cent and shows every sign of rising further.

This massively bloated welfare system has not created schools or hospitals significantly better than were enjoyed in the 1950s. Healthcare is of course better – it is not so clear that the same can be said of schools – but this is as a result of technological advancement and the increased wealth our nation has enjoyed. Indeed, this latter factor would have been far higher had our parents and grandparents show a little more restraint.

Voters since the 1960s have cost those leaving home today half the potential wealth they might have enjoyed, with the higher living standards that would have resulted. We would all be better off had they shown more prudence. It is not too late to learn that lesson and to adopt a growth plan for future generations.

Quality, not quantity, is what we need in education

Ministers appear to be considering raising the compulsory school age to 18. It is hard not to sympathise with their motivation for this. Alan Johnson (one of the few Labour ministers that retains some credibility) told The Times that “It should be as unacceptable to see a 16-year- old working, with no training, no education, as it is now to see a 14-year-old… We should find it … repellent that a youngster of 16 is not getting any training.” Coming from a man who left school at 15 with no qualifications, it is hard not argue.

This raises a question I have discussed before about the need for a proper and meaningful legal definition of adulthood. At present one “comes of age” after 18 years, but may drive a car at 17, have sexual intercourse at 16, and not stand for parliament until 21. There is no logic to this. The school leaving ages are an example of this. At present children can leave school and start work. Technically, that means we have child labour – albeit not with the overtones of exploitation that that term usually carries.

Some Liberal Democrats believe that the voting age should be lowered to 16. I believe that this should only be the case if we believe that 16 and 17 year olds are mature adults capable of exercising their judgement well enough to make such a weighty decision. Whether they are or not is a discussion for another day, however. My point here is that if they are, then they are adults.

If 16 and 17 year olds are adults, it would be wrong (I might even hazard criminal) to require them to spend a further two years in education. No matter how much they would benefit from it, it would be a violation of their freedom. After all, they have the right to an education; should they ten be obliged? If they are children then we may at least have the right to take that decision for them. If not, it would be as unacceptable as conscription.

The proposal anyway raises a more obvious problem. The reason why school children are not getting satisfactory qualifications is not a lack of time – they spend 11 years in school and still a quarter of them are functionally illiterate and innumerate. It is the quality of education in those 11 years that is letting our children down, not our failure to require them (remember, they are already entitled to it if they wish) to attend school for another two years.

This proposal is bound to be expensive. While its motivation is undoubtedly high-minded, ministers would be better off concentrating on improving literacy, numeracy and qualification levels prior to children reaching 16 rather than making headline-grabbing gestures that fail to address the real problem.

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.

"That's quite enough Dyslexogate, thank you"

David Aaronovitch has written an excellent op ed. on "The Ruth Kelly Affair".

As well as exposing the real hypocrisy - journalists who tut-tut about her decision when over half of them privately educate their own children - he takes a swipe at Labour back-benchers who put ideology over the interests of the child (the point I made yesterday).

I know a comment piece is good if it is both informative and humorous. Enjoy.

Losing sight of the child

There is something unseemly about the row that has erupted in the Labour Party over Ruth Kelly’s decision to send her child to a private school.

Labour’s commitment to state provision has always made it difficult for Labour ministers to school their children privately. Yet the fact remains that private education can provide better outcomes for children that state schools.

This is not always the case: past Labour administrations were crammed full of and led by grammar school boys who had got the best state education by passing their 11+ exams (or their parents paid for the privilege). But since Labour dismantled the two-tier grammar school system, our current Labour Prime Minister has been drawn from the ranks of the private schools.

In fact, debate still rages over whether private education always provides better outcomes for children. Every few weeks another study emerges arguing either that children from private schools enjoy better outcomes as a result of their education, or that there is no discernable difference.

Whether or not parents should have a right to educate their children outside the state system, and whether parents should be allowed to take the money their children would have costed the state and spend it elsewhere if they see this as in their child’s interests are important but macro-level debates. What is so disgusting about the reaction of Labour members to Ms. Kelly’s decision is that it shows absolutely no concern for the welfare of the child.

Take these quotes in today’s Times:
Ian Gibson (Norwich North): "I think it’s wrong. You should set an example as a minister and support your local school. It is a slap in the face for the teachers and the pupils in the school that the child has been taken out of."
Ann Cryer, (Keighley): "MPs should try to get state provision for their children because that is what we believe in."
Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak): "I think it goes against the principles of the Labour Party. It makes me wonder about the sort of people who achieve high office who are in New Labour."
Margaret Hodge, Trade and Industry minister: "Given our commitment to state education, it is an issue of public interest."

Not one of these Members of Parliament even qualified their statements by suggesting that Ms. Kelly’s main concern as a parent should be the welfare of her children. A government minister may choose to sacrifice their own interests for their career – say, by spending time on an NHS waiting list rather than paying to go private. For a minister to sacrifice their child’s interests would be disgraceful. For the minister’s colleagues to berate her for not doing so is disgusting.

Ms. Kelly’s child struggles with dyslexia. Whether or not state education should be able to provide her child with the best schooling is beside the point. The child’s parent has made an informed choice about what is in the interests of her child. We should respect that choice.

We may of course cite that choice as proof that Labour is failing to provide state education that meets the needs of children with special educational needs, but we should not condemn Ms. Kelly for recognising that fact and responding by doing what she can for her child. It does not matter that she was once Education Secretary. What matters is the welfare of her child.

That is what the likes of Gibson, Cryer, Jones and Hodge fail to appreciate. Too wrapped up in the battle of ideology, they have lost sight of the child.

Labour isn't working

It’s an old story, but it appears that they’re remaking it again. No, it’s not the BBC dramatisation of Dracula. It’s rising unemployment.

Youth unemployment is particularly troubling. In November this year 11,200 young people had been claiming benefits for more than a year. Youth unemployment is now worse than it was when Labour came to power. Figures from the Office of National Statistics are instructive:

1997 2006 Change
16 – 24 year olds unemployed 665,000 702,000 + 37,000
16 – 24 unemployment rate 14.4% 14.5% + 0.1%
16 – 24 unemployment rate – London 22.5% 42.9% + 20.4%


Labour MPs are rushing to blame the usual suspects – immigrants. With simple but flawed logic they suggest that hundreds of thousands of East Europeans have flooded in and taken jobs that might otherwise be filled by British workers. However, if this were the case, why was it that two thirds of a million 16 – 24 year olds were unemployed before the East Europeans arrived? How has Britain managed to absorb hundreds of thousands of East European workers when unemployment has only risen by tens of thousands?

This scapegoating of hard working, tax paying immigrants is a sordid attempt to shift attention from the real culprits: the Labour government. Youth unemployment is on the rise because Labour has strangled business with masses of extra regulation and rising taxation. It is rising because our schools are still failing to teach basic skills to far too many of our children; a quarter are functionally illiterate, innumerate and leave school at 16 with no qualifications worth speaking of. And it is rising because the government’s New Deal is a disaster, costing more and proving less effective than similar schemes in comparable countries, while massaging the jobless statistics by placing young people in jobs that last less than 13 weeks, so that returning jobless do not appear to be long-term unemployed.

In 1997 Gordon Brown described the levels of youth unemployment that Labour inherited from the Conservatives as “sickening”, a “human tragedy”, “an economic disaster”. After nine years of his chancellorship, it is now worse. It is an old Labour story, and each time we read it we feel the same despair. Labour isn’t working.

State education condemns millions of children to the scrap-heap

The failure of Government policy on education was highlighted today in two reports. In one, literacy expert Jean Gross suggests that poor literacy is costing the State £2 billion a year in lost earnings and additional public expenditure. Meanwhile, figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest that there are 1.24 million people aged between 16 and 24 who are not in work, training or education, a 15 per cent increase since Labour came to power. The figure is worse for 16 and 17 year olds, where the increase has been 27 per cent.

This comes as no surprise when one considers that the OECD estimates that around a third of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate, ranking below such countries as Finland, the Czech Republic and Portugal. It doesn’t need to be this way; Sweden regularly achieves a 100 per cent functional literacy rate.

It does not take a genius – or even a degree of literacy – to recognise that these two factors are linked. Most people would expect to be able to read and write before they leave primary school, yet a huge minority enter secondary school completely unable to cope with the demands. These are the children that become disaffected and give up on an education system with which they cannot cope. Two in every five school children leave without any worthwhile qualification. With little prospects of a job in an age when Britain is a developed, information-driven service economy, they drift into unemployment, and from there to drugs and crime. It is no coincidence that while one in three school leavers cannot read and write, in our prisons the statistic is seven in ten.

If after eleven years of compulsory education the State cannot impart the most basic skills necessary for 21st century life – literacy and numeracy – it is time to accept that State education is failing. While the best performers in the OECD survey were the highest spenders, overall there were no correlation between expenditure and literacy. Rather, the problem is in a system that lumps children of all abilities into one, uniform type of school, prioritises the choices of bureaucrats over those of parents, stifles innovation among teachers creates no incentive for success.

The solution is more competition, performance related pay, parental choice and autonomy for schools that wish to innovate. The State’s role is to ensure that education is available to all irrespective of wealth or background; that does not mean it needs to provide education itself. This will be best achieved by giving parents the spending power, allowing the money to follow the pupil, while schools compete on quality and on specialist provision to cater for the needs of the children they wish to serve. With power in the hands of parents and schools competing for children, the quality of service will rise. In education, that means more literacy, a stronger economy and less crime.