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.

The myth of the postcode lottery belies the awful truth

Last night on Channel 4, John Snow presented a Dispatches on Britain’s Healthcare Lottery. According to Snow, healthcare is applied differently in different regions and as such a “postcode lottery” applies across the UK. He cited a gentleman in Wales who was not able to get treatment that was available to English patients across the border, and an arthritis sufferer who was denied treatment that was available to a women with a similar condition only a few miles away.

This concept of the postcode lottery is a fallacy. While there is no doubt that different Strategic Health Authorities and even NHS Trusts have different priorities, this is not a lottery. A lottery, were it to apply, would at least be fair, for the totally arbitrariness and randomness of such a system would mean that every patient had an equal chance of “winning” treatment, irrespective of other factors.

What we have instead is a postcode auction, with houses near good public services worth significantly more than houses where provision is poorer. I well remember an evening walk in Muswell Hill, when a friend pointed out that the houses on one side of the road were worth £100,000 more than those on the other side, because one side of the house was in the catchment area for a highly rated state school whereas the neighbouring school was far less well regarded.

This is a disgrace that points to the heart of the current Government’s public services failure. What both John Snow and the Labour Government seem not to understand is that differences in provision are unavoidable: schools and hospitals will always vary in quality – uniformity is a pipe-dream – and there will always have to be differing priorities in different areas. As long as citizens are parcelled up by district and told which health provider or which schools they may access, house prices will reflect the quality of public services and the rich will be able to access better services than the poor.

Where schools are concerned, this is probably one of the main reasons why social mobility has fallen in recent years; where once bright children from poor backgrounds could access good schools, they are now stuck with whatever school their parents can afford to live near. Thus poor people are obliged to send bright children to underperforming schools.

It is time decisions about services were taken away from bureaucrats and handed to citizens. Rather than public services being allocated by postcode, they should be selected by the user. The Government’s “choice” agenda is a nod to this, but it does not go nearly far enough. The Government should get out of direct provision of services. Education should be provided by a voucher scheme that allows poor parents to buy their way into good schools: as the money follows the pupils and the pupils follow success, failing institutions will be replaced by successful rivals and the overall quality of education will improve. This already happens in havens of Social Democracy such as Sweden.

As regards healthcare, Government should use the tax system to fund individual health insurance for every citizen, rather than try to provide health through a state monopoly. Thus patients would be able to access, through their insurance providers, whatever treatment they required, rather than being at the mercy of state planners who have decided that in a certain region a certain treatment does not meet the bureaucratic requirements.

The tired old phrase about “a postcode lottery” is a myth that belies the truth: a postcode auction that enables rich people to buy access – through higher house prices – to the best public services. This travesty is the inevitable outcome of state planning. It is time to move to a system for providing essential services that is truly fair. Power over their own health and over their children’s education must be returned to the people.