School vouchers revisited

An interesting idea courtesy Kenneth Baker in yesterday’s Torygraph:

We should introduce an education credit equivalent to the amount the state pays for a primary education place, £3,150, and a secondary school place, £4,070, to those parents whose children attend a school that is designated by the Department for Education and Skills as failing, and who are dissatisfied with the education provided for their children. The parents of pupils in such schools would have the cash to purchase better education for their children, either in a local state school or at an independent school. This would achieve greater social mobility than undermining the grammar schools. Education at independent schools costs more than this, but such a change would encourage the start-up of new schools, particularly at the primary level, geared to that level of funding.

I have argued before in favour of school vouchers; with some misgivings, as I’m not sure their introduction would usher in a problem-free panacea. Lord Baker’s proposal does at least side-step the usual first argument against vouchers: that they will simply subsidise those parents who already pay for their kids to have a private education. I suspect, though, that introducing such a partial scheme would simply shift the inequalities between different catchment areas within a locality.

However, it does at least attempt to grapple with the key educational problem facing us today: how to offer equality of opportunity to young people in a society which segregates according to who can afford to buy a house near a good school. Those who oppose school vouchers need to suggest a practical solution to remedy this very real problem.

PS: as an aside, are ‘staff inset training days’ still known as ‘Baker Days’, as they were way back in my day?

Simon Jenkins: writing with forked pen

As the voice of Liberal England, Jonathan Calder, noted a couple of days ago , Simon Jenkins appears charmingly content to fit his voice to his readership. On Wednesday, he biffed Blair for giving parents some say in their kids’ education:

The education white paper offers a vision of a "parent-led" state secondary-school system. Its key institution is the "self-governing school free to parents", a copy of the Tories' grant-maintained school that Labour once derided. Parents will be able to control a school's "ethos and individualism". As one parent briskly put it to me, "We can keep out the blacks."… Most parents cannot and do not want to roam the country in search of the "school of their choice", even if the transport system could stand the strain. They want the school closest to where they live to be an excellent one, period.

Of course, the best state schools already have a pretty effective racial screening process: it’s called the housing market, and it means that the poorer communities too often don’t get a look in.

And of course parents would prefer their local school “to be an excellent one, period”. Who knows, though, they might even prefer the option of two excellent local schools offering different curriculums, a different ethos, different extra-curricular activities, etc.

Perhaps Mr Jenkins doesn’t feel parents should bother their little heads with such minor concerns?

But all this then made for a bizarre experience today to read Mr Jenkins’s article for The Spectator, headlined Independence for Oxford. Here we read:

The government last week proposed what is a de facto voucher scheme for English secondary schools. They can be self-governing institutions with the freedom to determine their ethos and accept [financial] contributions from parents and others. Oxford would be no different in principle.

So let me get this straight, Mr Jenkins: you are happy to champion independence for educational institutions which are free to determine their own futures when writing for The Spectator – but equally happy to diss it as terrible idea when writing for The Guardian? It's one way of achieving balance, I guess.