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?

Just a little bit of history not repeating itself

Flicking through a discarded copy of The Times on the train today (it’s just about value-for-money when it’s free), I noticed a chain of correspondence concerning young people’s ignorance of who Marie-Antoniette was.

I can’t find it in myself to feign shock. I have spent a reasonable amount of my life learning history; indeed I have a degree in it. In seven years at ‘big school’, I was taught the following:

• Year 7: Anglo-Saxons and Normans (mainly motte and bailey stuff);
• Year 8: Tudors (divorced, beheaded, she died, etc);
• Year 9: agricultural and industrial revolutions (“Smash the Spinning Jenny! Burn the rolling Rosalind!”);
• Years 10-11 (GCSE): the rise of fascism and communism (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini - yay! - videos to watch);
• Years 12-13 (A-level): the rise of Nazism (another two years of the chap with the moustache doing a poor Charlie Chaplin impersonation); and Europe, 1815-1914 (that’s Europe *excluding* the UK - the history syllabus was way ahead of Ukip).

It’s as uninspiring as it looks. And not just uninspiring: unhelpful, too. Liberal as I am, I’m not a Whig, so I’ve never bought into the teleological approach to history - that the discipline allows us to trace humanity’s relentless advance towards a golden age of liberty, egality and fraternity.

If history teaches us anything it is that nothing is inevitable, and life is messy, fragmented, kaleidoscopic. To make any sense of it, historians divide our continuum into periods - but, of course, it’s not as if a switch was flicked, and folk suddenly realised the renaissance was happening all around them. Any more than it was pre-destined that the ‘geographical expression’ which is Italy should ever have existed.

But unless you have some grasp of chronology, it’s impossible to understand how incomprehensible history is. To teach history in disparate, bite-size chunks - dotting about between Tudors and Nazis - without ever trying to contextualise or connect is senseless.

Nor can it be healthy for this nation’s history to be so ignored. For me, British history stopped in 1603, with the death of Elizabeth I. In my 16 years of formal education, I was never once taught anything about what happened here in the UK in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (other than the popularising of the crop rotation system). That just can’t be right.

And it is truly bizarre that the imperial role of the English/British in Ireland, the Middle East, USA or Africa over the centuries should be wholly absent from our curriculum. It is hardly as if such issues are no longer relevant, or even that young people would not be interested in our involvement.

I don’t buy into the dismal cliché that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it - because people usually learn the wrong lesson. But I do believe that to comprehend the present you must have some understanding of the past. It’s perfectly possible. Or, as Marie-Antoinette almost certainly never said, “It’s a piece of cake.”

Let's campaign for choice

Alan Milburn has always impressed me, not so much for his narcissist’s demeanour, but because he has never been afraid to state his argument even when he knows it’s the very opposite of what his party wants to hear.

He’s at it again in today’s Grauniad, pointing out the appalling educational inequalities in this country which are all too often tolerated in the name of educational equality:

At present, any parent can state which school they would prefer their child to attend. To break the cycle of educational disadvantage we need to give parents in the most disadvantaged areas more than preference. They should have choice. Many better-off parents already exercise such choice through indirect market mechanisms - most notably the buying of homes near good schools. Poor parents need a more direct mechanism. Countries as diverse as Denmark, Sweden and the USA have all in recent years pioneered different forms of parental choice. The evidence suggests both that choice programmes helped raise standards across all schools and that the most disadvantaged pupils benefited most. …

It is simply not right - and we should no longer tolerate the fact - that too many working class children are still let down by the schools system. Correcting that injustice means shifting the balance of power to put more choice in the hands of parents who the system currently disempowers. Those parents and their children need a direct route of the educational ghetto.

He is right: both in the problems he cites, and that a market mechanism will be the best way to empower those who are currently disempowered. (Though I’m unpersuaded by the specific measure he recommends: an educational credit available only to those in ‘failing schools’. Sounds like a nut to crack a sledgehammer.)

If one definition of liberalism is ‘equality of opportunity’ - a level playing field in which all are free to make of their lives what they will - then ensuring access for all to the best possible schooling isn’t merely an aspiration: it’s a fundamental pre-requisite.

Giving parents and their kids meaningful choice between schools with different specialisms is crucial to achieving that. What we desperately, urgently need to get beyond is the pat soundbite that “All parents want is a good local school.”

Though that may well be true, at least in part, it’s an argument that ignores how we achieve such a goal. Policies pursued by successive governments to date have signally failed.

And it is, in any case, misleading. Because while I have no doubt that parents would like to know there is one good local school, they would be still more delighted to have the choice between two or more good local schools.

Good public services depend on three factors:

• Decent funding;
• Local autonomy;
• Competition between providers.

Lib Dems have long campaigned for the first two. We need now to have the guts to address the third, to campaign for choice.

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.