education policy

Surely it is a given that we are all different? Size, shape, gender, colour, intelligence, personality, practical ability... So surely the human brain, and mind, are also infinitely variable. So why then do we have clothes, shoes, accessories, food, gadgets, literature, music, art, newspapers, all sorts of media, cars, houses, gardens, holidays, hobbies and pastimes of every conceivable colour, shape, size, sophistication, individuality to suit our needs and tastes and yet, when it comes to nurturing minds, especially young ones, in other words education, the state seems always to want a one size fits all, or nearly all solution we must all be dragooned through?

_{Scary kids from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video, copyright Columbia/CBS. Is this how we see education?}

Even the current advocates of increased "choice" in education are generally not calling for the sort of individually tailored schooling that might cater for a near infinite combination of aptitude and need in different subjects. No, squeezed onto the cattle trucks of the "skills agenda" at an increasingly early age, our children's precious formative minds are driven through National Curricula, SATs, Literacy Hour, regurgitated standardized lesson plans and a plethora of targets till they get an OFSTED stamp on their forehead to say they are ready to be part of Britains fast changing economy. Or at least, the fast changing economy that was being predicted by, yes, you guessed it, government, a decade ago when they started.

On Saturday I was having dinner with friends who either have children going through this system or looking to have soon. All of them, I think it would be fair to say, would be termed "left of centre" and would never have considered private education or home-schooling previously but are all actively considering it now or would if they had the money. They feel patronized by the system, and treated with varying degrees of contempt by the school and its staff.

But most of all they feel helpless when they can see that their child needs extra help or a different approach in one subject where they may thrive in a totally different subject with little struggle. Such different approaches may not be available in the one school. And the lesson plans used don't vary a great deal from school to school so there isn't a great deal of choice anyway. If they wanted to change schools - as one is trying to do now as a result of their experience - the bureaucracy is stifling.

Oh, this all sounds incredibly expensive doesn't it? How can we satisfy that nearly infinite combination of needs and aptitudes? Turn it around and ask, if we can satisfy a near infinite appetite for different trainers, baked beans and holidays, why can we not produce individualized education - surely one of the most important human needs, even for those of us who tend towards Herbert Spencer's view that the state should not be dictating or providing education at all.

I think we need to consider how to personalize education, from the earliest age; we're not going to achieve any step change in attainment just by adding a few extra teachers armed with standard lesson plans, just by putting a little extra money in the direction of the least well off - though that will no doubt help, assuming they can actually find the package to suit them.

Localism is certainly a part of the answer, as perhaps are things like "free schools" on the Dutch model and an idea expanded on at Regno del fines blog. Why not return the provision of schools much much closer to the families using them - at parish level or something similar sized. Parents could decide amongst themselves in a mutualist structure whether to get in a teacher who's going to teach the children proper grammar or to learn their times tables.

And we should not be so squeamish about the corporatization of education. By which I don't mean the mish-mash of schemes to get token private money into the current system. I mean that education, or at least the "skills agenda", is already a subsidy to business (or it ought to be if the education system produced people business can use). It is corporate welfare. So why not instead expect business itself to contribute directly to nurturing the skills needed in an area - perhaps paying for particular teachers is specialized subjects related to the local economy? It would be more transparent at least than corporate lobbyists persuading a few politicians far away to spend our money on providing them workers, and probably more reactive to changes in the economy.

A quantum leap in the amount of flexibility and personalization of education is what we need. And for government to butt out as much as possible. For surely, we have pretty well reached the situation Spencer predicted:

I'm sure there are probably a good few people rubbing their hands with some relish at the thought that private schools might feel the squeeze from this edict from the Charities Commission that they have to prove the value of their contribution to the wider community to retain their charitable status.

But before they get too excited, perhaps they might want to think about the numbers. I read that independent schools have about 600,000 pupils. If we accept the figures put forward by Nick Clegg, I think, when he was talking about the "pupil premium" in which he said, if memory serves, that the average cost was about £9,000 per year per pupil - which allowing for endowments and so on is probably a bit more than the average fees - it is an "industry" with a turnover of nearly £5.5 billion per year.

The statements about the level of charitable benefit they receive suggest that it amounts to about £100 million. This is therefore just under 2% of their combined turnover. Hardly insurmountable if they decide to stick two fingers up to the Charities Commission. But there's another side to it, isn't there. If we accept government figures that they spend about £6,000 per year on average on each state school pupil, then the 600,000 pupils whose parents are often scrimping and saving to put them through a private school are saving the state sector just over £3.5 billion.

It seems to me that whatever you think of private education, the charge that they do not contribute financially to the state sector through their customers' taxation cannot be upheld. Of course, since most of the charitable benefit is presumably in the form of reclamation of VAT on some expenses and I would argue that nobody should pay VAT, the most iniquitous tax on production we have, they would not have such a benefit in my fiscal regime anyway!

There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist.  read more »

I had an early meeting yesterday of a governors' committee where someone mentioned this Guardian article from Monday about how Oxford and Cambridge Universities have proven lukewarm or downright icy towards the idea that they should sponsor New Labour academies.

Oxbridge snub to government on academies

Polly Curtis and Patrick Wintour
Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian

Oxford and Cambridge universities have turned down ministerial attempts to persuade them to adopt a city academy, the Guardian has learned. Their decisions deliver a fresh blow to the government, which is trying to raise the academic profile of the schools by wooing top universities to sponsor one. Confidential documents, seen by the Guardian, reveal that Cambridge has vetoed the idea to avoid any negative fallout should the school fail or receive bad press. Sponsoring a school could also present a "conflict of interest" over admissions for pupils at the school, it says.

Which is interesting, and something itself of a turn-around on several hundred years' history. Some of the existing "Oxbridge Academies" may only take pupils to 13 years old - St John's or King's in Cambridge, New College or Christ Church in Oxford. Another, Magdalen in Oxford, is a leading feeder school to the universities' colleges. Others not necessarily located in the same place have direct, often founding, links with colleges - such as Winchester and New College or Eton and King's College. Then there are innumerable local schools the colleges of the two universities have effectively founded through their ecclesiastical benefices.

The formal recruiting links may have been broken with the demise of closed scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge but there can be no doubting that "conflicts of interest" were built into the Oxbridge system from the start. Now, that's not to say that it would be a good move to set up a new possible conflict of interest. As noted in that article the decision of my own university, Oxford Brookes University, to participate in the new Oxford academy that will replace The Peers School next year, was not without controversy. And some of my own qualms were similar to those of the head of the PGCE course at Oxford - that our school of education has links with many local schools, that our widening participation and outreach programs work with all local schools, and how would all this be affected if we had a founding stake in just one local school.

Another issue I'd have with the country's two leading universities starting academies is precisely that academies cannot select on ability. It seems to me that this is one case where selection could be justified, and probably boarding too - two national schools run by the two leading universities, able to pull in the brightest and the best who would benefit most from being taken up a level in their studies to equip them for the academic rigours of the world's best universities. And why not? Public money funds things like national sporting academies which are selective on a different sort of ability.

Neither of us are large cities where our universities' local connections could provide a base for such an academy - unlike perhaps Imperial or UCL who have the huge and still growing "market" of London schools to mix in. Though I suppose there is an argument that more people in our respective counties should be helped to get into Oxbridge because we should benefit more from the presence of those universities in our midst. Could you ever find a fair way of sticking a pin in the map somewhere and saying that only kids in this catchment area/city/county have the chance of an Oxbridge partnered school?

But how about another idea altogether - that they set up a virtual academy. Just as Oxford and Cambridge are, along with Imperial, in a different league of universities worldwide, so their prospective students need to be brought into that different league as early as possible. I know that in my case, my hopes of an Oxbridge education were probably dashed by the time I was about thirteen or fourteen, when my interest at school "peaked", for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I was not driven or permitted to go as fast as I could go academically and as a result became the disinterested teenager in many lessons - coasting on previously acquired knowledge and skills.

One of the great advantages of private school was that I had lots of teachers who were academics and not just educationalists. This made it easier to place me with a mentor for S level subjects for example which were much less related to the curriculum of the day and more to "added-value" academic skills and disciplines like historiography instead of just history, the study of literary criticism instead of just literature and so on. I just don't think that state sector teachers have the time, after all the paperwork and so on, to indulge their academic fancies in the same way somehow - it's not to do with their skills and abilities but the sausage machine system of state schools. So an Oxford University "Virtual Academy" could work like the Open University for bright kids, to add value to the knowledge and skills they gain from their existing state school. To run summer camps and crammer camps for the brightest and the best to keep them that little bit more stimulated and their learning skills on top form.

Every state school has to have a program now for dealing with "gifted children" in their Special Educational Needs strategy. Many I know from school governors discussions struggled to define "gifted" fairly to all sorts of gifts. But here would be one way of targeting a particular sort of academic giftedness - you could tie up an academically bright child whose talents were not being fully realized because of being thrown in with the mix of average pupils with a real life academic, or even an undergraduate student who could mentor them through extra tuition. They could create online courses, like the Open University, that schools around the country could be encouraged to send their brightest pupils on to add to their in house education.

And in return, those schools that use the services of the Oxbridge Virtual Academy would have the benefit of retaining their brightest and best locally, keeping them as an example to younger kids and perhaps even filtering down their enthusiasm and additional skills to others in their "home" school. It seems like a win-win idea to me. No doubt both universities would say that their existing widening participation activities already do much of this. But I think actually harnessing it as an identifiable "virtual institution", part of the Oxford or Cambridge "brand", would take it that one step further, make it, and them, more visible and perhaps even widen the opportunities beyond the schools they already choose to co-operate with in their W-P programs.

The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

This idea of David Cameron's that we're living in "Broken Britain" and of the Sun that we are witnessing "Anarchy in the UK" has been eating at me a bit. And with Dave's essay in the Telegraph outlining his ideas for mending his broken Britain by branding ten year old boys as failures and keeping them down a year at school got me looking out crime statistics.

I suspect this might not be what Dave had in mind (no, really!), but one thing sticks out in the British Crime Survey attitudes to crime, and in particular fear of crime. That the better educated you are, the better the newspaper you read, the more you earn, the less likely you are to fear crime, and the more accurate a perspective you're going to have as to the real levels of crime and anti-social behaviour going on in Britain.

Another interesting thing is that when people are asked about their perceptions of levels of crime throughout the country compared with in their local area, all groups are about half as likely to perceive crime as a growing problem in their local area, where they have on the ground experience, compared with nationwide.

So, what can we conclude, if anything, from that? Clearly, where people rely on the national media, and particularly the tabloid newspapers, for news of what's going on around the country, they get the impression that there's a lot more crime going on "somewhere else" compared with what they see and hear about in their local area. Are they just wearing rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to their own area? Maybe - local pride and disbelief that "such a thing could happen here" might be very influential. But more likely we are being manipulated by the media for whom crime, and particularly the nastiest most vicious sort of crime, sells newspapers.

So yes, a better educated nation will be less fearful of crime because they won't have to rely so much on sensationalist news reporting to form their opinions. Better still would be if our politicians stopped pandering to this tabloid agenda and feeding their appetite for fear-mongering with populist speeches and snappy but misleading headlines.

There's been a little talk about what is expected to be the next quasi-policy announcement from the Conservatives on education - that parents should be allowed to set up their own schools with state funding. Liberal Leslie worries that this is vouchers by the back door, complete with top-ups and selection, whilst Jonathan Calder suggests that as liberals we should embrace such diversity of provision. Little surprise that I should tend to agree more with Jonathan than with Leslie.

And it just so happened that I was already writing a tome on education in response to a couple of stories last week - about the poor performance in GCSE English and Maths that's causing employers to have to train new 16 year old employees the very basics just to be able to operate in the workforce, and stories about a uniform maker thinking about putting transmitters in school uniforms so parents and teachers can better monitor their charges.

Education is important to me. It provides me with my day job. I'm also a governor of the university and a former primary and secondary school governor as well. But it is also important because I need to have an image of how, in my ideal geo-libertarian world where the "state" is restricted pretty much to collecting land value tax and distributing the whole lot of it to everyone as a citizen's income, education would be funded and function without a monolithic state provider.

One even has to ask whether it is legitimate in such a libertarian world to make parents get their children educated. I think we can answer that one pretty easily - it is legitimate because the child can not do so for themselves, and can only really attain adult responsibilities and the opportunities that go with them if they have at least the basic education to participate in those opportunities. But that doesn't mean that the state should provide it or even dictate what sort of education a parent should choose for their child. Indeed, although the vast majority of children in the UK are educated at state controlled schools, it is in fact just the "default" option. A parent's obligation is to ensure their child is educated, and the state provides such a default in case they don't choose home schooling or private provision.

But in a world where most all of the tax money currently collected and spent on state provision of services like health and education would instead just be handed out as a citizen's income equally, to everyone and where people as a result were expected to make their own provision for those services, would people put enough of a priority on educating their children to put enough back into schooling to make private provision work? Well, whilst I estimate that there is enough residential land value to yield about £250bn a year in a "100% land value tax", not far off what taxes paid by individuals (except VAT) actually raise at the moment, and enough to provide a Citizen's Income of around £100 per week for adults declining to say £40 per week for toddlers, on its own that is obviously not enough for someone totally reliant on their Citizen's Income to pay thousands of pounds a year for schooling.

But of course one of the perceived benefits of a Citizen's Income system, at least if combined with the abolition of the minimum wage (which is not even beyond the realms of possibility for some Labour commentators), is that because the CI is not withdrawn as people go out to work even for relatively low wages unlike with the current benefits system there would be far fewer households totally reliant only on the CI. A two parent household with one parent bringing home what would now be minimum wage and another bringing home half as much, and with two teen aged children could expect to have a gross household income including their CI of around £36,000 per year - not huge, but significantly more than people suffering benefits withdrawal at the moment. So one would expect them to contribute some of their earned income to their children's education as well.

Private and charitable education provision could be allowed to means test parents with lower and upper proportions of household income they would be able to charge. But the idea would be that everyone would pay something, even if it were only a proportion of the children's portion of the Citizen's Income in a few cases. Schools would have an incentive to provide an environment that attracts pupils and parents from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to pull in more than the bare minimum of means tested fees. Just as the LVT in the first place would encourage more mixed income communities as tax-savvy middle classes might choose to live in lower land value areas to reduce their tax bill.

As is observed widely in the developing world, even paying small amounts for education focusses both parents' and children's minds on the benefit they are getting from that education. Truancy would be a direct waste of that household's money. Pupils performing below what's expected of them for their ability levels would concentrate minds on whether the choice of education method employed by a school was the right one - was "worth the money" - and help promote diversity in educational methods. Parents would also see that playing their full part in assisting the education of their children by taking an interest and providing out of school stimuli would both save them money and improve outcomes for their children.

My best guess would be that we could improve educational outcomes, reduce costs, enhance diversity both in types of education offered and in pupil mix within schools and increase the involvement even of the currently least interested households in their children's education and really ingrain the value of education in everyone. Unthinkable? Maybe, with education currently eating up nearly £80 billion a year and us not having terribly much choice about what we get for that money, the unthinkable is what we need.

The education bill debates present a very good opportunity to show how landowners are the ones to gain from public infrastructure investment for doing nothing and that taxing land values would be a good way of recouping public infrastructure investment more fairly through a market driven tax system...

Picture the scene. You've just moved into your quiet surburban semi ready for your retirement. And the uncaring council comes along and decides it's going to build a new school right across the road. You get out your placards and march on the Town Hall to fight the planning application. You find any reason you can why this "predominantly elderly population area" does not need such a development, that it will "blight your lives" and "adversely affect property value in the vicinity" and so on. You might even fight on beyond the "obviously biased" local councillors, to the High Court.

You are defeated. You settle down to a retirement of valium and earplugs, you might even want to electrify the front drive just in case any kids get too close. You can only just bear the construction traffic. And the following year, this brand spanking new school takes its first pupils, with everyone predicting great things from it. And someone pops up on your doorstep one day having dodged the teen-proofing on the driveway and offers you and extra £42,000 for your home.

You are a bit taken aback. After all, you had been confidently informed by your friendly local amateur surveyor that the new school would depress property values. Surely you just adding triple glazing to keep the intolerable noise of happy children out wasn't worth £42,000? Nothing you've done has added that sort of value. So you ask..."why pay £42,000 more than for that house down the road there?"

"Because you're in the catchment area of this brand spanking new school everyone's got high hopes for and I want my child to have the best education i can afford. So I'm prepared to pay you, who hold a monopoly on the only property for sale in the catchment area, whatever price you name within reason."

You accept, realising, somewhat smugly, that your only contribution to this little windfall was the prominence your anti-school campaign brought to the new school.

Tax Payer -> Government investment -> Landowner

And it happens with most things. That new railway line making your life hell? Just pity poor Don Riley, property developer around the Jubilee Line extension stations, who saw his portfolio value rise by over £3bn when the line opened (and now an advocate himself, by the way, for LVT).

You just need to read any estate agent's property particulars to see the sort of factors that affect land value, none of which the current owner has any great part in - "walking distance from local shopping", "20 minutes Northern Line to City", "easy access to motorway", "good local educational and medical services" and so on.