Liberty Alone

Tristan, when people make applications for LEA school places, there is no-one telling them they HAVE to use the government’s criteria for selecting the one they want. If parents decide the best school is the one at the top of the league table, then that’s a decision they’ve made, not a decision that’s been forced on them by government. Why do you suppose that under a voucher system parents would use radically different criteria when choosing between schools than they do now?

Perhaps unlike you (I don’t know what you do for a living), I have been involved in trying to sell an educational product - for many years I was my university department’s admissions tutor. The depressing thing is that faced with an array of choices most of our applicants generally did choose to go for the one highest in the league table, and not the one they thought would suit them best. League tables in higher education, remember, are run by private organisations, particularly the newspapers, rather than by government.

Yes, it would be really nice if parents and students when choosing school and university places looked carefully at what the schools and universities offered, and made all the sort of thoughtful decisions based on what the organisations actually did, the actual nature of the educational experience at the institution etc. There is NOTHING stopping them doing that right now. Sadly, in my experience, most people are just too fixated on league tables to look at much else - whether that league table is provided by the Times newspaper based on its own criteria for what makes a good university, or by the government based on SATS scores.

I can tell you I despair at the Times League Table of universities - it is so much crap, it says very little about actual educational quality, it is a crying shame when a student turns you down because “X has made me an offer and X is 5 places higher in the Times league table than you are” when I know X offers an inferior degree, or a degree which is not of the sort that student wants. Yet, because it is so dominant in applicant decisions making, at my university we DO spend a lot of time thinking of ways we can push ourselves up the Times league table, sometimes by artificial means.

My point here, and in much of my discussion with you is NOT what you seem to think it is - that I want rigid state control - but that actually I think your proposed solution is a lot less radical than you suppose it is because is a lot closer to what already exists than you suppose it is.

I think Matthew’s point is that utility does not necessarily equal optimality. In the case of universities, the most optimal place for Joe Student to go may be QMUL - he will get the course he needs and leave with the degree that is most suited for him - but in terms of utility, he may choose to go Sussex because although the course may not suit him best, a degree from Sussex is “worth” more than a degree from QMUL simply because of its ranking and therefore will be better for getting a job, although in the long term this could be inefficient. In a school scenario, if the rankings were determined the same as the university league tables, then the incentives for schools under a voucher system may also not be socially optimal e.g. they could inflate grades to win more students or structure their organization to target the rankings, essentially making it no different to the current target-based system. This in turn would lead to more students going to schools that were not optimal, again the same problem that we have now. Essentially, this is EXACTLY that same scenario as we currently have, except the centrally controlled target is no longer a government target but a target set by a third-party (in the case of universities, The Times).

However, universities are not open to market forces, they are in the same position as schools currently are. This means that the league tables do not tally with what consumers want, but what someone at The Times dictates, which can be arbitrary (the sudden flip a few years ago to favouring Oxford instead of Cambridge at the top shows this point well). If market forces come into play (via a voucher system) then this scenario no longer holds true. It is now the market (the consumers – parents and children) that determine what is worth their vouchers, not league tables anymore. League tables may still be drawn up but they would reflect the choices of the consumers rather than the government or another arbitrary panel. The would follow the market rather than dictate it.

What the parents and children want from their school will differ from family to family. Some will want strict education, some a hippy arts school, but this way they choose. Just as importantly it will be more transparent whether a school provides good services or not. Schools that are not good will not have many takers, schools that are good will have more consumers and ergo more money to cater for them.

Personally, having no children and not remotely thinking about it for a good few years I haven’t really thought about this topic a lot. These are just my thoughts since reading this a couple of hours ago. Generally, I am in favour of market solutions to problems simply because in a perfect system, they tend towards true prices, best practice, transparency and efficiency. The important phrase in that sentence is “a perfect system”. If you are going to let education be at the mercy of the market then you have to design its integration well and have to set up a good standards and regulations body.

University admissions is actually pretty much a market system, except that the currency is qualifications rather than money. A university department (to a large extent they are autonomous in this - what gets you into one department at a university won’t necessarily get you into another more popular one at the same university) will set its entrance requirements at whatever is enough to get enough applicants who will agree to pay it and take the place. However, it doesn’t pay to be seen to set your price too low (makes you look low quality), so the quoted price (the entrance offer) often isn’t the actual price (i.e. you might still get offered the place if you didn’t get the grades, because the real price is lower).

My point here is that the idea that people make careful rational decisions about this based on what they actually prefer is false. In my experience, most university applicants are pretty clueless about what the degrees they are applying to entail, and they generally tend to make the choice based on “the higher in the league tables, the better”.

OK, this is a gross generalisation, as it is for schools. Of course there will be some parents who look around and consider things other than the position on the LEA league tables. But that is my point anyway - the existence of league tables based on SATs and exam scores does not mean parents are forced to choose on this basis, but they tend to choose that way. Because they tend to choose that way, teachers are under huge competitive pressures to score high on SATs and GCSE scores at the expense of a more rounded education. I do not see why, if there were a voucher system, the criteria used for making choices would change. People ALREADY have the right to choose on whatever basis they like, it happens they mostly choose to choose on the basis of the league tables.

It ALREADY is the case that the “best” schools have more takers than the “worst” ones - look at any LEA and you will see there is a huge difference in the numbers of first choices between the schools. The market people suppose a school with a large number of applicants would want to expand in this case, but why should it? Isn’t it preferable to keep small and elite, only educating really keen and bright pupils, rather than to over expand and weaken the brand by taking in pupils who’ll drive the average exam performance down? Teachers are under huge pressure to keep the scores up because the price of failure is only weak applicants and those whose parents don’t care take their places, and they are much more hard work to teach, and for their pains in doing so they get called “bad teachers”.

It is ALREADY the case now that newspapers are free to publish their own league tables based on whatever criteria they like, so if there is pressure to choose others which “reflect the choices of the consumers rather than the government”, then what is to stop them? Indeed the Guardian newspaper tries this, but doesn’t get much respect for it. The consumers seem to like the league tables based on crude performance measures.

Therefore my main point - I am sceptical about the argument that introducing vouchers will engineer a big difference in behaviour. The argument that it will seems to me to be voodoo - relabel the system and suddenly hey-presto, people will make their choices differently than they do now. And as for the idea that it will introduce competition where there is now no competition - what world do you live in? - not the one where a headteacher recently committed suicide in the face of an Ofsted inspection.

Yes, I’m all for freeing up schools from state restrictions on how and what they teach. There is a bit of a contradiction between your claim that schools are in big trouble and will fail if they don’t meet the OFSTED criteria, and that schools never get onto trouble and always keep open, however.

I’d certainly like to see a range of choices and teachers trusted to teach as they see best. The argument I was having with Charlotte Gore is that if we allow this, we have to allow that some of the new schools established may not be to our liking. Remember, the groups that seem most keen on opening up new schools are the fundamentalist religious ones.

A big part of the problem is that what makes a school “good” or “bad” isn’t the teachers, but the pupils. What most clued-up parents want out of school is to get their children into the school with the children of the other clued-up children, and not into the school where many of the kids come from “problem families”. The latter sort of school tends to fail no matter how good the teachers, and there’s a downward spiral whereby that drives out any good pupils or teachers. Are there free market groups willing to take on the job of educating problem kids? Well, actually yes there are - but at a BIG cost. When I was a councillor one of the big and growing items in the education budget was sending the most difficult problem kids to private schools who specialised in them - very expensive private schools.