Over at Charlotte Gore’s blog Matthew Huntbach launches yet another attack on markets in education.
This time he fails to understand the difference between the pressure to achieve centrally set targets and to provide services (or products) people desire.
He says:
The reality is that school teachers actually feel under intense competitive pressures to do whatever it is to drive their schools up the league tables, and this is having a negative rather than a positive effect on education.
I agree that teachers are under pressure to push the school further up the league table. However, this is pressure to conform to outside imposed targets. In a market, the pressure is to create what people actually want, not what some government department thinks people should want.
The current situation is like trying to meet this month’s quota for tractor production. Its an arbitrary target which has little to do with what is actually desired or needed.
In a market the pressure is to produce something which enough people want to make it worthwhile. So whilst some people want tractors, they will want different things from their tractors. Different companies can specialise in different types of tractor, or they could divert their energy and capital to the production of a different type of farm machinery for which there is a demand.
Thus, competition is driven not by government targets and trying to do best at them, but by the demands of the customer, and the customers are not a homogeneous group with the same desires and expected outcome.
Schools would then be able to specialise. Some people may prefer a school which gets very high grades at GCSE above any other considerations. Others may prefer a school which has a broader focus, or which specialises in a particular subject area. There are any number of considerations.
If I look at my experience. I was lucky enough to go to a private school (thanks to sacrifices by my parents and later the generosity of charity, the school and my own savings). The reason my parents were willing to pay so much? Because the local schools would not have given me an education which was suitable for me (and they were both teachers in the borough so they knew this very well).
When looking at schools, the one we chose was not chosen over exam results, it was chosen because of the whole atmosphere and ethos.
I assume other pupils and parents preferred the other school for their own reasons.
Of course, the school did not suit everyone, there were several people who did not respond well to the academic atmosphere (despite being very intelligent). They would have benefited from an even greater choice of schools.
