On school choice, the rest of the world is moving in the right direction, while Labour proposes the opposite. But the Government even funds private schools for poor children in Africa. So why not here?
In his blog, Dan Mitchell writes approvingly of school choice developments in U.S. states. It’s based on this report, the American Legal Exchange Council’s (ALEC) ‘Index of State Education Freedom’, which starts:
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a complete reimagining of how and where students are taught around the country. More importantly, the pandemic sparked a national realisation that our current ‘one-size-fits-all’ system of public education simply does not work for too many students. While there are plenty of students who perform at their highest level in their local public schools, there are also many who would perform better in an alternate educational environment. Parents are best positioned to know where and how their children learn best, so we must empower them with as many educational choices as possible
Amen. Teaching (unlike, say, brain surgery and cancer care) isn’t rocket science. We’ve all been to school and can remember what makes for a good teacher, a good classroom, a good school. At work, we’ve learned, developed, watched others coach and lead, and coached and led others. This is not to say we could all step into a primary school class tomorrow and start teaching them to read, or to multiply. But we could pretty quickly identify whether the teacher is any good and whether the children are engaged.
Where choice exists, parents have the incentive to learn how to identify good schools. School choice empowers parents to drive up standards – not only in their ‘preferred’ schools, but across the board.
So why shouldn’t we have choice?
Who has school choice?
So here’s the (growing) list of U.S. states – 18 in all – with a direct school choice programme in the form of “education scholarship account programmes”, where dollars follow students’ parents’ choices: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina and Utah – with Texas reportedly on the way!
For an international perspective, there’s also school choice in Canada, Chile, the Netherlands and Sweden.
As I wrote here, Denmark, France and Germany have a variety of private sector provisions that support school choice within state-funded provision – like a mix of grammar schools and academies.
We love school choice in poor countries
Another excellent read is The Beautiful Tree, where James Tooley explores private education in the slums of Nigeria, China, Ghana, Kenya and India – finding that fee-charging, profit-seeking, low-cost private schools are often strongly preferred by poor people, and deliver better outcomes, compared to free state- or NGO-funded alternatives. Based on Tooley’s evidence, the U.K. Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) started to spend British taxpayers’ money on private providers, using vouchers, so that parents in poorer countries could have school choice. How sensible.
That’s right: British taxpayers’ money spent on school choice in the – boo hiss – profit-seeking private sector abroad, but not at home.
Labour’s VAT plan means less choice
My aim in my blog is to call for good schools, as many good schools as possible. Taxing independent education harms good schools. It stands to reduce choice in three ways:
- Fewer parents will be able to afford private education; they will be forced into state provision which certainly won’t offer much, if any choice. At best, there won’t be places in over-subscribed ‘good’ state schools. At worst places may not be locally available at all, or manageable without significant change to parents’ domestic and professional circumstances.
- If and when some private schools close, even parents willing and able to absorb the VAT cost will lose the choice to do so as the school will no longer exist; some of those parents will also be forced into state provision.
- Parents currently unable or unwilling to pay fees will face greater future competition for their ‘preferred’ places at
freetaxpayer-funded grammar schools, religious schools, academies, free schools and top catchment areas; a greater proportion will in turn be disappointed. Those places will become even more financially exclusive (via pricey catchment areas) than they already are.
Which countries’ example to follow?
So we could follow the example of 18 U.S. states and Canada, Chile, the Netherlands and Sweden, and even Denmark, France and Germany. We could offer more British children what we’ve paid for some African children to enjoy.
Or we could follow Labour in wanting to tax education and reduce school choice.
Mr. Chips is a pseudonym for an employee of a private school. This article first appeared on his Substack page.
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By what bloody right have the government got to give OUR money to fund African schools?
People are getting poorer and colder by the month in this country but we are chucking money in to Africa.
Pack it in!
Spot on. I’m from the “most taxation is legalised theft” camp.
However, most people don’t seem to complain about giving a substantial part of their wages to the state – 20% & 40% tax, 23.8% National Insurance (combined employee and employer rates), community charge, 20% VAT, fuel duty, tobacco and alscohol (sic) taxes etc etc. Someone on a decent wage who enjoys life could be handing around half their earnings to the state to spend on their behalf.
Yet some will vote Labour and presumably look forward to paying even more. I cannot understand the mentality of people who think that Kier Starmer can spend their wages better than they can themselves. If they want more money to be given to the third world or on windmills – let them fund it themselves. Funnily enough, it is possible to voluntarily pay extra tax – and I recall reading 20 odd years ago (on the Devil’s Kitchen blog) that there were fewer than 10 people a year who did so.
“Funnily enough, it is possible to voluntarily pay extra tax…”
Indeed. It is called giving money to charidees.
I used to believe that paying taxes was all part of living in a modern society, now I consider this sheer ignorance. Billions are wasted each year by detestable, money- grubbing politicians who think it absolutely ok to rob from their constituents while they fill their pockets like volunteers at an all you can eat buffet.
I detest taxes and taxation. It is all utterly dishonest.
The government are spending ‘OUR money to fund African schools’ probably as part of some deal in exchange for those countries buying weapons from British arms manufacturers or some similar self-interested commercial reason.
And also giving overseas money not for commercial self-interested reasons but to adopt climate change policies.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-the-uk-has-spent-its-foreign-aid-on-climate-change-since-2011/
Hi, author here. Thanks for your post. I don’t necessarily disagree, but the greater concern I have is we are ideologically opposed to full school choice, profit, and vouchers over here; everyone swears it would be terrible somehow (poor people can’t recognise a good school, they say).
We don’t even discuss it. it’s been put in the box of things-beyond-Thatcher that the Conservative Party won’t touch with a bargepole.
But it’s a mechanism that’s OK for us to support outside our borders.
“the Beautiful Tree” is a terrific read if you’re interested in this question specifiically.
Many thanks for taking the time to reply.
To have a grammar school you have to have 2 or 3 secondary moderns. When I hear parents demanding, “more secondary moderns”, I’ll be more supportive of Grammars.
I regard it similar to demands for equality of the sexes in boardrooms. When I hear demands for equality in bricklaying, road construction or sewage working, I’ll look on equality elsewhere more favourably.
Author here. I’m just advocating for choice. People want more choices and are told they have to stick with the comp for reasons….that when you peel them back are associated with the producer interest, not the parents interest.
You don’t “have” to have secondary moderns at all. It’s the state that says so. We could instead have a range of state-funded and private-supplied establishments; we could encourage micro-schools, family cooperatives, flex-schooling, the sky’s the limit. But the state says no, and the state has (our) money.
“But the state says no, and the state has (our) money.”
And this is where everything goes wrong.
https://youtu.be/1opgupZiVKI?si=Z8jh_91zj7sOSO9w
More on the German farmers protests.
Thanks for this link. It is encouraging that the Germans and the Irish are beginning to wake up to the green scam.
The Left don’t want to create upward social mobility, the Left want to drag everyone down.
This is evident in all left wing ideology.
Schooling isn’t about improving the prospects of a few, all need to be on the same level, and the way to achieve this is to force everyone to keep pace with the slowest.