schooling

I hope that anyone who calls themselves a liberal of any flavour would regard conscription as anathema. It is, after all, a form of slavery; greater even than the slavery we all participate in to a state whose policies we do not agree with but are obliged to conform. So, whilst I realize that it's a sentiment that does exist within the party, I am a bit disturbed that some amongst us agree with conscription when it comes to education.

See, I don't reckon that Tim Lott makes a case at all. Yes, he makes a series of assertions about how much better state education would magically become if everyone were compelled to go to state schools and private schools outlawed. But it seems to me that it is no more than blind faith. If those parents who current choose private education were to be forced, yes, forced, to send their kids to state schools, he argues, they would magically find their voice, not a voice of idealism and patronizing concerns for "other peoples' kids" but the self-interest of getting the best for their own.

The trouble is, it never seems to work that way. When it comes to government run services, with their one-size-fits-all approach, even if you do wish to change it, it takes a herculean effort, a lot of time and a great deal of persuasion - you are trying to turn around an enormous ship with an Oxbridge punting pole for a rudder - and you still have to settle for what potentially a bare majority decide. If you don't like how things are done at one private school, well you vote with your wallet and go to a different one whose ethos you prefer.

And if achieving change was such a lot of effort, would not someone prepared to pay north of twenty grand a year today not simply buy extra tuition - or are these statist idealists proposing to outlaw that as well - or perhaps rule that if state registered teachers want to offer extra tuition they have to do so for free so anyone can avail themselves of it?

And what of the specialist private schools that offer such specialized excellence that they are simply not replicable across the country - okay so perhaps we could nationalize the Royal Ballet School, but what about Chetham's, or, whilst there are other issues raised by post-compulsory education (assuming 16 remains the school leaving age) what about professional football club academies, and similar such centres of excellence? Are all places to be allocated by lot so there is an equal chance of every state school having its fair share of mouthy middle-class parents demanding change, regardless of how far the child has to travel or where his or her circle of friends are based?

Amongst the very wealthy (who, let's face it, are the only ones who can afford top boarding schools these days with fees approaching £30,000 a year) perhaps there would be a renewed interest in governesses - and at what stage does a group of families getting together to hire a couple of private teachers to "home-school" their kids become itself an illegal school? Or would home-schooling be outlawed as well? Even for our next potential Wimbledon winner whose parents want to support that talent whatever the cost?

No, the exact opposite is what is needed - free competition in the provision of schooling for everyone. It's bad enough that what passes for an education should be compulsory. We ought to see plenty of innovation and choice of styles, specialisms and prices. Frankly I think it is a good sign that, with just seven per cent of the market, you can get private schooling for round about the price that government funds state secondary schooling. Expanding that to one hundred per cent of the market can only bring those costs down so far as I can see.

And yes, Darrell, that includes the possibility that "profit making business" would be involved - and why not? Every business, even a social enterprise, has to aim to be profitable or else it aims to fail - the only difference between a social enterprise and a "profit making business" is whether one distributes the profits to individuals like shareholders or to social goods. After all, if you built a new school, would you expect the builders to do it for no profit; if you borrowed to do so would you expect the lenders to make no profit on the loan, if you have outside caterers do they operate for the love of it, what about the text-book publishers, the uniform suppliers, its IT infrastructure contractor or bandwidth provider? What if the school is a profit distributing teachers' co-operative? Is that any better, morally or ethically, than a Nord Anglia group paying their investors, the investors that made it all happen?

What is sure is that in a genuine free market, unencumbered by the sort of regulation and barrier to entry that government currently sets out for people who want to set up an educational provider, these profits would not be so great as they are when they are protected from other, innovative competition. Such protection, incidentally, would certainly include flogging off current assets to a private provider at some discount that, say, a local start-up provider were not offered - if there is going to be competition, it cannot start with some schools being transferred "on the cheap" to some big corporation simply because it has some kind of "preferred bidder" status.

Then we can start working out how much additional financial support people might need in the current inequitable economic system to be able to afford the appropriate sort of education for their children.

So, we've got another cunning plan from the Balls-up that is our government led education system. This being the government that, twelve years ago, came to power on the mantra "Education, education, education". The sad fact is that for all their central interference 40% of kids born at the beginning of this era of "Education, education, education" cannot read satisfactorily, despite the literacy hour, the special measures and all the money (for I don't begrudge them the fact that they have spent money, just that they seem incapable of spending it wisely) spent on academies and such like.

It seems that change in state provided services can not be incremental change, but complete u-turns. Yet turning around a system of this size and bureaucracy is like turning the proverbial super-tanker around - a long slow process which is, unless you know precisely your destination is behind you a waste of time and money that could have been used to deliver actual teaching to actual children. And all too often we see that once one public sector super-tanker has managed to turn round, another politician has another cunning plan and the process begins again. Well, you can see where that will get you in the long run - nowhere.

This, I am afraid, is the fate of all centrally planned public services. The government has to be seen to be being fair to everyone because it is the main provider. In fact of course it is usually fairer to those constituencies that elect members of the governing party as their representative, or ones they wish to win over next time. So it has to roll out massive change, perhaps even ignoring those who have managed to make good headway despite the dog's dinner of central policy because everyone's got to do things the same way otherwise it's a "lottery" provision or whatever.

There can be no meaningfully functioning market in ideas, pedagogic technique, innovative governance or anything else, because all must be seen to be delivering the same sort of product everywhere. Well this is nonsense. To those who claim that "only the state can deliver essential services like education" I ask looking at yesterday's announcement, and the many other tumultuous changes of direction over the past sixty years, how do you believe such a system can possibly ever be efficient and good at producing its end product - an educated citizenry?

Or, as Prime Minister Hacker said once to Sir Humphrey "do you mean to say that the state of schooling in Britain today is what the education department planned?"

We need change now, "change we can believe in", and the only change I can believe in is to remove schooling from state hands completely and encourage competition, both the quicker to spread the best teaching and learning practices and the better to create efficiencies in the system as a whole that will allow for more specialization and meaningful differences between schools and other training providers so that people can choose for their children the style, environment and outcomes that they, not the government, feel is appropriate.

The past couple of days have seen parents and children around England at least waiting to hear whether they have got into their chosen schools in the annual ritual of place allocations by LEAs. Many will have been disappointed. There are the usual accusations that others get in by paying their way through buying property in the right catchment area. Others, in places such as Brighton, may have thought that was a way to get into their chosen school only to find places allocated by lottery.

This weekend also sees the Lib Dem spring conference in Harrogate discussing its education proposals. So I've been meaning to write about selection in education because I firmly believe that neither the current system nor the Lib Dem proposals go nearly far enough in that regard and I think that it is key to ensuring we have a good education system into the future.

While the state is the effective monopoly supplier as well as the ultimate judge of success or failure by one of its subsidiaries, the schools, and while it effectively measures that success or failure by results of examinations that are set nationwide based on a nationwide curriculum, one has to wonder what the big fuss is. It is interesting perhaps to note also this week that it has been announced that one of the best schools in the country by results is dropping the national GCSE examination.

When the comprehensive system started, its aim was to produce a uniformly good standard of education in every locality; pupils would attend their local school knowing it was as good as any other; LEAs would have reasonably good "market" intelligence on numbers of prospective pupils in a catchment area well ahead of time so that capacity could be planned in advance. That so many will be disappointed this week is ample proof that this aim has not been realized.

And whilst "selection" in the sense of the system or the school deciding who can go where on the basis of ability is largely still anathema to most proponents of state education, the answer to the failure of uniform excellence has been a creeping introduction of selection by parents, by a false "market" in superficially specialist schools neither of which do any more than create an illusion of choice. And sure, if you were simply herded to either a grammar or a comp/sec modern on the basis of an exam result disappointment and resentment may follow.

But by selection I mean a system in which yes, schools may select on a whole host of criteria depending on their individual specialization or unique selling point, but also in which parents and pupils have a wider selection and are enabled to apply to the most appropriate school for their child, with assistance and advice from professionals perhaps. Expectations are managed better. Everyone knows not every child is a genius. Everyone knows not every child is going to be Oxbridge material and may better find their talents in some more hands-on facility like the German Hauptschule.

Every child is different, and the idea that each one's talents can be fully explored and developed in a conglomerate school of 1500 pupils or more focussing on the same curriculum and being judged by the same league tables and examination measures just seems wrong. If opting out of the single public examination system is good enough for the top performing schools, why not for ones that address very different needs?

The Lib Dem paper to be discussed today starts from reasonable principles; that everyone should have a fair start in life and that that means a quality education; that control should not be exercised so centrally from Westminster (I was quite shocked to see on a program about Margaret Thatcher the other day that her favourite Keith Joseph insisted on vetting every course in the National Curriculum personally so the Tories have proven just as bad in the past for centralization for all their talk about more diverse schools); that there should be more freedom in establishing schools.

But from there I'm afraid it is all down hill for me. Why aspire to give per pupil funding in the poorest areas to match the average private school fees? Why not encourage those private schools to compete for the same pool of pupils with vouchers or other incentives to establish branches in less well off areas? The policy paper assumes that the "state" at some level or other, rather than the "customer", is still the only body that can make education work for all. In Oxford, between the state and the private sector secondary level, we have about 9000 places. I realize the private sector takes pupils from outside the city of course but if we were looking, say, at schools averaging 300-ish pupils we could have over thirty to choose from, each with their unique selling points, each competing for a niche in the market to be successful in.

Moreover, whilst education is an important factor in social and economic mobility and therefore in the social liberal aims of opportunity for all, far more important still, even today, are the embedded inequities of land monopoly and corporate welfare. We need to cut education free from the state, but do it on the basis that we have also wiped away those state protected monopolies of land and money that keep people "in their place" more surely than any deficiency of education. For that would also encourage more mixed neighbourhoods - as middle class tax savvy households are more prepared to bring their relative wealth into less well off areas to take advantage of lower taxes - leaving them more money to spend on things like education and further encouraging those with a good reputation for running schools that add value to open up branches in an area that would then be available also to the less well off local households.

We want to ban selection completely so far as I can see. In the future, with our national economy's reliance on financial services likely to be severely reduced in the foreseeable future and our manufacturing still in decline, we need to push our most high achieving children so they invent the things that will give us a production base for the national wealth into the future. If we are to nurture diversity in our children we need to be able to select both ways - just as we do with higher education.

I shall find it very difficult to continue to support a party with such a one-size-fits all education policy. A policy which is apparently not prepared to question whether or not the state is the best provider but just assume there is something unique about the education "market" that means private provision could not be better and more efficient. If only 7% of schools are currently private, and can still produce education with an average cost not far above what the state currently budgets, how much more competitive would they be with the other 93% of the market opened up to them? Such assumptions about the state's ability versus the private sector's ability to deliver are, quite frankly, contrary to our own constitution.

Absolute bollocks! School bureaucracy (and local state protected monopoly) goes bonkers in cold weather...

Cold war over coat policy 6:30am Saturday 7th February 2009 Comments (13) Have your say » By Hayley Cover » Children had a freezing walk home after a school confiscated their coats because they were not official uniform. Last night, John and Shirley Cooper said they were outraged King Alfred’s Sports and Community College, in Wantage, had not let their son Sean, 14, have the coat back to go home. The school confiscated the coats of four other children on Tuesday. Sean had to walk half a mile to his home in Dean Butler Close without his plain black hooded windcheater. [From Cold war over coat policy (From The Oxford Times)]

No, not those "E's" that make you a little bit more chirpy and empathic when you're out at a club, but E grades at GCSE level...

Interesting that getting a grade E may double the relatively tiny risk, while smoking skunk may increase it by less than half that. I suppose it is distinctly possible that all the Grade E students are perpetually on spliffs.

Personally I think both this research and the cannabis research are more on the "urban myth" front than good science but I'll bet we don't get some lurid headlines in the Express or Mail these next few weeks about all those just about to receive their GCSE grades and how half of them are doubling their risk of evil psychosis. I note also the last paragraph of the BBC article:

[Hilary Caprani of mental health charity Rethink] added: "The good news is that many people who have psychosis recover and go on to have challenging careers."

We don't hear that much in the scaremongering about dope, do we?

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:

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.

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.

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.