Paying for education

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.