Selective education

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.