David Cameron and power to the people?

pete quentin, 3 June 2007

In the Sunday Times today David Cameron responds to critics of his grammar schools’ policy by presenting everyone who disagrees with him as a backwoodsman entertaining policy delusions. But the strongest critics of Mr Cameron’s education policy are not diehard defenders of grammar schools. They fully accept the need for policies to be modernised and presented in the most persuasive language, but argue that Mr Cameron is not going about modernisation in the most effective way.

Image builders are blocking policy debate
Mr Cameron claims to be in favour of modernity and long-term thinking, implying that his opponents are stuck in the past and in thrall to short-term thinking. But the real division among Tories is between ‘problem solvers and ‘image builders’ and the image builders are so much in the ascendancy that they are blocking the open-minded search for public policy solutions to the country’s problems.
A genuine problem-solver would not waste time comparing the new Tories with a caricature of past policies, but instead look around the world for examples of successful alternatives. The speech by David Willetts that gave rise to ‘grammargate’ perfectly illustrates how image building got in the way of following the logic of the compelling evidence set out by Mr Willetts himself.
He started with the problem we’ve got. State schools are failing and the failure is most acute for children from the poorest backgrounds. Have other countries found ways of overcoming this problem? Yes they have and Mr Willetts listed the examples, including Sweden, where there is an effective voucher scheme; Holland, where parents have a constitutional right to establish private schools that are entitled to state funding; and America, where semi-autonomous public sector schools (charter schools) have opened up opportunities for many black Americans and where the voucher scheme in Wisconsin has empowered poor parents to break free from low-quality government schools.
So far so good. But then problem solving gave way to image building. The voucher scheme in Sweden gives parents the right to send their child to an independent school and for their chosen school to receive the same funding as local state schools. It’s the same in Holland except that the system is not called a voucher scheme. Independent schools have a right to the same state funding as state schools. So too in Wisconsin, where parents who earn 150% or less than the US poverty line are entitled to receive the cost of sending their child to a private school instead of a government school.
Private schools for everyone
They are all systems based on increasing access to independent schools, not only to state schools. In each case the role of government is to make sure that parents on low incomes have the cash to choose good independent schools for their offspring. The result in Sweden, for example, has been a rapid increase in private schools from about one per cent of schools to around 11%. The lesson is that the government should confine itself to ensuring that no child is barred from private education by parental poverty, but otherwise refrain from running schools. The best schools are private schools that have to flourish in the face of rivals. The resounding message is that competition works for everyone, whether rich or poor, but Mr Cameron and Mr Willetts stopped short of advocating it because it might be interpreted as a defence of privilege.
Their underlying assumption is that the income of a child’s parents is unmerited and has not been acquired by any effort on their part, as if they occupied a place in a social hierarchy regardless of personal accomplishment. It is this accusation that has upset many parents. Some people are lucky and inherit wealth, but most people classified today as middle class have earned their income by working hard. If they choose to spend it on giving their children the best education they can find, what’s wrong with that?
Instead of demanding the third-best solution of increasing the number of academy schools, Mr Cameron should have come out fighting and called for private schools for everyone. He should have slapped down egalitarian complaints that private schools are only good because privileged parents send their kids there. They tend to be good schools because they are not monopolies. If they fail their pupils, then parents will go elsewhere. They face constant and unrelenting pressure to improve, unlike local authority schools, which can go on failing or merely coasting for years.
Private schools for everyone would also be a more believable slogan for the new Tories. It would build on longstanding Tory support for school independence, instead of asking us to accept that Conservatives are now at home with the language of hardline egalitarians who resent grammar schools as bastions of privilege. And it would be consistent with the new Tory concern to ensure that no child is left behind.
Mr Cameron is not much of a moderniser
Mr Cameron is not under criticism for being a moderniser as such, but for going about it the wrong way. He is allowing shallow image building and short-sighted political positioning to get in the way of solving the problems we face. There is more open-minded thinking going on in the Labour party. There are already voices calling for school reform based on a combination of equity and choice. Choice is achieved by giving all parents a right to take their state funding to any school, public or private, and equity is secured by giving low-income parents an additional payment to make up for their initial disadvantage. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Gordon Brown came to accept that this was the way for a modern party to go?
Commentary by David Green, Director of Civitas