School Class War Declared
nick cowen, 16 January 2008
There isn’t that much one can add to this Telegraph report other than to say that it was almost inevitable: independent schools are going to come under increasing regulation in order to ‘justify’ their charitable status. Obviously, merely providing a good standard of education to 500,000 British children just doesn’t cut it anymore as a public benefit. Independent schools have continually shown up state education, if only by drilling their pupils for national exams much more effectively. Now many have started to transcend those standards altogether by taking IGCSEs instead, having found the depth provided by normal GCSE courses an insufficient challenge for their pupils’ abilities. This could not be allowed to go on.
It is not clear yet how these interventions will disrupt independent school practice at the moment. But there is economic illiteracy at the heart of it: demanding that these schools lower their fees while simultaneously sharing their resources, and offering more free places to pupils from poor backgrounds. In other words, prices will be capped at some level, even as the costs (and responsibilities) for independent schools rise. This could force some schools to close but, more likely, it will just lead to greater stagnation. A stranglehold on investment in the independent sector will mean there will be no incentive to offer a better standard of education than competitors (because it cannot be priced any higher), or to expand for fear of attracting too much attention from the Charity Commission.
If the government were really interested in expanding the public benefit of private schools, it would legislate for the exact opposite of what the Charity Commission is now doing: open up independent education rather than strangle it. There is a tremendous amount of red tape that surrounds setting up new schools (state and independent). Planning law is a case in point. Schools are only permitted on one specific land designation (D1), when there is very little reason why schools would be unsuitable on land already designated for commercial, industrial, and (for primary schools especially) residential purposes. By taking away these costs of opening up a new school, more competition would be allowed into the independent sector, offering more choices to parents and driving the costs of established schools down naturally (or at least forcing them to up their game even more).
At the same time, if the government were serious about getting more ordinary working families to benefit from the independent sector, it could introduce a tax credit system, allowing parents to pay for independent education while deducting the fees (in whole, or in part) from their tax bill. But this isn’t really about the public benefit. This is war.
With regard to comments about educational apartheid, I believe that a more accurate comparison might well be with Zimbabwe, where a major national asset was systematically destroyed, supposedly in the name of “fairness” and “equality”. Commentators have pointed to the way in which China and India are doing everything they can to boost the number of graduates they produce, sometimes making better use of our educational system than we can. It is of little use the government trying to stop the private sector from competing with the state system, unless the ministers can also stop those countries from competing with us, which does not seem likely – an educational system based on the lowest common denominator against systems based on the idea that the best is scarcely good enough.
Any predictions as to the result? Someone once said that stupidity is the only crime which always carries the death penalty – if not for the individual, then perhaps for the society which fails to accord intelligence its proper value.
Quite. This government is not interested in education. It’s goal is “equality” which means a shameless, brutal levelling down. For them, the fact that the middle classes tend to be more academic is proof that brains are some sort of “bourgeois” racket. Therefore, anything which recognises and caters for the development of brain power is “entrenching class privilege”. The simple facts of heredity are brushed aside in favour of the paranoid, marxist conspiracy theory. In this malign spirit, they will pursue their perverted policy even if it means vandalising the minds of twenty generations.
The fact is we should have put up much more of a fight over the grammar schools. That fight should not have stopped, even though the enemy appeared to possess the field. Their defensive positions on that issue are full of holes. Graham Brady is simply the latest in a long line of courageous and high principled “francs tireurs” to have exposed them. Well, now the vandals are advancing again and civil society will have to pull out all the stops in order to resist. There is a party political aspect to all of this. Brown and his henchman, Balls, clearly calculate that by tempting the Tory party into a defense of the public schools they will be able to demonstrate to a gullible public that it is merely the champion of “the few”. Perhaps, then, it would be wise for the conservatives to remain officially above the fray. After all, by not taking a leading role in the campaign to stay out of the Euro, they allowed a general hostility to build up against it. That regretably being so, it behoves all those who believe in liberty and excellence to join forces and campaign on behalf of private education. This will mean more than writing. It needs to be a mass movement and an unrelenting pressure group. The shoddy, politicised, drug ridden mess that socialists have made of our education system should be endlessly exposed.
Certainly, we must act or something infinitely precious will be spitefully destroyed.
As a post-script, I am not sure that the Conservative party need be so timid. They must see that the tide of opinion is running strongly to the right. Over tax and benefits and immigration they now find that boldness pays off. Why can Mr Cameron not mount a full blown campaign on all sorts of fronts in favour of an education provided by independent experts and tailored to whatever kind and level of talent has been bestowed by nature? It must be better than the tatty boiler suit foisted upon us by the socialist state.