Punish ambition and reward failure ? There is an alternative

Civitas, 4 January 2011

Years since he first proposed the idea, Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Sociey, still has the same solution to Britain’s educational woes: big government should pick up its clunking fists and pummel the most successful independent school system in the world, preferably with a VAT on fees. This, somehow, will atone for all the sins of educational failure in the state sector. It was a bad idea then; it is a bad idea now.

Sunder and others have tended to conceive of educational attainment as almost a zero- sum game. Essentially, children are thrust into this world and must grab what they can from a semi-fixed amount of educational opportunity. Private schools hog all the best pupils and education, effectively stealing opportunity and attainment from the rest. An aspect of this is the idea that future attainment and earnings are determined almost hierarchically according to which university you are allowed to attend. Thought about this way, it makes perfect sense to imagine that you can actually improve attainment of the disadvantaged by making it harder for middle class families to educate their children.

If, on the other hand, you consider a well-educated child to be adding to the stock of knowledge and skills, rather than taking it away from the collective, then the idea makes less sense. If you put a tax on school fees, you simply raise the cost of independent schooling, pricing out those at the margin (those that are struggling to afford the fees at their current level). This would turn independent schools into even more of a preserve for the rich. But as I’ve pointed out before, this is unlikely to achieve the Fabian’s apparent objective of levelling down middle class access to educational opportunity. They will simply shift gears: parents will buy their children more books, help them more with their homework and hire more tutors. At the extremity, more families will choose to home school. This is because helping children to achieve their educational potential is perhaps the defining feature of middle class values.

A more progressive reform, in the sense of improving outcomes for the disadvantaged rather than simply holding back the aspirational, would be to do the exact opposite of what Sunder suggests: subsidise private schools to accept pupils from low income (or any) backgrounds in the form of tax credits or education vouchers. Allow, as is the idea behind the Government’s pupil premium policy, the money to follow the pupil wherever they choose to be educated. Then ensure that new schools, whether state or independent, are allowed to enter and attract pupils on an equal footing with already existing providers. The result would be to break the monopoly that state schools currently have in free education, and the oligopoly that elite independent schools maintain in the fee paying sector.

The evidence that this sort of liberalising reform, rather than penalising measures, can have particular benefits for low income pupils is growing more and more robust.