[David Cameron's] plan to create a new wave of comprehensives, existing outside local authority control, was attacked.Schools minister Jim Knight called it an "unregulated free-for-all." (BBC)Yes! That's the whole point! It is a free-for-all. Celebrate it! Set parents and schools free to educate their children properly!The Schools Minister, typically for a politician in general and a Labour one in particular, is a control freak. He needs to have everything under his thumb, run from Whitehall [1]. David Cameron is proposing that this monopoly of provision be broken up and fresh blood be brought in to run Britain's schools, all the while maintaining funding from the state. In fact, he is also proposing a pupil premium for children from disadvantaged backgrounds [2], to help and encourage schools with those children and to fund the kind of special help that they often need.Now, I strongly prefer the Liberal Democrat approach, where national policy is to devolve education down to local councils, and then the desire is that local policy should be to devolve power down to headteachers and parents, and to allow outside institutions to found new, independently-run and state-funded schools [3]. However, the Tories are simply more likely to get elected, and so we take our breaks where we can get them. Education is one area where the Conservatives are more nearly right than Labour, and Jim Knight ably demonstrates why the Government just does not get it. Freedom is scary for government ministers, who think that they can solve the world's problems, but it is exciting for the rest of us. Bring it on.[1] Yes, Minister fans will note that those two objects are mutually exclusive.
[2] Originally a Liberal Democrat policy, folks. This is why, even if they never get into government, they are a good force to have around: they can produce innovative policy proposals which eventually get picked up by one of the main parties.
[3] On which, watch this speech by David Laws at last year's LibDem party conference.
1 comment:
It's a start, but unfortunately the Conservatives are likely to muck it up.
For example, they've been talking about third-sector involvement in who can run schools, but without allowing profit-making. It's stupid - without the profit incentive to be paid per student, schools just won't take up the scheme very fast.
They're right to reduce regulation, but the major reform that needs to happen is for schools to be able to opt in or out of a system, be they state or private school, where they can be paid a certain amount per pupil by government, with all of their freedoms to run the school as they wish, on the single condition that the schools are free to parents and pupils.
THAT is the famous "Swedish model", and the Cons appear to have misunderstood it by not allowing the profit incentive that is crucial to how and why it works as a reform!
The pupil premium (which the LibDems have now also proposed) is unnecessary due to the fact that most new pupils for a school taking part in this scheme to recruit will be in poorer, more deprived areas where there is real need of more and better schools. Schools will appear or expand to areas where pupils need them. This does however rely on the further reform that Councils will not have the power to set quotas on the number of schools in the area.
It's SLP policy of course - I fear however that the Tories will get it all wrong and the idea will be discredited somehow, even if they are moving in the right direction.
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