The Schoolroom and the Guillotine

Suppose a single grocer owned ninety-three out of every hundred shops in the country. Suppose he allocated his customers by postcode, forbade them to shop elsewhere without paying twice, fixed his prices at zero by the simple device of confiscating the wherewithal from the customers’ wages before they ever saw it, and then announced — with the air of a benefactor — that he had abolished hunger. Suppose further that the seven remaining grocers, having no means to compete with “free”, were obliged either to sell hampers to the very rich or to scrape by in the cracks where the monopolist’s bread was found to be mouldy.

A reasonable observer, asked to inspect this arrangement, would not detain himself long over the seven. He would ask what had become of the ninety-three.

This is, of course, the architecture of British schooling. It is so familiar that the country has forgotten to find it strange. The current fashion is to demand inquiries into the seven — their fees, their charitable status, their effect upon the maintained sector — while treating the ninety-three as a fixture of the natural order, like the weather. One reads the columns of Mr Aaronovitch and the speeches of Ms Moran and learns that the fault for England’s worst schools lies with the children who attend other ones. It would be difficult to construct, on purpose, a more perfect inversion of cause and effect.

1The fraud of “free”

The state has not given anyone an education. It has taken the means of an education from the household, processed it through a department, and returned a fraction of it in a form chosen by the department. To call the residue “free” is to misuse the language so thoroughly that one suspects design. The household paid for the school in the same week it paid for the bread; the only difference is that the bread was delivered by someone who had to please the customer, and the school was delivered by someone who had to please the inspector.

A market without prices is not a market without rationing. It is a market in which the rationing has been moved underground, where it cannot be observed and therefore cannot be corrected. In England the rationing is performed by the housing market: a desirable school is a postcode, and a postcode is a quarter of a million pounds. The household that cannot reach the postcode is informed that education is a right, and then sent to a school that exists chiefly to demonstrate the consequences of monopoly. According to Zoopla, more than a quarter of parents admit to lying about their address to gain admission.^[1] A system that requires its citizens to perjure themselves in order to secure the good it claims to give them universally is not a public service. It is a confidence trick with a curriculum.

2The humanitarian with the catchment area

There is a particular type of critic who appears whenever this subject is raised. He calls himself a progressive. He proposes that the children of the independent sector be redistributed across the maintained sector so as to “leaven” it — as though character were a yeast and the poor a sort of dough requiring the addition of the better-off in order to rise.^[2] He does not propose to redistribute his own children, naturally; he has secured a house near a good school for that purpose, and considers the question of his own arrangements to be private.

I once observed that the humanitarian wishes to be the benefactor of the human race, and that the position of benefactor requires beneficiaries, who must be kept in a state requiring benefaction.^[3] The humanitarian with the catchment area is a member of this family. He requires the existence of a failing state sector in order to deplore it, and he requires the existence of an independent sector in order to blame it. Were either to disappear, his vocation would disappear with it. He is therefore the last person on earth with an interest in solving the problem.

It is worth noticing what he never proposes. He never proposes that families be permitted to take the money the state collects on their behalf and spend it on the school of their choice. He never proposes that new schools be permitted to enter the market freely, or that good schools be permitted to expand and replicate themselves. He never proposes that the parents of the worst-served children be given any power whatever over the schools their children attend. His remedies always involve a transfer of children, never a transfer of authority. He believes in choice for himself and allocation for everyone else, and he calls this equality.

He believes in choice for himself and allocation for everyone else, and he calls this equality.

3The parent as producer

There is a deeper error beneath all this. A child is not educated solely, or even chiefly, at school. He is educated at home, in the hours before the school day begins and after it ends, by the conversation he hears at table, the books that are within his reach, the discipline he is held to, and the expectations of the adults who love him. The school takes a child already partly formed and adds to him. Where the home has done nothing, the school can do very little; this is the iron fact that no quantity of expenditure has ever altered, in any country, at any period.^[4]

The state-monopoly model treats this fact as an embarrassment. It cannot acknowledge the household as a producer of education without acknowledging that households differ, and it cannot acknowledge that households differ without admitting the limits of what schooling alone can do. So it pretends that the school is the whole of the matter, and that the parent is at most a consumer of its output and at worst an obstacle to it. This pretence has consequences. A system that tells parents they are not required to produce will produce parents who do not produce. The norms and standards upon which any classroom depends — the rested child, the finished homework, the respected teacher — do not arise from the curriculum.^[5] They arise from the household, and the household arises from the expectation that it must.

Amartya Sen, whom I would not have read in my own day but whose argument I should have recognised, writes that human flourishing requires not merely entitlements but capabilities.^[6] The entitlement to a school place is not the capability to be educated. The capability is built at home, and a policy that crowds out the home in the name of providing the entitlement has succeeded only in destroying the thing it claimed to be providing.

4The voucher and the restoration of the natural relation

What is to be done? The answer is not complicated, only unfashionable. Attach the money to the child, not to the institution. Permit the family to direct it. Permit schools to open and to expand in response to where the money goes. Permit them to fail and close where it does not. Differentiate the voucher where children have differentiated needs. Means-test it if the public finances require, or do not, as the politics of the day allows; the distributional question is separate from the structural one.

The objection that vouchers subsidise the rich is a debating-society objection, settled by the design of the voucher. The objection that the market will not serve every child is answered by the observation that the present system serves a great many children abominably, and that no arrangement which permits the family some power over the matter could possibly serve them worse. The objection that education is a public good is answered by noticing that it is in fact a merit good, with externalities that can be addressed by subsidy without requiring the abolition of choice.

The objection that none of this is politically possible is the only one with any force, and it is not an argument against the proposal. It is an argument against the political class, which is a different question.

5Coda

A society that permits its grocers to compete and conscripts its schoolmasters has revealed its priorities. It values its bread more than its children. It will, in due course, get the children it has paid for, and will wonder where they came from. The seven independent grocers will continue to be blamed for the state of the ninety-three. The humanitarian will continue to demand the redistribution of other people’s arrangements. And the children of the households without the postcode will continue, as they have for thirty years, to be educated chiefly in the lesson that the state which promised them everything was not, in the end, in the business of giving them anything at all.

It is not, as the founders of this think tank are right to insist, the fault of one’s parents or one’s grandparents. It is the fault of a policy regime that was constructed deliberately, maintained across changes of government, and defended by people who knew, or ought to have known, what it was doing. The remedy is not to share around what the better-off have produced for themselves. It is to restore to every family the means and the authority to produce it.

That is not a radical proposal. It is the ordinary condition of a free people. We have merely forgotten it.