Reclaiming Education [1 ed.] 9781441138767, 9780826479075

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Reclaiming Education James Tooley

CASSELL London and New York

To

Tom,Antoine & Chloe,Alissa & Sebastian, for all your twenty-first centuries

Cassell Wellington House 125 Strand London WC2R OBB

370 Lexington Avenue New York NY 10017-6550

© James Tooley 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2000 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-826-47907-3 (paperback) Some of the material in this book was researched as part of an investigation of the global education industry supervised by the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, supported in part by the government of Japan through the Comprehensive Japan Trust with the IFC.

Typeset by Kenneth Burnley, Wirral, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction

Rethinking Education

IV

1

Session 1

Education

24

Session 2

Equity

62

Session 3

Choice

102

Session 4

Democracy

139

Session 5

Accountability

172

Reclaiming Education

204

Bibliography

241

Index

251

Conclusions

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book makes out a case for reclaiming education from the state. I have been debating the ideas in it for the best part of the closing decade of the twentieth century. I know that one very common reaction to these ideas is a suspicion that my position on privatization in education is there simply to justify my own particular social class status. Someone defending private education against the state is assumed to have come out of the private sector himself, and to simply want to protect that preserve of the rich. Knowing how common this reaction is, perhaps I can be forgiven a little self-indulgence as I try to put the record straight. In fact, I went to a state comprehensive school in working-class east Bristol. After a few years out of schooling I went to Sussex University, which was one of the new universities of the 1960s, and not known to be particularly elitist. I then went out to teach in a state secondary school in Zimbabwe for three years, as a young idealistic mathematics teacher, wanting to help build the new socialist regime there. On return to England, I lived in the London Borough of Lambeth, and helped with the Labour Party in one of the poorest wards in London, Angell ward, where I lived. It was only then, roughly ten years ago, that I started on my PhD in philosophy of education, thinking that I would be another voice raised against markets in education and privatization. I agreed with the many authors outraged at the (what I now refer to as 'so-called') market reforms in education and wanted to provide philosophical support for their arguments, in a way that I didn't think others were doing adequately. But the more I set out to challenge the arguments for privatization, the more I came to realize that the arguments were right, and my challenge misguided. A particularly influential book for me was Professor E. G. West's Education and the State (1994a), which gave me the kind of 'jolt' that I want to give my readers here. Also influential were Professor Peter Berger's The Capitalist Revolution (1990), Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984), various of Lord Bauer's books on equality and development, and a book I picked up in Johannesburg by Leon Louw and Francis Kendall of the Free Market Foundation, South Africa: the

Preface and Acknowledgements

v

Solution (1986), which was my first taste of libertarian ideas. (I had bought it while I was living in Zimbabwe, and shamefully read it in bed, hiding it under my pillow, so that my Marxist house-mates couldn't see what I was reading. I was fascinated by the boldness of their ideas, although of course at the time I knew they couldn't possibly be right.) So, I haven't always believed in these ideas - and indeed, I sometimes get impatient with those who have always believed in the market alternative. I am sympathetic to the maxim of Sir Winston Churchill on this one, that 'the young man who is not a socialist when he is 18 has no heart'. I had a lot of heart when I was 18. For it seems so reasonable to an idealistic young person that you can solve the problems of the world through government action - why not? There are terrible problems in education around the world. Let's band together and use the power and influence of the state to improve conditions for all, but especially those so disadvantaged by our current system. However, the idealism of youth comes up against the stubborn realities of social policymaking, which you aren't likely to know about until you've seen some reform processes in action, till you've seen the disastrous impact of some social experiments and until you have explored theoretical explanations as to why this might be the outcome. Doing this often leads to some revision of one's youthful idealism, as it did for me. Sir Winston did go on to say that 'the man who is not a conservative by the time he is forty has no brain'. I like to think that, as I approach forty, I have heart and brain. I still have concern for the poor and disadvantaged - the concerns that led me to go out to Zimbabwe. I still like to think of myself as having instincts which value justice and fairness. But these are tempered by realism and experience. During the course of thinking about this book over the last few years and finally cramming the writing of it into the last couple of months, many people have helped me in formulating my ideas, providing a valuable foil for my ideas, giving me support and friendship and inspiring me to see the possibilities for education without the state. I'd love to write a paragraph about each of them; there's only space here to list names. To all of them I give my thanks. I also add that many would not necessarily wish to be associated with the ideas I have raised; they have helped me formulate these ideas often through strongly disagreeing with them. Thanks to academic colleagues for sharing ideas and friendship: Mel Ainscow, Richard P. Bailey, Stephen Ball, Robin Barrow, Michael Bassey, David Bridges, Justine Burley, Bruce Carrington,Tom Christie,Tony Edwards, Jac Eke, Antony Flew, Sharon Gewirtz, Hazel Hagger, David Halpin, David Hargreaves, Stephen Hewitt, David Hustler, Roger Iredale, Dennis O'Keeffe, Sally Power, Richard Pring, Christine Skelton, Lord Skidelsky, Eugenia Vilela, Geoffrey Walford, Eddie West, John White, Patricia White, Geoff Whitty, John Wilson. To 'educational entrepreneurs' (broadly understood!) who have given me time and inspiration: John Abbott, Dick Atkinson, Sir Robert Balchin, Rob Blair, Robert and Karen Boyd, Netti Brown, Leon Brummer, Nielen

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Brummer, Juan Garcia Calderon, Doug Dewey, Luiz Duarte, Thys Du Preez, Tim Emmett, Marcos Santo Guilger, Charles Hall, Richard Hough, John Kim, Abhas Kumar, Michael Latham, George Laverdos, Victor Levine, Neil Mclntosh, Kevin McNeany, Marina Mesquita, C. R. Mitra, Sugata Mitra, Jose Nasr, Evando Neiva, Joao Paulo dos Santos Nogueira, Mario Rivera Orams, Rajendra Pawar, Mike Plumstead, Richard Price, Adrian Pritchard, Suren Singh Rasaily, Michael Sandier, Benno C. Schmidt, Wilson Seremani, Alex Siemers, Peter Stokes, Vij ay Thadani, Chaim Zaher. To those in politics, government and assorted government agencies who have had time to share ideas: Sandy Adamson, Michael Barber, Sue Dasey, Michael Fallon, Anthea Millett, Sheila Scales, Nick Tate, Sir Cyril Taylor, Andrew Turner, David Willetts, Chris Woodhead. To headteachers who have shared with me their expertise: John Burns, Tom Clarke, Barry Cook, Bob Haworth, John Mclntosh, Gareth Newman, Sir Bob Salisbury, Dr Liz Sidwell, Sheila Tiezen. To Directors of Education in LEAs and those in the teacher unions who have constructively criticized my ideas: John Bangs, David Bell, Barry Fawcett, David Hart, Arthur Jarman, Doug McAvoy, Janet Theakstone, Les Walton and Tony Webster. To colleagues in the World Bank who have created great opportunities to explore these ideas: Arthur Karlin, Jack Maas, Maris O'Rourke, Harry Patrinos. Thanks, too, to my editor Anthony Haynes, for helping me to conceive of this idea, and for gently pursuing me when deadlines were missed and missed again. Richard P. Bailey, Richard Haugh, Andy Howes and John Wilson diligently read the whole manuscript and offered me many useful comments and suggestions. Lisa Oliphant stoically read the whole manuscript too, and offered me support, counsel and comfort when things weren't going too well. Love and gratitude to her. Finally, my (extended) family - Mum and Dad (Arthur and Barbara), Bob and Ruth, Mark and Stella, Paul and Anne, Simon, Rachel, Alissa and Sebastian and Tom, Antoine and Chloe - have always been a source of great inspiration and satisfaction to me, and my love and thanks go out to them all.

JAMES TOOLEY Fontburn, Northumberland June 1999

Introduction Rethinking Education

A GLOBAL AND HISTORICAL WAKE-UP CALL There are solutions to the fundamental challenges facing education. The solutions do not require much more from government other than that it leaves education well alone. New global and historical evidence has provided us with radical new ways of thinking about the way education is provided for in society. This evidence can change the way we think about the state, education and 'privatization' - giving education back to the private sector, to markets and civil society. This book lays out an agenda for reclaiming education from the state. It shows how all the supposed justifications for state intervention in education melt away in the face of this new evidence and new arguments. With these justifications revoked, a moral case for privatization of education can be made, grounded firmly in practice, focused on the future. But the book also lays out why we should reclaim education from the tyranny of schooling. It goes back to first principles about the nature of education, and finds the current fashion of putting all our educational expectations into schooling unsatisfactory and bringing undesirable consequences. The book is global in perspective and outlook. Although parts will focus, to illustrate major themes, on the situation in England and Wales, it proposes solutions which are similarly global - for 'developing' as well as 'developed' countries. Ask people to think of education in 'developing countries', and most respond with pictures of either a few elitist private schools, primitive shack-schools, or under-equipped universities, together with grim notions of widespread illiteracy. Of course, these pictures do have some bearing on reality; but it has been a humbling experience for me to discover the extent to which we in the developed world could be learning from the innovation and enterprise that exist in the private education sector in these countries. The Times Educational Supplement pandered to popular prejudice when it accompanied an article of mine on this theme with a photograph of an

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extremely poor school. The caption underneath read, 'Education in India has a lot to teach the British, according to Professor Tooley' (Times Educational Supplement, 1 May 1999, p. 21). The implication being, of course, that Professor Tooley is somewhat crazy thinking we have anything to learn from countries which can't even afford glass for the windows and where children don't have shoes on their feet. However, as this book will show, I do think we have much to learn from the experience of education in developing countries. One of the major themes in this book is that we don't have to wait for the advent of some market Utopia in the USA or UK to challenge critics of privatization: the Brazilians, Indians and South Africans - to name a few - are showing the way already. We have much to learn from education in these - and a multiplicity of other - countries. The book is also, albeit briefly, a journey through time. It argues that we are far too caught up in the 'parochialism of the present' in our understanding of education and the state. If we would only have a greater historical sense of where our current systems came from, then we would have a clearer idea of where we might be able to go in the future. Later in the book we will see the origins of state education in the desire of governments to quash religious opposition and to expand military and industrial might. We will also see how governments in the UK and the USA intervened in the provision of schooling only to 'fill in the gaps' in an almost-universal provision and observe how schooling became universal without compulsion and while parents paid fees. These kinds of ideas can also make us sit up and think more carefully about our current system and how it might be reformed. These ideas, it will be argued, also shift the onus of proof on to those who seek to maintain the status quo of state education, rather than on to those who seek to change it. These combined global and historical perspectives give us the necessary jolt to think through our ideas about what education is, and how it can be provided. And the 'best' must be understood in terms of not only quality, but also in terms of what is morally most desirable. WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT 1996 was a good year for 'millennial' education books in the UK.That year the most acclaimed and influential of the crop were George Walden's We Should Know Better: Solving the education crisis (1996), Melanie Phillips' All Must Have Prizes (1996) and Michael Barber's The Learning Game: Arguments for an education revolution (1996). To these three, I'll throw in a fourth which is also likely to have a big political impact, Tom Bentley's Learning Beyond the Classroom (1999). These books make up our 'Millennial Four'. Each has been based on the assumption that there is a crisis in education, that there is basic educational failure and a dumbing down of standards. Readers of this book may be relieved to know that I am not going to harp on about such a crisis in education - so the words 'challenges facing education' in my opening sentence were carefully chosen: not 'crisis', nor 'emergency', not even 'danger'. This is not to say that I am complacent about the quality of state education - far from

Introduction: Rethinking Education

3

it, as we shall see. But first, I don't want to dwell on it because it's something that we all know about now - each of the millennial books has led to a bunch of imitations, and the Press is also always feeding us this stuff. What I want to do is to build on these critiques and move on now. We need to take up the challenge posed by Melanie Phillips in the paperback edition of her book. Lambasting the new Labour Government, she notes that despite its reassuring rhetoric, there is 'a philosophical hole' at the heart of its education policy. There is no sense of what education is, 'or what its purposes might be . . . No one was asking the deeper questions . . . What were the driving ideas behind failing educational practices - and to what extent were these ideas embedded not just within schools but within the whole education system... ?' (1996, p. xiv). This is the challenge of this book, to probe behind surface policies and ask the philosophical questions about whether any of what we do now is morally justified and, if not, how we can put it right. In any case, I do wonder about the nature of the evidence usually used to summon up this educational crisis. I'm not sure any of it can be trusted, nor, most importantly, am I sure that I share the values behind the ubiquitous statistics on educational failure. Too much doesn't have to be read into my misgivings here: if the reader thinks there is a crisis in education on the basis of these statistics, that's fine, we don't need to part company at this point. I only want to distance myself from the type of data normally used to illustrate that crisis. For instance, there is supposedly evidence of low marks in state examinations. But to believe that these show a crisis, first, one would have to trust the way the data has been collected and collated. I remember the furore around the publication of the first full tranche of national testing results in England and Wales in 1996, where we were told - by each of the major political parties - that these showed that half of all pupils aged 11 and 14 have 'sub-standard' results, that children are 'falling behind', which was an 'appalling indictment' of the 'shocking shortcomings' of either sixteen years of Conservative rule or of 'progressive teaching methods in primary schools', depending on taste. Crisis? Certainly! But, unfortunately, the results showed nothing of the kind. All they showed was that the Government's National Curriculum Working Groups got it wrong when they guessed the levels of attainment for certain age groups. For all the distraught social commentators had simply forgotten was that when the predicted levels were set this was all they were - guesses; indeed, 'rough speculation' was the term used by Professor Paul Black, who chaired the Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT) set up to make these guesses. The mathematics working group, for example, labouring under intense political pressure, unworkable deadlines and with a paucity of relevant research, noted that 'It would be surprising if we got everything right.' What the results showed was that they didn't. The same for the other working groups. So, no one could really make any inferences from the results. No one was to blame, no one to praise. Progressive teaching methods in primary schools, left-wing Labour councils, the Conservative Government, the teaching unions, teachers and pupils, all escaped unscathed from these results.

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Reclaiming Education

Second, one would also have to believe that high grades in, say, Geography or History national tests really measure what is important or valuable about the educational enterprise. I'm not sure that they do on that count either. I'm not sure that what is important about the educational process is easily measurable by government bureaucrats. Again, there is evidence of low marks for England and the USA, for example, in international comparisons of educational standards. Professor Michael Barber (1996) in his The Learning Game, probably to be the most influential of these books of the 1990s - acclaimed by Tony Blair as being from 'one of the most stimulating thinkers in British education today' - points out the 'shocking results' of England in 'an international study of achievement in mathematics' (p. 24). I would reproduce the table of results here, but I don't want any reader to flick through these pages and think this is yet another book bemoaning our failure in international comparisons. The table shows England performing almost at the bottom on the question 'Solve x + 1 = 3 - x\ Melanie Phillips also registers horror at these comparisons, noting the 'yawning gap between the standards reached by British schoolchildren and their counterparts in Europe or Japan' (1996, p. 3). And, poles apart politically, in the USA, Andrew Coulson, author of the acclaimed Market Education, bewails in exactly the same way the USA's 'grim' showing in the International Evaluation of Education Achievement and International Adult Literacy Survey (Coulson, 1999, p. 284).The key questions here, again, are whether these international comparisons can possibly mean anything, given the diversity of curricula on offer in the different countries. But also, and most significantly, they raise the question of what education is - precisely Melanie Phillips' prior question - before we can start saying that low scores on any one of these types of question mean that there is rampant failure. Perhaps some might want to argue, for example, that if all young people were leaving school able to live happy and fulfilled lives, able to form and maintain healthy family relationships, and to support themselves through work, and to enjoy leisure, perhaps it would be irrelevant whether they could also solve ;t + l-3-jt?I am not saying this is the case, merely pointing out that we can't just jump in here and assume that the results mean anything without these further considerations. But more importantly, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Korea, all countries that tend to do much better than England and the USA at these international tests, don't necessarily have education systems which are morally justified and good for individuals and society at large either, simply because they score highly on these questions. Just because a country has an education system which performs better in these international assessments today does not mean to say that it has cracked the challenges facing us in education - nor that it will continue to perform well as times and circumstances change. As American educationalist Dr Myron Lieberman puts it: 'Henry Ford's Model-T was not a failure. On the contrary, it was a huge success, but it was the product of an industry in which improvement is essential to survival' (1999, p. 35). In this book I will suggest that the delivery of educational opportunities is, in part, a similar industry. It doesn't really matter whether or not state

Introduction: Rethinking Education

5

schools are failing and in crisis - although many probably are. What matters is whether or not we believe education should be immune to the type of improvements we take for granted in other areas of our lives. I don't, and that is the problem that needs to be addressed, irrespective of how schools are performing in government league tables. This said, I am not complacent about quality in schools. I try to visit on average one school every week and, although some schools are very good, except in the very best I always feel at least disappointed. In many schools, indeed, I feel positively outraged and disgusted that any child should be forced to spend time in such a place. Dilapidated buildings, disillusioned teachers, inefficient and ineffective organization create an environment which leads to disaffected children, and the rule of the mob and the bully. In one such school recently, I saw one child sitting at the edge of the classroom, trying to read with her hands over her ears, head cowed, dodging flying missiles, trying to cut out the bedlam around her. Such state schools are awful places. But the 'crisis' in them is not one which has necessarily anything to do with those statistics which are so often bandied about. This school is bad, not because it doesn't achieve a high proportion of children going through national tests and has high truancy rates, but because it is singularly failing to meet the needs and aspirations of the children there. Perhaps, for instance, the solution is that the school shouldn't be there at all, not that it should be achieving higher examination grades in arcane subjects. In any case, in other schools which aren't at such an extreme, I also feel disappointed. Children can be reasonably well behaved, the school reasonably well organized, teachers not completely disillusioned, and yet some spark is missing. One wonders whether such places are really offering the best that we can offer our children today. The sense within them is of acquiescence and complacency. It is not clear that they will bring happy, fulfilling and challenging lives to the children within them. But the 'crisis' in these schools cannot be measured by government league tables - for they probably do rather well against any such statistics. So any 'crisis' which I would subscribe to is only supported at this subjective level, from an anger that some children are trapped in schools which are so clearly not meeting the needs and desires of young people and society, to an intuitive misgiving that all is not quite what it is cracked up to be even in supposedly more successful schools. And perhaps part of the problem is that we are trying to put too much emphasis on what goes on at school and not enough on other areas of our lives. Each of the 'Millennial Four' also concludes that the solution lies, in one way or another, in government. Government needs to expand opportunities outside the classroom; government needs to bring in new curricula in personal and social education or citizenship; government needs to ensure that standards are kept high in teacher training; government needs to abolish private schools; government needs to change the culture of schools. Quiet! The argument of this book is that government doesn't need to do any such thing. It doesn't even need to get out of the way. For there is a revolution going

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on in education which will push it out of the way, and it will not be able to resist it. Mention of a 'revolution' brings us to something else that this book is not. The word might raise a fear in some readers that it's yet another book about the technological revolution which is transforming our schools, and isn't it wonderful and can't we all jump on board and won't the Internet add to everything teachers do and ... ? And shut up, I'm sure many readers are feeling by now. Typical of books in this genre is Bill Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought (Gates with Hemingway 1999). What I find most depressing about this book is epitomized when you turn to the Index and look up 'education'. You find: Education, see Schools. But this isn't just laziness on the part of the lexicographer. For Gates' book, like so many others in this mode, is just about how schools can use computers to do what they are doing already, in a slightly modified way, without any sense that perhaps the information revolution can do far more than that. So we have statements like: PCs can empower teachers and students more than any other group of knowledge workers.. .Teachers will be able to use the Internet to share with each other and to allow students to explore a subject in new ways, (p. 387) But all this seems to mean is that the computer will be an add-on in the classroom, leaving everything else pretty much intact, including the basic teacher-pupil power relationship: Using PowerPoint, for instance, teachers find they can spark kids' interest in the subject by including photos, film clips, and links to Internet pages. One civics teacher at Western Heights [a small, sevenschool district in Oklahoma] starts his class each day with fresh news from the Internet, (p. 389) Yawn. Or: Teachers use e-mail to communicate with one another about common issues . . . 'People may not realize how alone teachers are in the classroom,' Western Heights superintendent Joe Kitchens says. 'Most teachers remain behind closed doors all day. They have little time for sharing experiences or interacting with other teachers ... E-mail eliminates that isolation.' (p. 389) Is that it? There is a hint of something slightly more radical:

Introduction: Rethinking Education

1

Several classrooms are set up specifically for distance learning via PCbased TV. These setups have enabled Western Heights to add advanced math classes in its middle school by TV instruction ... (p. 390) That's getting interesting, but then the authors ruin it all with a frank statement of their conservatism: It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than no advanced math class, (p. 390) Really? Why is having a (probably poorly informed) middle school teacher in the classroom better than having access to an expert inspiring and motivating at a distance, even if it is through video-conferencing? It is ideas such as these which will be explored in what follows, not the technology as add-on to the teacher-pupil power relation. Perhaps it was unfair expecting more from Bill Gates, who after all isn't an educator. And perhaps on one level he is right: it is a fundamental argument in this book that, if we stick to state education, this is probably as radical as it can get. It is only when education is liberated from the state that we can expect more. THREE FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGES So this book is not premised on there being a crisis as measured by government statistics, but it is premised on there being challenges to education and choices to be made. This book uses three such challenges as springboards into the discussion. The first challenge is how we are to meet unsatisfied demand for educational opportunities of all kinds. Globally it is estimated that there are 150 million children aged between 6 and 11 who are not in school, 60 per cent of these girls. And fully one quarter of those children who do start primary school drop out. Adult literacy globally remains below 40 per cent. Further and higher education participation rates in most countries in the world are considerably less than 20 per cent of the relevant populations. All these figures are usually taken to mean there is huge unsatisfied demand for education in developing countries. Similar unmet demand is also evident in educational aspirations in any developed country - a recent high-level discussion in the New Zealand education department estimated that if all the demand for further and higher education was to be met by government, it would annually exceed all of current government earnings through taxation! Similar situations are apparent in any other developed country. Now, the solution to this challenge is presumed to be the same the world over. Whether our education system is top notch, or whether we are a struggling developing country, nonetheless, the solution is always: 'What can government do about it?' Whether in the UK or USA, or in the United Nations or, until very recently, the World Bank, or in a developing country, the proposal is always the same. Educational challenges need a solution from government.

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But why? Why do we assume we need government here, and not the private sector? Our first challenge leads us to seek evidence about the ways in which 'the private alternative' can satisfy educational demand - and how it has done so historically. Such questions are discussed especially in Session 2. Throughout the book we will be concerned with 'the private alternative' - that is, markets in education in combination with other agents of civil society, most notably the family and philanthropy. The second challenge raised about education brings us up graphically against what we mean by education. For we find in the 'Millennial Four"s writings concerns which are, to say the least, extremely wide-ranging if not allencompassing. So we have Professor Barber nervous about 'the problems of the global environment' (1996, p. 17) and the 'descent into hell' felt by the parents of the murdered Liverpool child James Bulger and its ramifications for moral decline in society (p. 19) - sentiments similarly echoed by Melanie Phillips (1996, p. x). Tom Bentley is anxious about the crises in young people's relationships - with marriage break-down featuring highly - depression and suicide amongst young people, and apathy towards governments and voting (1999, ch. 2). But, curiously, the solution to this sweeping range of problems always seems to be couched in terms of what schools can do to solve them. I think a Martian, not immersed in our everyday ways of seeing these matters, would find this somewhat puzzling. Perhaps schools are such powerful places that they can solve every problem besetting us - from global warming to adulterous relationships - but it wouldn't be clear at the outset how the place where children spend only 15 per cent of their waking hours would necessarily have such power. However, read these authors and you'll rarely find any discussion about what they think education is and why schools must have such wide-ranging responsibilities. This book will not neglect this fundamental area. And this challenge brings us to one of the senses, as noted above, in which we seek to reclaim education - by reclaiming the concept of education from the tyranny of schooling. This discussion informs the whole book, but is especially covered in Session 1. The third challenge looks at what society requires from education - in all the ways we understand it. We are worried about inequality - about some children, as noted earlier, having really poor quality of schooling, for example, or about terrible inequalities within countries and also between countries. Some are worried about issues concerning democracy, how to improve it and to reinvigorate what it means to be a citizen. Equality and democracy are the key concerns which lead people to want the state to intervene in education. Others are worried about social cohesion, or crime, or economic growth. What is notable about each of these societal concerns about education is that they have been put forward as justifications in their own right for governments to get involved in education. Without government being involved in these areas, we are told, we will never achieve equality of opportunity or equity. Or we will never achieve real democracy. Or society will disintegrate. The main thrust of this book is to challenge these assumptions. It considers whether these ideals, sincerely held by many, can be satisfied by government, or whether they are

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aspirations better met outside of the state. This is the fundamental sense in which we are seeking to reclaim education - to reclaim education from the state. These ideas pervade the whole of the book.

THREE LEVELS OF STATE INTERVENTION As well as focusing on the three challenges facing education, there is a second strand of discussion woven into the argument. This focuses on the three levels in which states can intervene in education, through provision, funding and regulation (Barr 1993, p. 80), and examines justifications for intervention at each level. Let's be clear on what we mean by each level: states can, for example, provide by supplying buildings and employing teachers, fund by supplying school places free of charge or heavily subsidized, and regulate through having compulsory attendance laws and national curricula and assessment systems. And while we are used to all three aspects being together in state education now, it is important to note that each is independent of the other. In other areas of our lives, for instance, we are accustomed to the state regulating to ensure that all drivers on the road have passed their driving test, but there is no state funding of this, nor state provision of driving schools, both aspects which are left to private initiative. Or we can have state funding of food for the poor, through welfare payments, but no state provision of food shops. With these distinctions in mind, the book examines the justifications given for state intervention, exploring at what level they might apply, and then exploring whether they do apply. Equity or equality of opportunity is a justification for state intervention which seems to encompass all three levels. Session 2 looks at it in terms of justifying provision, funding and regulation in terms of compulsory attendance. Session 3 provides some missing pieces in the jigsaw to show that equity does not justify state provision, funding or regulation - addressing, among other things, the claim that parental choice will undermine equity and so should be regulated against. Indeed, it goes further than this, arguing that choice is desirable in education - even, paradoxically, for those who don't actually value the act of having to choose. The 'information problem' is another justification for (at least) state regulation, that parents will not have enough appropriate and relevant information about education on which to base sensible decisions. The state is needed to step in to solve this problem. Session 3 addresses this issue too, showing that it does not lead to the need for state intervention after all. Another major justification for state intervention concerns the need for education for democracy, and also democratic control of education. Session 4 looks at these arguments, focusing on an example of a recent proposal for a statutory education for democracy to show graphically some of the general problems of seeking to impose higher-order values through regulation. Finally, Session 5 looks at the desire for accountability, and what state intervention this justifies, and whether or not profit in education needs also to be controlled. Building on the three challenges, and exploring the major justifications for

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the three levels of state intervention, the message of this book is simple: we need to start thinking differently about education. Jolted by recent global and historical evidence, we need to revisit ideas on what education is. From there, we need to imaginatively ponder ways in which we can ensure its presence and delivery in society. And all this will lead us to realize that the status quo of state education systems is simply untenable. We will realize that if we want education to be of the highest quality, inclusive of all children and all their varied needs, and to respond to the needs of society and encourage life-long learning, then our current system simply cannot deliver it. There is no point in looking any further to the state. State intervention in education has been a culde-sac, a historical experiment with the lives of children. It has not been successful. We must now return from it, to consider something new. The argument is that there are no moral or ethical justifications for state intervention. The conclusions reached here are that we should do all we can to encourage what I will call from now on 'the private alternative' - in all its diverse and delightful forms, for-profit companies, not-for-profit foundations, the family, philanthropy and other agencies in civil society - to play an everincreasing role in the delivery of educational opportunities. THREE FUNDAMENTAL CONFUSIONS Before we can set off on this journey we need to do some 'intellectual housekeeping' to get rid of three fundamental confusions about the concerns of this book. A key part of the 'private alternative' is of course to look at 'markets' in education. But there are at least two key confusions about what we mean exactly by markets in education. Then there is confusion about what we mean by education businesses - which will be key players in what follows. But markets in education don't work... A book has just landed on my desk which has - even I have to reluctantly concede - the very clever title Trading in Futures: Why markets in education don't work (Lauder et al 1999). Its title is very much in keeping with the spirit of literally hundreds of books and articles published over the last decade, by educational researchers in universities, educational journalists and concerned others, all proclaiming precisely the same message: that markets in education don't work. Academic books and papers clamour for attention, all heavily critical of recent reforms that have taken place which have purportedly introduced markets into education, in the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Colombia - all over the world in fact. (Professor Lauder and his colleagues are writing about reforms in New Zealand, for example.) Marking essays by students on modular undergraduate education courses, or by students on teacher training courses, one soon becomes aware that there is only one acceptable view on this issue, and that view is hostile towards markets in education. And the students have only got this from their tutors, whose reading lists positively bristle with sources angry at market reforms.

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It would seem I have my work cut out to engage with every one of these authors to show why, against all this mounting evidence, I still want to put forward the case for markets in education. Am I very brave, or just very stupid? I think I am neither, at least not in this context. For all these books have nothing to do with markets in education as we shall come to understand them in this book. This is the first fundamental misunderstanding which we will have to clear up. All these hundreds of books and articles may be right to be objecting to certain reforms, but these reforms have very little, if anything, to do with markets.1 For the education systems which are being objected to in this literature all feature 'choice' reforms, which have as their chief characteristic that parental choice is permitted within a heavily regulated, state provided and funded schooling system. In these choice systems, it is hardly possible for new suppliers to enter the market, such is the near-monopoly offered by the state. And there is definitely no price mechanism operating. But defenders of markets in areas other than education do not normally have in mind that the state should be so heavily involved. Markets in food and clothing, for example, have some relatively minimal state regulation, and zero state provision and funding, although in some circumstances there may be some very tiny amount of targeted (indirect) funding for the poor, such as food stamps in the USA or social security cash benefits in the UK. They also feature an open and competitive supply-side, with many competing suppliers from large supermarket chains to corner shops and market stalls. Finally, customer demand and producer supply is co-ordinated through a price mechanism. Crucially, each of these features are necessary, and in combination sufficient, to define a market, and are worth highlighting: 1. No state provision. 2. No state funding (except perhaps for targeted indirect funding for the poor). 3. Relatively minimal regulation. 4. Relatively easy entry for new suppliers. 5. A price mechanism. Throughout this book we will take it that markets in education will also have to feature each of these. Only when all of these features are present together can we say there is a market in education. This is more than a semantic point we need some term to be able to define what education without the state will look like, and we object to the use of the term 'market' to describe something which is so patently not this. Interestingly, many of the principal writers in this debate do seem to recognize there is something odd about calling choice reforms 'markets', but then they all promptly drop their misgivings and go on using the unhelpful terminology. So Professor Lauder and his colleagues note that what has been introduced in the choice reforms is 'in reality, quasi or proxy market

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mechanisms into education', given the lack of a price mechanism and lack of competing suppliers (1999, p. 19). And they do even go as far as considering whether there could ever be 'genuine' market mechanisms in education: Suppose, for example, that the condition of allowing schools complete freedom over their budgets ... was met. Would that make a difference? Would, for example, Sheppard High, which performs so well on raw examination results, expand to include more students? (p. 135) But they argue no, basing this on the fact that the successful school wouldn't want to expand - the head told them so! - and 'from her perspective, rightly so. If the apparently successful schools expanded while others closed down, all that would happen is that the problems associated with the schools closing down would be exported to the "successful" schools' (p. 135). As we shall see as we go along through this book, it is crucially important to consider what would happen under more genuine market mechanisms, and that their simple dismissal of other possibilities excludes quite radical and dramatic options. So, while possibly being a useful critique of inequality within the New Zealand state system, noting how certain reforms may have made things worse in that respect, Professor Lauder and his colleagues do not touch on the subject of this book, markets in education, whatever their title claims to the contrary. Similarly, Professor Michael Barber (1996) also objects to markets. In his The Learning Game he harangues the 'market forces' introduced by the Conservative Government - which were precisely the same type of reforms as those introduced in New Zealand, with parental choice introduced into a heavily regulated, state funded and provided system. But again, interestingly, he also notes that what was introduced . . . is in fact a very crude model of market forces . . . it is as if a state monopoly in the provision of supermarkets were to be broken down by telling consumers that, from now on, they could choose which supermarket they shopped at; but once they had made their choice assuming the supermarket was not over-subscribed and too full to be able to accept their custom - they would have to do all their shopping there, (p. 256) I couldn't have put it better myself - except he also neglects the price mechanism, and the fact that the supermarket would also be state provided and funded. But nonetheless, I think it is a graphic illustration of the problem. But given his awareness that these are not markets in education which he is criticizing, unfortunately he persists in using the language of markets throughout his book. And so again, readers might think that he is criticizing the subject of this book, when in fact he is patently not. Finally, some of the most important empirical research in England and Wales on 'markets' in education is that conducted by Professor Stephen J. Ball and his colleagues at King's College, London. Again, this work shows the

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problems which have occurred because of the choice reforms in terms of equity. Again, they call these reforms 'markets': Schools in England are now set within the whole paraphernalia of a market system, albeit a market which is strongly politically regulated. (Gewirtzetal. 1995, p. 1) But not only is it regulated, but it is also, of course, funded and provided by the state, does not have a price mechanism operating, and entrance for new suppliers is severely limited. Again, Professor Ball recognizes that there is something uncomfortable about calling it a market: . . . the UK education system is organised as a very strange market indeed . . . The market is thus heavily constrained and singularly constructed by government. Furthermore, the performance indicators of schooling are fixed by the Government... Is this 'real' choice? Is this a market? It certainly has the effect of a market in creating competition between schools but the possibilities of invention and entrepreneurship and expressions of minority interests or commitments among parents are severely limited by political control of the market. (Ball 1993, pp. 8-9) Agreed. So why call this a market at all? Perhaps some readers will be rather impatient with this, because they might argue: so even if these aren't real markets, wouldn't real markets just be like these choice systems but worse! Wouldn't all these criticisms apply, but even more strongly? London University professors Geoff Whitty and David Halpin and Dr Sally Power argue along these lines. They do concede that 'of course, empirical research on current systems does not, indeed in principle could not, show that total deregulation would not have beneficial effects', and they continue: The best available evidence does seem to suggest that going further in the direction of marketization would be unlikely to yield overall improvements in the quality of education and might well have damaging equity effects. (Whitty et al 1998, p. 128, emphasis added) I totally disagree with this. I'm not sure that the 'best available evidence' does show this for a start (see Note 1), but even if they are right, it assumes that the state reforms of devolution and choice are actually moves towards markets. But to have one's ideas on deregulated education damned because current reforms (which, sorry to keep on repeating it, involve heavy government regulation, provision and funding - where's the free market?) haven't succeeded in promoting quality and equity, seems rather akin to having one's egalitarian impulses damned because of the failure of the Soviet Union. The point is that there is very little which is recognizable about real

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markets in these choice systems. Barber's analogy with the supermarkets is helpful here: if food provision was provided, funded, and regulated by the state in the ways that schools are under choice reforms, does anyone believe they would in any way resemble food provision as we know it today? Perhaps I shouldn't leave this as a rhetorical question, but should spell out exactly what I mean for readers. So consider this parable. Suppose that in the late nineteenth century it had been decided that children needed an adequate diet to grow up into good citizens and employees, and it was observed that not all children were getting this. Hence the state, invoking the 'protection of minors' principle, intervenes to ensure an adequate diet for all children. Through a bold series of ever-more encompassing reforms, starting with the setting up of a National Bread Board through to the creation of the Department for Nutrition, the system is in place by, say 1970, whereby the vast majority of children attend Local Nutrition Authority (LNA) kitchens for all their eating requirements. Children are directed to their local kitchen by their LNA, neither they nor their parents have any choice in this matter. Food is provided free at the kitchen, and officials strongly warn against provision of food outside of the kitchen. (In any case, as parents would have to pay for such additional food, there is very little motivation for them to do so.) Attendance at the kitchens is compulsory for all children, and they have to eat three meals a day, at set times. All children have the same amount of food and the same amount of time in which to eat it. If they haven't finished one course when the time is up, they have to move on to the next. They eat their meals in their own part of the kitchen around tables with 30 other children of the same age, supervised by one member of the Feeding Profession. If they do not eat their meals at the set times, they are punished, often by serving them the meal that children least like when everyone else has gone home. The Nutrition System as outlined comes under mounting pressures. In many kitchens, it is alleged, food is of poor quality, leading to illness and listlessness. Some of the Feeding Profession cannot control their charges, with consequent riotous meal-times. Moreover, it is pointed out that because diet is not centrally prescribed, some kitchens are experimenting with different kinds of food, with disastrous consequences for children thus exposed. Samosas served at one school instead of steak and kidney pie creates a huge national scandal. Questions are asked in the House of Commons. All this seems grossly unfair, particularly as at other institutions, meal-times are orderly and the food good, at least in part. Finally, the children of the rich, it is noted, can afford to opt out of the state system, and have food in restaurants or even, in rare cases, cooked at home by their own parents. This adds to the inequity of the system, because it is agreed that the quality of private restaurants is better than the state kitchens, and because home cooking clearly deprives children of their national nutritional entitlement. It is apparent that urgent reforms are needed. The party that wins the next election favours 'markets' as a panacea for the country's ills. It introduces market reforms into the public services, including

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Nutrition. To avoid alienating the Department for Nutrition and the Feeding Profession, the government sets up a National Dietary Division (NDD) and brings out a National Diet (ND), prescribing the quantity, quality, speed of eating, table levels and so on, to take place in all kitchens in the country. To ensure national accountability - so important in a democracy - a testing regime is enhanced, with frequent eating examinations and publication of kitchen (league) tables. But these are not the key market reforms. These, enthuse the politicians, liberate nutritional demand and supply. On the demand side parents are now permitted to choose their preferred kitchen from the two or three in their area. Moreover, whereas previously kitchens had received funding regardless of how many children they had to feed, now they are to be allocated a specific amount for each child. That should keep these kitchens on their toes! On the supply side, kitchens are now given control of much of their budgets and a rather small number of brand-new expensive kitchens opened, with superb modern cooking equipment. With these demand and supply-side revolutions in place, the government presents its Nutrition Market. However, it is not long before critics begin condemning the market. Says one professor: look how markets exacerbate inequality! For it is clear that, under the reforms, some kitchens are far more popular than others. Lo and behold, just as one could have predicted, the popular kitchens are able to choose between parents. Under the guise of consumer choice, it is the producers who are empowered, not the customers, and particularly not the disadvantaged, who end up in the worst kitchens from which the middle classes have escaped. The debate rages, and when a new government comes into power, under agitation from the Nutrition pressure groups, the market reforms are curtailed. Let's leave this parable and return to Michael Barber's point, and consider the 'more authentic' market as we know it in Nutrition, or, as we call it, food. Parents can choose in what ways they wish their children to be fed. They purchase food using their own money, and the myriad of these individual choices have an influence on the final price of the food, giving information to suppliers to act according to demand. They can choose uncooked, cooked, or partly cooked food. They choose from an incredible diversity of suppliers, from traditional markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets, late stores, corner shops and wholesalers. Some grow food for themselves. Some eat out for certain meals at restaurants or fast-food stores, or order take-away food. Some eat with friends or extended family. The government is not involved in the funding or provision at all. There is some state intervention in this market for sure. The food suppliers need to conform to safety and informational requirements. Moreover, there are two 'safety nets' to ensure that children don't suffer. If parents are neglectful, there are mechanisms to ensure children are cared for properly. For poor parents, there are money handouts to ensure their children eat properly. These mechanisms, if working properly, enhance but don't undermine the market. I hope I have written enough to bring out the stark contrast between an

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authentic market and the 'so-called' one. The tiny aspects of markets which were introduced in the parable are largely insignificant, and indeed, as the critics pointed out, may even exacerbate the unfairness of the previous system. The moral of this parable is, I hope, that tinkering with heavy state intervention does not bring about a market, even if the tinkering is introducing some vaguely market-like mechanisms. All we have in education is this tentative tinkering; the so-called market is as different from a more authentic market as the reformed Nutrition System is from the market in food. Or finally, perhaps another analogy will help. Suppose that a new 'choice' reform is introduced into a prison system. Prisoners are now allowed a choice of food within the prison canteen. Prisoners have to go to the one prison canteen of course, and have to eat at the set mealtimes, but nonetheless they have a choice of food when they get there. Would anyone want to say that such choice is the same as real freedom? Of course not. It is the same in the education system. The choice systems in education are as far removed from real markets as real freedom is from the prisoner. Education markets versus education for the market A second widespread misapprehension about markets in education confuses what we are talking about, markets in education - as we've just defined them • and education geared for the marketplace. Two vehement critics of markets in education, Professor Ruth Jonathan of Edinburgh University (Jonathan 1989,1997), and Canadian professor James McMurtry (McMurtry 1991), seem to be assuming that markets in education mean that the education delivered will be of a particular vocationally-oriented type, i.e. education to equip young people for the marketplace. They don't want education to be narrowly defined in that way, and certainly don't want to forsake the possibility of education understood as being of intrinsic value, or of being involved with disciplines and practices which have no obvious value in business or industry. So this is one reason why they don't like markets in education. However, this is to misunderstand what we are talking about. Here are the two possibilities spelled out in more detail: • Education for the market. Educational opportunities designed to equip young people for work; or educational opportunities designed by governments to foster greater international economic competitiveness. • Markets in education. Educational opportunities delivered by markets, i.e. not provided, largely funded or largely regulated by governments, with supply-side liberated and price mechanisms in place. The first point is: there is no necessary connection between the two. Many governments, throughout history and globally, have tried or are trying to provide the first through increasing their control over education. As we shall see, this was arguably one of the reasons why the British government intervened in education in the first place in the nineteenth century. Britain needed to remain

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competitive with Germany and France, whose governments had already intervened in order to achieve greater economic power. Similarly, the governments in Korea and Taiwan and Indonesia have sought to increase international competitiveness by increasing their hold on education, not by letting markets be given free reign. From the opposite direction, it is quite possible that markets in education will not bring about greater international competitiveness and not bring about more focus on vocational preparation. This all depends on what consumers choose to spend their funds on. There are markets in books, now, for example, but this doesn't mean we all spend our funds on books which will improve our business competitiveness, but many of us spend money on books which will improve our minds. The same can be true in a genuine educational market. The second point is that in this book we are not concerned with the first education for the market - except of course when it arises as a consequence of the second, markets in education. So no one must read what follows and think we are talking about education narrowly geared to vocational preparation. Business involvement in education versus education businesses Reviewing the quality of educational research for Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, was in general a pretty grim business, as readers of my report Educational Research: A critique may have suspected (Tooley with Darby 1998). However, in all the hundreds of articles surveyed, I did come across one joke, which I liked so much I have since used it, suitably personalized, at several conferences. An article by Professor Rosemary Deem, entitled 'Border territories: a journey through sociology, education and women's studies' (1996), at first seemed a rather unpromising account of yet another woman academic telling her life story, sorry 'auto/biography'. But it was actually quite a lively account, and in it she described how, as an undergraduate, she attended a core theory course in which we were all dazzled by Tony Giddens [now the Director of the London School of Economics] . . . unencumbered by lecture notes and wearing a donkey jacket emblazoned across the back with the legend 'Laing'. Whereas then this apparel might have been decoded as showing his empathy with the working class, today anyone wearing a similar jacket might be thought to be sponsored by industry! (Deem 1996, p. 8) It is this aspect of education being sponsored by industry which many people assume I am talking about when I speak of markets in education. It is also the subject of severe criticism from Professor Alex Molnar (1996). Similar qualms are raised by Robertson in her book No More Teachers, No More Books (1998), from the Canadian perspective, and by Sheila Harty in Hucksters in the Classroom (1979) (based on the situation in the USA) and The Corporate Pied Piper (1985) (based on findings in Malaysia).

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So for example, Professor Molnar objects to Pizza Hut's 'BOOK IT!' literacy programme - which brings as a reward for children's reading 'a salty, high-fat meal', whereas we all know that 'a healthful diet is low in salt, fat, and sugar'. He condemns the involvement of this business in schooling: 'It's understandable that Pizza Hut wants to be associated with reading. It's less clear why schools are willing to undermine their curricula for the promise of a personal pan pizza' (p. 45). Similarly, Sheila Harty objects to the best sales pitch ever advanced in USA schools ... the Cheesborough Ponds' advertising campaign which promoted Q-Tips cotton swabs through an art contest aimed at primary grades. Student entries for paintings and construction models had to use Q-Tips as the paintbrush, the glue applicator, or the construction material. Prizes amounted to $40,000 worth of USA savings bonds for four winners per grade. Teachers' chances at a sweepstake drawing were increased with each student who entered the contest. The winning teacher was awarded a paid 'art experience' for two in either Athens, Cairo or Florence. Now that's guaranteed to sell Q-Tips. (Harty 1994, pp. 91-2) Or in Malaysia, she objects to the Nestle Company sponsoring 'nationwide cookery competitions for all secondary schools', in order to 'counteract adverse publicity and decreased sales after the worldwide boycott of Nestle's products' (p. 92). And Heather-Jane Robertson objects to the way Scholastic, who are publishers and distributors of educational materials, distributed a pamphlet entitled 'Introducing Indonesia' to 77,000 teachers in 1997. The problem was that it was backed by 'the Lippo Bank, the Indonesian government, Mobil, Texaco, and other Suharto-friendly corporations'; because of this it explained that 'sneakers are manufactured in Indonesia not because labour is cheap, but because rubber is a natural resource' (Robertson 1998, p. 211). In each of these cases we have big business being involved in schools, to promote their brand names, to increase sales, or even to subvert truth in the cause of offering free curriculum materials. I find that when I'm giving lectures defending the involvement of education businesses or companies in schooling, as I am seeking also to do in this book, many in the audience simply assume I am defending this sort of practice. However, this is a crucial misunderstanding, and we need to make a very important distinction to avoid it. The distinction is between businesses getting involved in schools - for all the kinds of reasons outlined above - and education businesses whose only business is education getting involved in schools, or other educational opportunities. It is only the latter which I am seeking to defend in this book, not the former. In fact, I too share an abhorrence of many of the practices revealed by the above three writers. I really don't think other businesses have much role to play in schooling, as will become apparent in what follows. They are liable to distort the

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educational process, and subvert it to their own ends. But this does not mean I am also against education businesses being involved. Professor Molnar puts it succinctly: 'Corporations don't exist either to serve the best interests of schoolchildren or to promote "family" values. Corporations are created to return profits to their owners' (Molnar 1996, p. 47). But this brings out the crucial distinction I wish to make. For real education businesses - the sort I will defend here - do exist 'to serve the best interests of schoolchildren' and their families, as well as their shareholders. If they are not serving the interests of children then they will go out of business. The only way they can make profits for their owners is if they provide high-quality educational services. This isn't the case with the other businesses involved with schooling, I agree with Professor Molnar. They want to make profits to shareholders who are not particularly concerned about the educational impact of what they are doing. So this distinction must be made clear. Incidentally, I do think that the kinds of criticisms raised by Molnar, Roberston and Harty could actually be used against their positions in favour of state education. For the strongest part of their arguments against business involvement is that public schools are really gullible to use these materials and promotions from (non-education) businesses: Even a cursory look at most of this stuff would be enough to cause most people to wonder why in the world teachers and principals continue to let it into their schools. It takes up valuable learning time and distracts, misinforms, and manipulates the students. (Molnar 1996, p. 43) Similarly, Molnar notes the experience of 'one Milwaukee mother', who wanted to reward her child with a book rather than pizza, involved with a Pizza Hut promotion in schools: 'In the clash of values, Pizza Hut prevailed' (p. 45). What an indictment of state schools in America these examples show, that they can bring in programmes so alien to parents' values - and what a compelling argument for liberating school choice! But that's by the way. Fundamentally I agree with them that these types of arrangement are not desirable. But they are not what I am arguing for here. ONE FUNDAMENTAL (POTENTIAL) PROBLEM All this leads to one fundamental problem for me as author of this book; indeed, some might think it is an insurmountable problem. If I am to present an argument in favour of something that doesn't yet exist in any country, then where is my evidence going to come from to show that it is preferable? How can I possibly be able to support those strong statements laid out at the beginning of this chapter? Actually, I think I am in a perfectly symmetrical position to many of those advocates of other reforms which can improve the lot of people. Anyone who argues in favour of more egalitarian education (for example, Benn and Chitty

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1997), or more democratic education (for example, Whitty et al. 1998) or whatever else is the flavour of the month in left-wing circles, also has to concede that there is no evidence to show that these proposals actually do work, for nowhere have their proposals been fully tried. All similar proposals point to an alternative which has not yet been tested and on which, therefore, there is bound to be scant evidence on which to base any debate. But this brings in the need not for further dwelling on past empirical evidence which may not be relevant, but an examination of the underlying theoretical arguments which support the case. What is needed is philosophical reflection and some greater historical perspective. Professor Lauder and his colleagues don't like this kind of approach. They note that 'the potency' of the ideas for markets 'clearly transcends the rational (in the sense of testable ideas), raising the possibility that at the heart of policy making there is a founding myth which people have to accept or reject on the basis of faith' (p. 7). The qualification of 'rational' as being 'in the sense of testable ideas' is interesting here, and is far too positivist for my liking. What I argue here is that there are rational reasons why we might want to accept markets in education, which aren't myths and don't need to be accepted in faith. They are philosophical ideas. For fundamentally, the questions raised about education in this book are not ones which are amenable to simple factual input; they are fundamentally questions about values and about meaning, normative questions. So the core of this book will be a philosophical approach - perhaps for those purists around, we should point out that this won't be of too gruelling a kind, and perhaps would only pass muster in some circles as pop philosophy. But it is philosophy (pop or otherwise) which we have to use to explore the fundamental questions of the role of the state in education, because fundamentally these questions hinge upon ethical concepts, concepts such as equality and equity, and choice and democracy. There is also the core philosophical question - which we certainly haven't forgotten, and must explore - of what education is. TWO 'TRICKS OF THE TRADE' How best to explore these philosophical issues? Given the factors mentioned above - the difficulty of finding empirical evidence to support the case made here, which is fundamentally an ethical case - I have chosen to supplement, albeit sparingly, the narrative with two philosophical 'tricks of the trade'. The first is the 'veil of ignorance'. What we want to know is what kind of educational system we think would be most desirable. And this includes what role we think is most desirable for the state to play in that educational system. Now, if we just asked people to consider this question, there would always be the suspicion that their answers would be unduly coloured by their own position in society. They might not give us answers which were truly fair, truly just, but only those which would create the best possible outcomes for themselves and their family circumstances. In his ground-breaking book A Theory

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of Justice, the social philosopher John Rawls was also troubled by a similar problem (Rawls 1972). He wanted to explore the fundamental principles of justice, but was aware that we all have vested interests which may distort our apprehension of these fundamental principles. So he proposed a way in which we could imagine how we might choose these principles if we knew nothing about our present situation.This was what he called 'the original position': I assume that the parties are situated behind a veil of ignorance. They do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they're obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations. First of all no-one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of his psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society... It is taken for granted, however, that they know general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organisation and the laws of human psychology. Indeed, the parties are presumed to know whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice. (1972, pp. 136-7) The intuitive picture is clear - we want to know which arrangements would be just, so we discount everything which smacks of our self- or group-interest, and then we are able to get a disinterested picture. Thoughts behind the veil of ignorance pick out the arrangement that people would select if they were forced to be impartial.2 This is precisely what I want to discover as far as education is concerned. But there is another reason more particular to education which also points to the desirability of using a 'veil of ignorance'-type thought experiment. The problem I find when talking about education, at seminars, conferences, or wherever, is that we all carry around so much baggage about the ways in which education is currently organized and delivered in our society. It is very hard to break away from this to think more radically and imaginatively. So we all have pictures of schools and teachers and headteachers and desks and playgrounds and examinations and local education authorities and... everything else that is currently in the system. So if I talk about markets in education, people always put them in the context of schools and teachers and all the rest. And this always raises many objections in people's minds to markets in education. But one of the key questions I want to ask is: if our minds had been purged of these conceptions of what education is like, would we think differently about it? This is what I want to do with my thought-experiment behind the veil of ignorance. Not only are the agents behind the veil to be purged of all the knowledge and values that Rawls saw fit to rid them of (as noted above), but

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also they are to know nothing about the way education is currently delivered in society. And because so many of our ideas about the way education is funded and provided are in keeping with our ideas about other areas of the welfare state, it also seems pertinent to require that these ideas are also purged behind the veil of ignorance. This gives life behind the veil a certain nineteenth-century innocence as far as the welfare state is concerned - although this innocence is not required for other considerations, such as about technology - but it is clearly necessary in order that we come to education with a clean slate, not infected by ideas which might distract us from the task of finding the desirable role for the state in education. Who shall we have behind the veil of ignorance? To solve this problem, I have used another philosophical 'trick of the trade' - the focus group. Some might be surprised to hear the focus group described as a philosophical tool of the trade. Focus groups, surely, are de rigueur in politics, marketing and business. But in philosophy? However, it seems to me that the imaginary focus group is the basis of many, if not all, of the dialogues of the Ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. Take his Protagoras, for example. Here we have Plato setting us down in the 'house of a rich and cultured citizen', to find him 'entertaining the leading Sophists of the time'. We get to meet the wealthy patron Callias, and Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, and the two sons of Pericles. All gathered together in Plato's vibrant imagination, to discuss the question: 'Can virtue be taught?' We, the readers, 'certainly feel grateful to Plato for giving us the opportunity of sitting in the midst of this remarkable circle and overhearing their conversation' (Guthrie 1956, p. 8). Indeed. Although I am not as ambitious (or as vain) as to think that my readers will be as grateful, I do want them to hear a conversation between people grappling with these important issues of the role of government in education. The final twist is that I want these participants to have something very firmly at stake in the process. So I have borrowed six children and young people from a variety of homes, to take them through the veil of ignorance. They know that they are deciding on a fate which could await them when they return. So they will be very keen to get things right. I do want them to be able to reflect and pronounce on adult preoccupations too, however, so I've contrived the situation even further so that as they pass through the veil, they acquire, for the duration of the sessions, a certain adult gravitas and sensibility and knowledge about things which as children they may not have known about. To make it all a bit fairer, I'll let the focus group leader be someone who doesn't agree with the kind of views I've espoused before. He's very much in favour of state involvement in education and will do his best to get the group to agree with him. So, in Sessions 1 to 5, we follow the discussions of the 'focus group behind the veil of ignorance' carefully. We ask of the members of our focus group the questions: What kind of education system would you choose to create, if you knew nothing about current arrangements, and knew nothing about your actual place in society? In particular, what role would you see for the state in this system?

Introduction: Rethinking Education

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Exploring these questions will, I hope, prove invaluable in exploring what it is that is valuable, or not, about state intervention in education and enable us to arrive at an ethical understanding of a justified role for the state in education. But these sessions aren't only concerned with the deliberations of the focus group - that might get tiresome. The five sessions cover the range of issues which we need to engage with in order to know where we are with regard to the state and education. These range from equality of opportunity and equity, through choice and the information problem, to democracy and accountability and the profit motive. Each of the 'Sessions' is divided into three sections. The first is a 'Prologue', where the general ideas, motivating arguments, disputes, and so on, are all laid out, with regard to the current literature and political ideas on the topic in hand. The second part brings in the deliberations of the focus group, with a closely defined topic for their discussion. The final part of each session consists of a 'Commentary', where I review the ideas which emerged in the group, put them into the context of the discussion in the Prologue and review any further evidence and debate which I think is needed in order to arrive at any conclusions. THREE-PART SOLUTION At the end of it all, having reviewed all the arguments against markets in education, and for the state to be involved, I conclude that there is no justification for state intervention in education, not in terms of provision, funding or regulation. This leads to consideration of the three components of the solution to the challenges facing us in education. I won't say what these three components are yet, but they'll emerge fairly quickly in the ensuing discussion. The fundamental question of education policy is what role there should be for the state in education. This book sets out why I believe there is no justified role. NOTES 1

I am, perhaps, being generous to my critics here. I have critiqued the methodology and findings of some of the most significant work on these so-called markets in education and found it wanting (Tooley 1997b). And Cardiff academics Stephen Gorard and John Fitz have carefully analysed Lauder et 0/.'s work and also found its methodology and conclusions to be unsound (Gorard and Fitz 1998a, b, c). However, for the purposes here we don't need to get into this discussion, for the reasons given in the text. 2 George Walden, in We Should Know Better, one of our 'Millennial Four', employs this 'eye-catching device' in one small chapter, and we'll follow his lead.

Session 1 Education

PROLOGUE Can state intervention in education be justified? Should education be provided by the state? Do we need state funding? In what ways, if any, should the state regulate education? These are the questions which will be our focus throughout the book, together with the complementary questions, the reverse-side-of-the-coin questions: can markets in education be justified? Can markets provide for our educational needs? Would they need any 'safety net' state funding? In what ways should they be regulated? The questions all raise issues of'should?' and 'justification', which make them, in part at least, philosophical questions. We will pursue these questions by creating a 'focus group' behind 'the veil of ignorance', which will explore answers to the questions without knowing anything of their place in society, and without any knowledge of the ways in which we currently fund, deliver and provide schooling, so as not to be distracted from their quest. To read many of the writers on this topic, one would think we could just jump in and try to answer them straight away (I've been guilty of this before myself, see Tooley 1996a). But there is, of course, the fundamental preliminary question: what is education? If we don't address this question, then we don't deserve to be taken seriously. And all our discussions about markets and the state will be left hanging, with critics not knowing whether we really have any sense of what the enterprise of education is all about. We'll address this question first outside of the veil of ignorance. This is not only because I want to share with readers1 some of the literature on the topic, but also because we have already stipulated, following the social philosopher John Rawls, that behind the veil of ignorance participants won't know anything of their view of the good life. But views as to the nature of education are completely caught up with conceptions of the good life. So we'll have to explore these outside, and feed the ideas in to the discussion which ensues.

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Education as schooling? First, readers will be aware that there are several distinct ways in which we tend to refer to 'education'. First, there is the most common usage in the public sphere. Here we refer to education as the 'institutions' in which it supposedly takes place. That is, 'education as schooling'. Common expressions here are: 'How many years of education did you get?' 'All that education didn't do me much good.' 'What's wrong with American education?' For the purposes of this book, it is essential that we step back from this usage. For using 'education' in this sense may presume answers to the questions for which we are looking for answers. It has been part of the critique of many over the years that schooling is part of the institutional mechanisms which the state has either created or set in stone, for purposes which may or may not relate to education as we understand it in other ways. Schools have had their purpose for other ends, such as social control or surveillance. So, for example, the nineteenth-century political agitator William Cobbett, criticizing the government's first intervention in schools in the 1830s, wrote dismissively of schools as offering 'Heddekashun' and asked: 'What need had we of schools! What need of teachers! What need of scolding or force, to induce children to read and write and love books?' (quoted in Johnson 1979, p. 90). William Cobbett was sure that there were ample resources within workingclass communities themselves which didn't need government schools in order to achieve education. His ideas were celebrated recently by the left-wing historian Richard Johnson. He argues that we have forgotten and undervalued the most 'popular educational resource: the working-class family itself (p. 75). And he notes how Cobbett - whom he calls the 'original de-schooler' (p. 78) - was one of the protagonists of a 'radical education' which was completely in opposition to a centralized state system, and which emphasized a concern with 'men and women as educators of their own children' (p. 77), and a lack of distinction between the education of adults and of children. Perhaps the key feature of the nineteenth-century radical education was informality. Johnson notes the educational resources of family, neighbourhood and even place of work, whether within the household or outside it, the acquisition of literacy from mothers or fathers, the use of the knowledgeable friend or neighbour, or the 'scholar' in neighbouring town or village, the work-place discussion and formal and informal apprenticeships, the extensive networks of private schools and, in many cases, the local Sunday Schools, most un-schoollike of the new devices, excellently adapted to working-class needs ... communal reading and discussion groups, the facilities for newspapers in pub, coffee house or reading room, the broader cultural politics of Chartist or Owenite branch-life, the institution of the travelling lecturer who, often indistinguishable from 'missionary' or demagogue, toured the radical centres, and, above all, the radical press, the most successful radical invention and an extremely flexible (and therefore ubiquitous)

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Reclaiming Education educational form... best thought of as a series of educational networks, (p. 80)

More recently, in the 1970s, the radical 'de-schooler' Ivan Illich argued that state education undermines the educative potential of working-class communities (Illich 1971, p. 10), and that to equate equality of opportunity with compulsory schooling is to 'confuse salvation with the Church' (p. 18). He wrote: Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school. (Illich 1971, p. 18) Let's be completely clear what my point is here. I am not saying that we have to be committed at this stage to any of this 'de-schooling' philosophy in what follows. All I want us to do is to clear our minds of the notion that schooling and education are necessarily the same thing. If we assume they are, then there may well be particular answers to the question of the role of the state in education which would not be the same if we considered other ways in which we could define education. It is a hard exercise to clear our minds of this ubiquitous usage - and clearly one of the reasons why I want our focus group behind the veil of ignorance to have this conflation purged from their minds. Recently, Tom Bentley - writing when adviser to Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett, and now Director of Demos, Labour's favourite think-tank - has illustrated the kinds of difficulties we fall into when trying to clear one's mind of this definition. His book Learning Beyond the Classroom (1999), one of our 'Millennial Four', has a title which lays bare his concerns. On the first page he notes that it is fundamental for the 'demands of the twenty-first century' that we get away from thinking about education as schooling, because schooling particularly impacts on children, and distorts and undermines the learning process. His argument requires a shift in our thinking about the fundamental organisational unit of education, from the school, an institution where learning is organised, defined and constrained, to the learner, an intelligent agent with the potential to learn from any and all of her [sic] encounters with the world around her. (Bentley 1999, p. 1) And again, to round off his introductory chapter, he notes: At the heart of the argument is the recognition that learning can take place in any situation, at any time, and that to improve the quality of education we must overcome the historical mistake of confusing formal, school-based instruction with the whole of education, (p. 6)

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Nothing could be clearer than that, and he is to be commended for sticking his neck out so firmly here. But then the insights of his commendable introductory warnings seem to get lost, as he himself demonstrates how difficult it is to break out of thinking of education as schooling: by page 9 he is already saying 'education must have a general aim: to equip its pupils with the tools and capacities to succeed in life'. Mentioning pupils seems awfully like thinking in terms of schools to me. And by Chapter 6, on the importance of 'learning morality and citizenship' he seems to have forgotten the distinction altogether when he writes of how a 'citizenship agenda' would need to include things like 'dedicated lesson time . . . in Personal, Social and Health education, from relevant National Curriculum subjects such as religious education, or from teachers using opportunities as and when they arise' (p. 71). He goes on 'Many ... are concerned about the overcrowding of the curriculum' but he thinks that these things are 'difficult to timetable, but not impossible' (p. 71). And so he goes on, pointing to the ways in which learning morality and citizenship can be crowded into the school timetable, with pupils and teachers in rather conventional roles. Sounds very much like a conflation of schooling and education taking place again. Sounds like he has not heeded his own advice. Two conceptions of education If we move away from education as schooling, what do we have instead? I suggest conceptions of education are usually divided into two camps. Like all the distinctions that follow in this book, this is somewhat imperfect. It will also be the case, as we shall see, that there is considerable overlap between the categories. I suggest the following two conceptions: 1. Education as an instrumental good - for (a) the promotion of certain goods in society or (b) as a preparation for adult life. 2. Education as intrinsically worthwhile. Importantly, by labelling one as an 'instrumental good', and in particular by labelling one sub-category as 'a preparation for adult life', this mustn't be taken to mean that this is something narrowly vocational. It is true that some people do think of it in that way, but the category is meant to include a whole range of philosophies which encompass much more than that. For example, I think the philosopher of education Professor John White's 'education for autonomy' fits into this first, 'instrumental good' category. For in his work there is what appears to be an instrumental justification for wanting us to be educated for autonomy, in that, as the title of his major book suggests, this will lead to 'education for the good life', which is good for the individuals concerned, and also for society at large (White 1990). Some philosophers of education whom I fit into this first category include those who see education in terms of the development of autonomy, or rationality, or rational autonomy (e.g. White 1990, Dearden 1972). It also includes those who see education in terms of the pursuit of pleasure or happiness

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(e.g. Barrow 1980), and those who see it in terms of the pursuit of God's will for our lives or for a life of serving others (e.g. Clark 1946). And moving away from philosophers, surveys of parents suggest that many see it in terms of individuals being able to pursue a life which could lead to health and enough wealth to provide security for themselves and their families (e.g. Coulson 1999). These would all fit into the first category of education. The key is that education is not an end in itself, but can be for the good of the individual and/or society. In terms of the first sub-category, the promotion of certain goods for society, economists often think of education as bringing about what they call 'externalities'. Externalities are benefits that accrue to the whole of society when individuals pursue their own individual ends. In terms of education, then, they are usually benefits that accrue to the community as a whole when all individuals are educated; conversely, failure to educate all citizens is detrimental to society as a whole. So, for example, a selection of the goods for society which economists think we need from an educated populace includes (see Weisbrod 1962, Krashinsky 1986) the promotion of • • • • •

democracy; social cohesion; equality of opportunity; reduction of crime; economic growth.

Indeed, it is not just economists who think in these terms. The philosopher of education, Professor Ruth Jonathan, has recently enumerated the kinds of 'benefits society seeks' from its educational programmes, including (Jonathan 1997, pp. 73-5): • • • • •

Education for economic growth. Fostering of appropriate values for society. Maintenance of a cultural heritage. Maintenance of a general level of culture and civility in the polity. A 'more egalitarian social world'.

Many, I suggest, would agree with these ideas about what we seek through society of education - especially if the 'egalitarianism' were translated into the less controversial 'equality of opportunity' idea. Education as 'preparation for adult life' can also be divided into other subcomponents: •

Introduction to, and development of, those types of knowledge and skills which are needed for thriving in adult life. • Introduction to, and development of, those aptitudes and values which are needed for thriving in adult life. • Development of knowledge, skills, aptitudes and values which would help

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children grow to live the good life - either in their own terms, or in terms of the norms of society. So preparation for adult life can be in terms of preparation for working life, but also in terms of preparation for being good citizens, preparation for parenthood, and so on. It doesn't seem particularly controversial to note that much of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of mankind could be helpful in regard to this first category. So education in this context could involve some or all of the following (based on Pring 1995): • • • • • • • •

Knowledge and understanding. Intellectual virtues. Imagination. Intellectual skills. Self-reflection. Moral virtues and habits. Social skills. Personal skills.

Two points are important to stress at this stage. The first is that we've been talking about education but we haven't mentioned schooling. Not one part of our definition thus far assumes that there are institutions called schools wherein education must take place. They don't rule them out, of course, but that certainly isn't any part of our understanding of education. Keep this in mind as we move on. The second point is that values - one's own and those of society - completely permeate the whole of this category of what education is. Only when we know our values could we know what was valuable in society, and hence what was worth knowing. Children couldn't possibly learn everything as they grow up. Out of the vast range of skills, knowledge, attitudes and qualities that children could learn, some selection had to take place. And that selection process ultimately depends upon values. So far so good. I hope that all of this is relatively uncontroversial. It isn't our place in this book to engage in the debates about the respective merits of each of these positions within the first conception of education. Clearly they do compete to a certain extent, although many, if not all, will have a common core of what is deemed essential for education to take place. We don't need to adjudicate between these positions, only to be clear on how they fit into this first category. The second conception of education - education as intrinsically worthwhile - has gone out of fashion somewhat in recent years. It was immensely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and even a little in the 1980s, when its chief protagonist in the UK, Professor Richard Peters, at the University of London Institute of Education, was pouring out his elaboration of ideas on the topic. Other philosophers writing in this tradition include Professors Michael

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Oakeshott (1972) and Anthony O'Hear (1987). This tradition in education is often labelled 'liberal education', which will be confusing to American ears as the proponents of it are often the most conservative of philosophers - understandably as it involves the conservation of intellectual traditions. But then intellectual fashions changed. I think the main objection to this position is that it seems elitist - an epithet which is enough to make anything unfashionable in the educational world, it would seem. However, just because something is elitist doesn't mean that it is wrong, or can be dismissed. In our focus group, we won't dismiss it, although we will need to be reminded of its particular implications from time to time. Under this conception, education is seen as having its own intrinsic value. Education is the transmission of what is worthwhile, to those who become committed to it. Education has no end other than itself. It wouldn't make sense in this way to speak of the aims of education - for education embodies its own aim. So it must be clear that this approach requires no further justification in terms of human happiness or economic utility or social benefit. Education is its own justification. Education in this conception involves being initiated into traditions of knowledge. These traditions are ways of thinking and feeling which are socially shared, and which have 'survived the critical scrutiny of previous generations' (Pring 1995, p. 110). Education is about initiating young people into these traditions and, in however small a way, getting them to participate in them.The traditions themselves deserve respect: 'Such traditions are captured in various disciplines of knowledge, understanding and feeling, and are guarded and developed by authorities within a critical community' (p. 110). The traditions are transmitted through the 'conversations' which take place between the 'generations of mankind' (Oakeshott 1972). In Oakeshott's philosophy, education's task is to ensure that the next generation can get into the 'inside' of this conversation. Without this happening, our experiences in society are curtailed and impoverished. And, as there are distinct voices in the conversation between the generations - 'the voices of poetry, history, science, philosophy' (Pring 1995, p. Ill) - the educated person wants to be able to participate in all of them. Why is an education that develops the mind good in itself? Professor Richard Peters, and Professor Paul H. Hirst after him, justified it using a 'transcendental deduction'. Transcendental deductions are where you try to justify an answer by 'transcending' the question asked: it aims to show that by the very asking of the question, the answer is already presupposed. So if someone asks for the justification of the pursuit of knowledge, then this presupposes that the questioner already has some commitment to rational knowledge already. In other words, the person already knows the answer to the question. As I said, this conception has gone out of fashion because it is accused of being elitist. As Professor Pring - who hankers after reviving this conception, it seems, in the context of noting how it is compatible with education for vocational preparation - notes, if we are talking about 'initiation' into the intellectual traditions, then this implies that 'only a few people are judged to be

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successful' - there will always be those who 'fail the initiation test'. Only a select group will be judged capable of participating in the elitist conversation between the generations. And only some voices will be allowed into the authorized 'conversation' between the generations, excluding, so the criticism would go, 'black or minority interests, or youth culture' (Pring 1995, p. 112). Finally, Professor Pring points out another interesting aspect of the liberal education tradition, important for our work that follows: . . . the formation of the intellect is a demanding task. It cannot, in the main, happen incidentally . . . Such excellence requires . . . space and time set apart, free from the distractions of the immediate and the relevant Indeed, educational settings ideally should be like monasteries. (Pring 1995, p. 185) Actually, Professor Pring wrote 'schools' instead of 'educational settings'. I chose to purge those words because they weren't essential to his argument, and to stress the fact that nothing in this conception either leads us to think in terms of schools as yet. With these two conceptions of education clearly in mind - and stressing again that we haven't had to mention schools at all in either conception - we now turn to the focus group, to let them take this idea further. We want the focus group to help us in our deliberations on what justified role there is for the state to play in education. First of all, we want to understand what the delivery of education will look like from behind the veil of ignorance. Do we want schools, for example? And how do we ensure that young people want to take part in education - do we need compulsion, for example?

FOCUS GROUP In which I discover that I am to be part of a Focus Group Behind the Veil of Ignorance, where we are to discuss the meaning of education and the mechanisms by which it might best be advanced and delivered in society. Beginnings On what was just another ordinary day, dad woke me up, I breakfasted and bathed. I got myself ready to leave the house. As I was pushing papers into pockets and purses, a knock at the front door. Unusual, perhaps the postman with a parcel? A man and a woman in dark glasses and overcoats. Would I follow them? Where? Just follow. I didn't have to follow, but I did anyway, being 'too inquisitive for my own good', as mum often says. I won't go into the details of my journey. All I know is that we travelled by train, it was tiring and I slept for much of it. I ended up in a large room, bare except for a dozen chairs, a flip-chart and a coffee percolator, having passed

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through what they called the 'Veil of Ignorance', a sort of tree of knowledge in reverse, where I unlearnt most of what I knew about my society and my place in it. Although simultaneously I seemed to learn a lot about other things which I didn't previously know about. Afterwards I felt somewhat older and wiser. In the room were five others, each of whom had similar tales to recount of the knock on the door and the subsequent train journey, including the journey through the Veil. Why are we here? The anticipation, tinged with some nervousness, permeates the room, as does the fresh aroma of coffee. Suddenly, there is a flurry of activity as the man and woman in dark glasses and overcoats arrive with a new guest. 'Sorry I'm late', he gushes. 'Couldn't get a taxi at the station.' He is dressed in a single-breasted Armani suit, but his jacket is soon removed and hitched over the back of a chair. He rolls up his sleeves, does a mental count around the room, and says: 'Good, now we are seven!' And he invites us all to take our seats, arranged in a horseshoe around the flip-chart. He begins his introduction. 'Good. My name is Jack. Welcome to this new focus group.The government wants Britain to be a modern nation. A nation where individual potential is released. A nation where economic enterprise is sustained, the quality of life improved. A nation with strong and inclusive communities. Above all, a modern nation with learning at its heart. The government is committed to building an inclusive and fair society. So it hit upon this idea. What would people - young people, people of the twenty-first century, people like you want it to be doing in education? A famous philosopher, a direct forerunner of the New Labour project, once developed a method for carrying out this type of research. If we just asked you in the streets what you thought we should be doing, then your answers would be distorted by your socio-economic position. If you were the child of a millionaire you'd want things that millionaires want. And they would be distorted by your own educational experiences. What we wanted was to know what you would want if you didn't know your social class. If you didn't know how education was currently delivered. What we wanted was to free you from your normal ways of thinking about things. Without any preconceptions about education or your own place in society, what would be fair? What would help us to build an inclusive, modern society? That's why we took you through the Veil of Ignorance. We're going to start from scratch, from first principles and build up a picture of what you think education should be like. 'This is your focus group, reflecting your concerns and your interests. Your views are important to us. Your views matter. But the issues we will discuss are of global importance, and have global dimensions. I know the world is watching us. But that's enough of me talking! Let's get to know each other. We'll go around the room, and introduce ourselves. Say who we are, and where we are from. I'll begin. I'm Jack. I'm the focus group facilitator.' The person to his right says: 'I'm Ruth. I am... I thought I knew who I was, but I don't think I do anymore.' Jack beams. Following her cue, her neighbour says, 'I'm Fatima. I don't know who I am either, but I'm very happy to be here!' And so we go around the room. All of us realizing that, although when we had

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entered the room, we thought we knew who we were, by the time we talk, we have no recollection. After Ruth and Fatima, there's Joel, Winston, Sanjay and Jayshree (me). Three boys and three girls. And with Jack we're seven. Jack continues. 'None of you knows who you are apart from your name. You have been selected from a range of socio-economic groups. On arrival in this room, however, not one of you knows your place in society. Not one of you has any knowledge of your wealth, natural assets and abilities, intelligence and strength, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Nor do you know your conception of the good life. You don't know whether your idea of fun on a Friday night is to play push-pin in the pub, or whether poetry readings are more your cup of tea. 'I know, for example, that one of you is the child of a very successful businessman - who made his fortune in home furnishings, and now has an apartment in town, plus a house on Guernsey. Your father runs a private jet and has a yacht in the Mediterranean. It could be you! 'Another of you is not so fortunate in the real world. You're the child of a single parent, who is unemployed, living in rather unpleasant housing on an inner-city estate. It could be you too! But in this room, these differences don't matter. But be aware that they exist! Your job is to devise a system for education which you wouldn't mind going back to, whatever your winnings in life's lottery.' (We look around at each other, the gravity of our ignorance sinking in.) 'As I've said, you don't know anything about education back in the Real World. Passing through the Veil of Ignorance completely desensitized you to that. However, you are aware of what we might call 'general facts about human society'. You understand political affairs, the principles of economic theory; you know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology. And much else besides. But how education is organized in society, that is a mystery to you all. We do have this facility, however -' (he motions to his accomplices in dark glasses, who have by now removed their overcoats. They open the door and wheel in a computer) ' - which we'll call Arthur. Arthur knows everything there is to know about the Real World, and we can consult it - him - together, when you feel you need evidence to inform your discussions. However, use it sparingly, and sometimes, I'm sure you'll understand why I won't let you have the information you request, in case it gives too much away.' Jack's tone changes slightly: T do ask that no one touches Arthur unless I am here, is that understood?' Arthur is wheeled to one side, and plugged in. Jack continues, in his livelier tone. 'You needn't worry, after this two-day conference, you'll be taken back from whence you came, and you'll regain all your memories. (We've got five sessions scheduled, two today and three tomorrow, followed by a banquet dinner with a very special guest.) And you won't remember this time away. Don't worry, no one will be concerned about your absences. But we'll have fun until then. So, we're here to talk about education. Now, first we all have to agree what we're talking about. It may seem basic, and I know you're probably all anxious to get on with the meat -' (he corrects himself)' - the substance of

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the sessions, but believe me, we'll be glad that we spent time on it later. People would not take our discussions seriously if they didn't think we had considered this prior question sensibly.' Jack told us that in the weeks before the session started they had surreptitiously canvassed views in the world at large on what education was. We had been included in this survey - 'Remember those interviews in the shopping mall, or those consumer questionnaires in the mailbox?' - but it was more farreaching than just us, and involved library work too. But what they had come up with, Jack said - turning over a page on theflip-chart- were two main sets of ideas on education. 1. Education as an instrumental good - for (a) the promotion of certain goods in society or (b) as a preparation for adult life. 2. Education as intrinsically worthwhile. Jack pointed out to us the various nuances of these two conceptions, and the various competing ways in which they are understood. He then gave us the question with which we were to be concerned throughout the whole seminar, already written on the flip-chart:

WHAT KIND OF EDUCATION SYSTEM WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO CREATE, IF YOU KNEW NOTHING ABOUT CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS, AND KNEW NOTHING ABOUT YOUR ACTUAL PLACE IN SOCIETY?

And then, turning over the sheets, was the question for our first session: • How should education be delivered? What arrangements for education would we seek which we would be happy with, whatever our social position, when we returned to the world beyond the Veil? How should education be delivered? We discussed this on our own, then Jack helped us search for evidence from the computer - Arthur - and then let us discuss for a bit longer on our own. Finally, he came back to lead our discussions, to hear our summaries and to probe more deeply on some issues. Our deliberations went something like this. First stage of preparation The first few years - from birth onwards - of the educational process seemed to us - from our intuition and the masses of evidence that Arthur had come up with - to be perhaps the most important stage, when so much was learnt and the foundations set for all future learning. Yet it was also the easiest for us to

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get to grips with. For both the 'instrumental' and the 'intrinsic value' conceptions of education it was clear there was overlap in these early years. We didn't want to be too dogmatic about the ages we were considering, given that this would most likely vary from child to child. But we suggested that the first stage would last from birth to perhaps age 5 years. As far as the liberal conception was concerned, we saw that a child would need to learn the basics of language, literacy and numeracy, and probably the basics of information and communications technology too, to help access sources later in life. One would also need to begin to learn some of the dispositions, habits and values which would be useful later on in life, including being able to sit down and concentrate a little, and learn that learning was fun but sometimes challenging, always rewarding. Clearly, as no one thought liberal education excluded the need for a child to be prepared for the adult world, aspects of interpersonal relationships, respect for others, tolerance and friendship and other such virtues would also need to be inculcated in the child. Each of these aspects, it seemed, was clearly shared with the instrumental conception of education too. And all were possible to begin building on in these early years of a child's life. For the beauty of early childhood, it seemed to us, was not only that it was perhaps the most important educational period, but that what was required to be learnt was not particularly intellectually demanding - so virtually anyone could help the learner - and there was an obvious natural educational environment in which to learn. From our basic evidence of child psychology we knew that children in the main had a curiosity to learn, that it was as natural for them as it was for any other young animal. So we guessed that in the first few years, much of learning would be about encouraging what was natural for them, rather than going out of our way to push them along routes on which they didn't want to travel. Many of these aspects could clearly be learnt through play - which could lead to the creation of friendships and learning social skills, the discovery and exercising of different mental and physical skills, developing physical and mental dexterity, and oiling the social processes. But not all things could be learnt this way, that too was clear. Some of the aspects would need more formal mechanisms for ensuring that all children acquired them; sitting down with them and helping them to read and write, for instance, and assisting them with guided activities with counting and the basis of arithmetic. And where would these things best be delivered? That was obvious. From the evidence of the institutions in society, it seemed clear that the family was a crucial basis of all societies the world over, and offered the perfect environment for this stage of learning. Children were born into the family, which offered potentially the most educational of all environments, where children could learn and experiment and explore and play, all within the warmth of loving and caring surroundings, with parents whose every focus and being is geared to their children's upbringing, and who would have patience and total commitment to their learning. And families, of course, would be linked with other families and other relatives and friends, so there would be opportunity for wider social and other learning opportunities too. Our instincts and our

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knowledge about families, and the evidence we called up from Arthur on the problems of other possibilities all reinforced this obvious solution. The family, par excellence, it would seem, would cater for all the educational needs of the young child. The first stage seemed very easy to address. However: 'Not so quick', said Jack. 'What happens to those children who are not born into such good families, who live in dysfunctional families? Or suppose some parents without being dysfunctional - aren't particularly interested in helping their children with what is required for learning? And are all family environments as good as each other? Remember you don't know what family environment you come from. Would it matter to you where you returned? Would it be fair if yours was not as good as someone else's? And supposing some parents aren't very good at helping their children learn all the things which are important, what then? And you've assumed that there is at least one parent at home during this time. But what happens if there are families where both parents are working away from home all the time? What do you do about the education of those children?' Many questions! After some discussion, we deferred the issue of whether all families were as good as each other, and whether this mattered, to the next session, when we were scheduled to discuss 'equity and inclusion'. We also deferred discussion of funding to the same session. The first question, then, seemed relatively easy to answer. If there were some families which were positively dysfunctional, then it seemed to us obvious we would want to help a child within these. After all, we, or more likely a younger sibling, could be such a child beyond the Veil. We put forward ideas on adoption of such a child, or of mentoring help for the parents from more committed or responsible parents. Each solution, it seemed essential to us, preserved the basic place of a child within a family. Jack did seem to be trying to steer us away from that for a while, but we resisted it, and he let it drop, saying it wasn't our main interest in any case, and there were more pertinent issues to discuss. The second question was what to do if some parents - without being dysfunctional - weren't particularly interested in or skilled at helping their children with learning? It didn't seem likely that many parents would be like this. But if there were such parents, it didn't seem beyond the wit of human society to ensure that these parents would become interested in helping their children. Skilled communicators and persuaders could be deployed to enjoin these parents to help their children, showing that it was the most important time for them, and that their futures depended on it. All the institutions of civil society - the churches and mosques, voluntary organizations and societies, the media and press - could become geared to creating the norm that parents did educate their children. And, as we have said, it shouldn't be too demanding at this level, and would likely be lots of fun for parents and children alike. Until now, Jack hadn't been writing anything on the flip-chart, but now he wrote 'nurseries' and 'day care', and suggested that these might be a better alternative than the family, giving all children the benefit of highly trained

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care, in the company of their peers. This seemed a bit risky, we thought... the sorts of people who might volunteer for this kind of thing might not be as committed to the children as their parents or grandparents, and it was this loving commitment which was so essential to the child feeling secure and being able to learn. Such a set-up may even attract suspect people to have access to very young children, Fatima suggested. Jack said, somewhat sharply: 'Not volunteers, these will be paid professionals ...' This didn't seem at all desirable to us. The strength of the family was the fact that it was founded on the bonds of love. Bringing commercial transactions into it would seem to undermine its key virtue. I noticed that despite our misgivings, Jack left the two words on the flip-chart in any case, and they were to remain as the only record of our discussion on this matter. The third question also seemed relatively easy to answer. If some parents weren't so good at helping their children learn specific things - perhaps if neither parent was particularly good at mathematics, or knew anything about literature, say, then again we would want such parents to be helped, to better help their children. For again, we wouldn't want to be a child with parents who couldn't introduce us to these areas. We came up with various ideas on the ways parents might be helped, from the idea of mentors again, to software packages which could be used in the home with children. Jack clearly wasn't satisfied with this response, but guided us to the final question: 'And if neither parent is at home? What then ... ?' This question was difficult for us to answer. Yes, it was true, we had assumed that families had homes where at least one of the parents was present all of the time. If there were families where neither parent could be present during the day then this clearly presented us with a problem. We supposed that it might be possible to replicate the family environment somewhere else - with grandparents perhaps, or by other neighbouring families taking in one or more children for the day. None seemed ideal, but if the circumstances compelled this to be the case then perhaps these would be the least undesirable option. Young children couldn't be left on their own, Ruth observed. Jack said, 'If there are a lot of families beyond the Veil where both parents are working, then you haven't been very helpful, have you? You've found no solution.' Winston responded. He said we thought we were here to be concerned about education, that this was our interest, and that we were looking for solutions to educational problems. And if it was true - which he was guessing by Jack's persistence on this question - that beyond the Veil there were many families in the predicament he described, then we would be concerned, and want all the wit and imagination in society to be geared, to finding ways in which at least one parent could stay at home with his or her children, overcoming the dire problem of both parents having to work. We all concurred with this. Jack sighed, and said 'Let's move on to your other stages, as this isn't the most important.' That struck me (and I think the others) as being rather odd,

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as all the evidence we'd picked up suggested that solid foundations at this stage were of the utmost importance to a child's later development. However, we moved on, as he suggested. Second stage of preparation The first stage of preparation provided the foundations for all other learning. The second stage then began the process of progressively moving children away from the presence (although certainly not the love and concern) of their families, and progressively introducing them into the wider world. The second stage of learning began from the age of 5 we guessed, although we weren't being dogmatic about this, depending as it did on detailed empirical evidence which we didn't have time to assimilate, and it would also certainly vary for individuals. We would assume that by this stage children had acquired all the basics for learning. That is, the basics of language, literacy and numeracy, and information and communications technology. Now, one of the main aims of this second stage was to further cultivate in children those dispositions, habits and values which would enable them to learn throughout life. These would include things such as perseverance, motivation, concentration, respect for evidence and emotional commitment to learning. Whether one believed in the 'instrumental' or 'intrinsic value' conceptions of education, it would seem that inculcating these dispositions, values and habits would be absolutely essential. Indeed, the more we thought about it, there didn't seem to be that much difference between the two conceptions of education again at this stage. In terms of the liberal conception, it would clearly be a priority to enable children to begin learning those aspects of our culture and the intellectual disciplines which were valued, those traditions which were worth preserving. But the 'instrumental' conception would also seem to benefit from at least an introduction to these areas too, for at least an awareness of what they are would seem to be necessary for living the good life, however it was defined, and for having access to the intrinsic pleasures that engaging with art, music, literature and philosophy can bring. It might not be everyone's cup of tea that we were clear about - but we would have to get some introduction to these areas in order to know that. Certainly, we mused, if we were beyond the Veil and in a family setting which didn't value these things, we would want to be, as a child, given at least some access to them, to ascertain whether it was something that we did value and appreciate, even if the ultimate answer was no. On the other hand, the 'instrumental' conception clearly had its own important priorities at this second stage, involving as it did the preparation for the adult world, and gaining benefits for society. So developing interpersonal relationships, mutual respect, tolerance and friendship and other such virtues would all be essential. And the development of ideas on future careers and the knowledge and skills necessary for these would also need to be brought in here, as would ideas on the responsibilities of an adult within the community,

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on parenthood, and citizenship. But we didn't suppose that there were many who favoured the liberal education tradition who wouldn't also find these things valuable for a growing child too, to take his or her place in society. So, we decided that, again, we could more or less treat the two conceptions as the same for the course of this second stage. Jack asked: 'So where should this second stage of education be delivered?' The answer at first seemed glaringly obvious: the whole range of components of the educational process encompassed almost the whole of the experience of a child growing up. So the second stage of education should 'be delivered' (if you wanted to use that phrase) in the whole of society. We got more specific as we went through some of the components of education (I'm not giving an exhaustive list here). The learning and acquiring of skills and knowledge which might be essential for later employment could often, we assumed, be acquired in the work-places themselves. But what was needed was for young people to have acquired the ability to learn in whatever situations they found themselves, to 'master the brief, as Winston put it, of any situation. And to this end it would seem to be particularly useful for children to have experience of 'mastering the brief in a number of settings, which required them to learn new knowledge and skills in order to undertake a task, or to complete a project. At first, it seemed clear that such tasks and projects would have to be fairly contrived, and of not much use or application in the real world. But after this, as children became increasingly capable of'mastering the brief, it would seem that genuine problems and tasks could be given to them, to give them some genuine and exciting engagement with adult life. Indeed, keeping children stuck in artificially contrived and pointless tasks may cause them to lose interest very quickly in this kind of learning. We noted that this ability to master a brief would also often depend upon getting informed about particular knowledge or skills, and so these would need to be acquired in some way, so that children could step aside from the particular project, and pursue ideas for a while. For these aspects of learning, it seemed likely that some sort of 'Centres of Learning' would be useful places. There could be some adults and older children dedicated to helping the younger children get stuck into the projects, and assisting them in engaging with them, and helping point them to resources which would help them to 'master the brief .These were not to be places apart, but would very much be resources for business people and industrialists to engage with, bringing real-life problems to children, and offering their skills and expertise and insights. Not being places apart would also prevent a danger that Winston stressed, of having 'youth ghettos', which were, he guessed, the surest way of undermining any learning motivation. Indeed, what would be most desirable would be if these Centres of Learning could be in some way attached to real work-places and research and development laboratories, so that children could see how real projects were carried out, and could use materials and expertise from these. Even if these places were not physically located with them - and there didn't seem to be any

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particular general reason why they couldn't be - they could be located 'virtually' within them, by means of video-conferencing and other technological links. Indeed, such virtual links would be desirable in any case, as we wanted children to have access to a range of projects and situations, from a variety of countries, and not be narrowly tied to one, or one kind of setting. These Centres of Learning would also have 'quiet' areas - Quiet Zones where children could step back from the hurly-burly of the project and have access to learning resources to help acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for these projects. Centres of Learning could also help supplement the everyday experience of children in terms of exposing them to different role models, to help them decide what sort of careers would suit them. In everyday life they would hear parents talking about work, and their parents' friends or relatives. They would also come across different kinds of people doing different types of work when they went to the supermarket, when they saw firemen and policemen on the streets, as they saw nurses and doctors and dentists when they were sick, and so on. The whole of society was already an 'educational resource' for this kind of learning. But these Centres of Learning would add to this, and expose all children to more types of employment possibilities than if they were just confined to their everyday routines. Both of these two aspects were about education as preparation for adult life. But we didn't want to neglect the core of the 'liberal education' alternative either. So, third, liberal education needed, by definition, 'Places Apart', places not connected with the hurly-burly of other things, not connected with work or employment, where one could go and be immersed in the disciplines of knowledge, acquiring a sense of their beauty and majesty and power. Places Apart could be another type of learning centre, where children went to be introduced to these disciplines. But we reflected that they could be metaphorically, rather than physically, places apart from everything else. So, given what we knew about technological possibilities, we could see that the 'place apart' could be in a child's bedroom, for example, where the child could have important books and music available, and be linked to other learners and supporters through video or computer networks, in a virtual learning community. Or it could be part of the 'Quiet Zone' in the Centre of Learning, although there was the obvious danger that this might infect the ideas of learning as intrinsically valuable with the ideas of learning as being connected with work. On the other hand, there was the convenience factor of having these things located near to each other, and, as Fatima pointed out, some of the intrinsically valuable educational disciplines would also be informing the subjects needed to help solve projects - mathematics and physics she gave as examples of overlapping areas. Now, returning to the 'instrumental' conception, we saw that society had certain expectations of the upbringing of young people. To be a properly functioning democracy, for example, it seemed clear that all children would have to be educated in ideas and awareness of the basic functions of the constitution, the political process, international relations, as well as the basics of the law.

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They would need to be aware of their responsibilities and duties as an adult citizen, and have developed the habits, dispositions and values to want to use the political process where it was appropriate (and to know what 'appropriate' means in this context) to bring desired change, and to see its limitations. They would need to be informed of political events as they unfolded, and to put these into context. It was clear that there were likely to be educational opportunities based around these ideas already in society. There would be newspapers, magazines and books, radio, television and Internet broadcasts all containing political input and commentary. There would be political meetings and debates organized by parties and lobby groups and concerned citizens. There would be reading groups and debating societies. And there would be the actual political institutions functioning themselves, the parliaments and councils and committees. All that would be needed, it would seem, for education for citizenship in this sense would be for young people to have access to these organizations, and to be able to visit the political bodies. At this second stage it seemed likely that various people from these organizations would be keen to engage young people in their ideas and concerns, and it would seem likely that they could be encouraged to go to where young people were - the Centres of Learning perhaps - and to put forward television and radio programmes aimed at young people, and so on. So this aspect of learning would also be likely to pervade all of society. Then there would be the 'socializing' role for society, to ensure that young people engaged with the norms of society. Here again, it would seem that this was a role for the whole of society. Every place and setting in society, we expected, could be involved in this; everywhere you went, whether it was to the shops or bank or the cinema or to the park, the whole society would be geared to the tolerable standards of behaviour, and people within it would be concerned that these standards were adhered to, and passed on to others. So we concluded (and we had other deliberations, but all ended with roughly the same implications) education in the second stage builds on the foundations set for it, and creates young adults who have the basics for learning throughout life, in all its diverse forms. They know about democracy and are socialized. They have the basis of the habits, dispositions and values which will encourage learning throughout life. They have been introduced to a wide range of potential careers and lifestyle choices. And they have been introduced to the liberal education experience and are gaining a sense of whether it is for them a source of satisfaction and fulfilment. Jack said: 'Good, fine. I was afraid for a moment that you'd just repeat all you had said earlier about families. No one would have taken you seriously beyond the Veil if you had!' He then turned over the sheets on the flip-chart and wrote 'Centres of Learning (Schools)' and 'Teachers'. Again, these words sat there, the only record of our discussions. He said: 'You've talked about learning and learners a lot, but you haven't told me much about the teachers those adults who help with learning. Can you tell me a bit more about them?' It was true, we hadn't mentioned them much, we'd been very focused on

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what learners - we as learners - would be doing and want. But of course, implicit - and occasionally explicit - in all we had said there was the assumption that there would be help. After much discussion we found six distinct roles. There would be the role of the 'teacher' as inspirer to motivate people to want to learn about particular areas of knowledge. Such people would not only have superb gifts of, and a passion for, communication, but also deep knowledge of something worthwhile to communicate, and a passion for their discipline or skill. We guessed such people would be somewhat rare. We felt such great teachers would be rewarded highly. It was clear from what we knew of the technological possibilities that such people could probably reach millions of young people - and older ones too, of course - through, say, television or radio. Sometimes we guessed there would be a desire to be with these great teachers in person, so we could see huge sports stadiums or concert halls being crowded with thousands of young people wishing to be inspired and learn from them. Or smaller seminars might be broadcast on television or radio. Or the great teacher would write books and pamphlets, written in such a way that would communicate to young people's hearts and minds and inspire others to learn. Thus inspired, a multitude of other 'teachers' would need to take over. There would be need for a 'teacher' (this terminology felt so artificial) to guide young people to the learning sources, and to purvey knowledge and information to them. It was clear that such learning support (a more comfortable phrase) could come from a whole variety of human and non-human sources, including course materials, books, computer sources, the Internet, and from people who were skilled at helping young people locate and select these sources. 'But wouldn't there be so much material - so much information - to select from, that we would need someone to guide and help us through it?' asked Jack. There seemed no reason why this would be the case at all, that there could be many good technological devices which could help guide young people in this way. So the 'teacher' as 'learning guide' could be a person or technology. Then there would need to be support for students with particular difficulties, help to diagnose weaknesses and suggest remediation, and generally smooth the individual learning process. Such support could come from a human teacher, we discussed, but more likely it would be technology-based. For we saw many dangers with having this role of the teacher being embodied in a person: people wouldn't necessarily be patient enough to go through all the diagnosis and detailed careful help that a student needed. It could be awfully tedious and repetitive - the sort of activity that a computer could excel at, but which might repel a sensible person. Or a person may have his or her own prejudices about young people, and might discriminate against certain learners, be racist or sexist or homophobic, or other nasty things. We weren't ruling out that there may be some excellent human teachers skilled at this kind of technical, detailed work, who would not be subject to harmful prejudice. But these gifted individuals would be somewhat rare. If so, their skills could

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also, we assumed, be highly rewarded to help in the construction of software packages which could help computers guide even more young people through the process of diagnosis and remediation. So the third type of learning support was 'teacher' as pedagogical assistance. For some learning, it would be extremely valuable for young people to be exploring ideas with the assistance of someone who could guide them in particular ways, and expose them to nuance and interpretation and ideas of which they themselves hadn't thought. This would be 'teacher' as seminar leader. In terms of liberal education, this type of teacher could in some sense embody the discipline for the learners, supplemented and complemented of course by the other types of learning support. All of these levels notwithstanding, we could see that there would be the need for 'teachers' who could offer encouragement, hope, humour, love and support to learners, particularly if they were finding particular learning difficult, but also to share in personal successes as well as to smooth over failures. Such people could be parents, other adults and older peers within the community. Such 'teachers' would also obviously have a natural place within the Centres of Learning which we had described. It was clear that machines couldn't do this type of learning support: this was a job only for people. They didn't have to have infinite patience, or considerable technical pedagogical skills. All they had to have was humanity in abundance. And such teachers would also be on the simplest level 'moral' teachers, through their example and conduct helping young people learn virtue. We called this fifth type of teacher 'human support'. Finally, within the Centres of Learning we would need learning support from technicians to help set up technical facilities, and supervisors to carry out general 'policing duties' if necessary, for example to ensure that learners didn't damage equipment.These we labelled as 'supervisors'. All these six levels of 'teacher' were valuable to the learning process we agreed, although some would probably find more value in terms of market price, given their scarcity. Jack then wrote on the flip-chart 'teacher training', and said 'So how best can we train - or educate - the teacher in all these six domains?' We were somewhat perplexed by this. We had been talking about six very different types of teacher. It didn't seem to us sensible to think that all could be embodied in one person. Perhaps a couple of them could be - the 'supervisor' and 'human support', for example, perhaps the 'inspirer' and 'seminar leader' too. But in general it seemed we were talking about very different types of person (or machine). What did he mean? We expressed our misgivings, and Jack, furiously rubbing the back of his neck with the palm of one hand, yawned, then stretched, and did whatever other displacement activity he could think of, before looking at his watch and saying: 'I think we need a break. How about half an hour to stretch our legs and get a breather?' His two colleagues wheeled in a trolley with some soft drinks and biscuits, and all three disappeared out of the door. The six of us also stretched and yawned. Then Joel said that he wanted to

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know what teachers were like in the world beyond the Veil. He got up and walked towards Arthur, the computer. 'You can't do that', said Ruth, 'Jack told us not to.' Joel shrugged, and began typing in his request anyway. 'You can't do that', Winston said. 'Jack said we mustn't.' But Joel is still typing. Winston rushes nervously to the door, and stands reluctantly on guard. We all hear Arthur say, in his monotonic computer voice: 'You want to see examples of teachers in the world beyond the Veil? What year?' 'The present', types in Joel, saying the words aloud. 'You want to see examples of teachers in the world beyond the Veil in the present. Is Jack with you?' 'Yes', typed Joel. 'I can't see him', said Arthur. 'He's just popped out for a second, and asked me to get things going.' Arthur whirred a bit and then the whirring stopped. Winston said: 'Let's stop this, he'll be back soon.' Ruth said: 'Arthur won't let you anyway. He's not stupid.' Suddenly, Arthur's video monitor screen lit up with the brightly-coloured caption: 'Teachers: The present.' Sanjay, Fatima and I crowded around the video screen, and Ruth joined us. Only Winston stayed by the door saying: 'You shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't be.' What we saw unsettled us. The 'teacher' in the first clip was in a largish room with about 30 children, teaching mathematics. He didn't look enthused by the subject, nor did his charges. We then saw him helping a child with a particular problem. He wasn't patient with her either, and both soon gave up; he moved on to another, who received the same cursory treatment. We had to know more. Joel typed away, furiously asking Arthur questions about this teacher. Our worst fears seemed to be confirmed. The teacher was in a 'school', which was where a thousand young people were all gathered together. This was their mathematics lesson, which would last for 40 minutes or so. And yes, the teacher was there as the physical embodiment of all six of the roles we had listed -just as Jack had implied by his question about teacher training. The man had to inspire the class to want to learn. He had to help the children through problems, offer diagnosis and suggest remediation. And he was their only source for this, no computers to help - but obviously he didn't have time to help out with all the 30 children in 40 minutes, or indeed twenty or even ten children. He had to cajole and encourage, support and foster the young people too. And meanwhile he had to police and supervise. What an odd assortment of duties and qualities to expect from one person! Then Arthur showed us another video clip of another teacher. This made us feel slightly better at first. This teacher was clearly very inspiring - a wonderful teacher in our first sense. He too was teaching mathematics. The children were hanging on his every word as he sublimated his passions and energies into a topic to which he was clearly devoted. The children's youthful exuberance seemed channelled into a love of mathematics.

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But then Joel asked the questions to which we really didn't want to know the answers. And when Arthur had answered, Joel said:'It's crazy.This teacher, this leader, has the same size class as the earlier guy! He teaches only a couple of hundred students a week, just the same as the earlier guy!' It seemed so unfair and so wasteful. When we knew there was the technological capability that this teacher could reach thousands or even millions of young people, and inspire them with a love of mathematics, why was he confined to reaching only a hundred? Finally, Arthur showed us a clip of a teacher who just wasn't controlling the class at all, failing completely in the 'supervisory' role. But when the camera zoomed in to focus on her helping one particularly difficult youngster, we marvelled at her technique. She was patient, and had many cunning tricks and connivances to get the young person to make mistakes which revealed the limits of his understanding, and then be ready with advice and help on what to do to overcome the problem. But clearly, there wasn't time for her to help all the youngsters in the class. Again, we thought how much more effectively her skills could be used if she was used to help devise an interactive programme which could reach thousands of young people who were having similar problems. But Arthur told us that, far from that, she was being marked down as a teacher because of her lack of crowd control, and would soon be lost to the profession. Again, pushing her into the one-size-fits-all of a teacher for all six levels seemed madness. Suddenly, Winston called out: 'Quick. He's coming.' When Jack returned, he found us all innocently finishing off our biscuits and slurping back soda. He said, 'There are a few questions I need to be clear about. Are you saying that you think the education you have outlined is an entitlement for everyone?' He wrote the word on the flip-chart. We realized we were saying exactly that. From behind the Veil, not knowing what position we would be put back into, whether we would be the child of the millionaire or the poor unemployed person, we felt sure, having seen the array of what education had to offer in life, that we wouldn't want to be deprived of any of these experiences. That would be unfair, we felt. So an entitlement, yes. 'So', Jack said, 'how will everyone be granted this entitlement? What will happen if some don't want to learn? Or if their parents get in the way?' None of us liked the sound of that. What would be needed (said Jack) would be some more formalized mechanisms to help ensure that all children were able to partake of all the benefits that education could offer. We thought that all of the ideas we had come up with could be codified in various forms, with parents and children informed of where they could find all the relevant types of experiences. (We started to talk about how it could be funded too, but Jack reminded us that we would be going into that in some detail in the next session, so we left it till then.) Jack didn't think that this mechanism would be enough. Couldn't we think of any others? Joel could. 'We've got to make all parts of the educational process as exciting and as enticing as can be. We would want to employ the greatest

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communicators to motivate and inspire children to clamour for educational opportunities, and parents to feel that they were really not doing their children justice if they didn't get involved. We would want skilful and aggressive marketing enticing children and their parents into education.' This seemed sensible. If children didn't want to take part, then inspire and motivate them. If there were parents who were reluctant to introduce them into educational opportunities in all their fullness, then inspire and motivate them to do so. And in this way, education would be reinforced as a norm in society. Jack nodded. 'Yes, but these mechanisms might not work. Suppose there are still some children and some parents who don't want to learn or won't introduce their children to the whole range of experiences on offer? Then what?' Fatima suggested that we could have the more formal mechanism of mentoring which we'd described earlier for the first stage. All children who might be at risk of not wanting to learn, and all parents who were at risk of not wanting their children to learn, would be able to link in with someone who could encourage, cajole, persuade and motivate them to take part in the educational processes. Jack looked slightly exasperated: 'Remember you have the power of the state at your disposal if you wish. Wouldn't you consider compulsion!' Oh yes, that was it. Compulsion was what he was after. Joel chuckled under his breath: 'Children who don't want to learn should be compelled to learn!' Jack interjected that it was for the children's benefit, that the compulsion would be on the part of parents to allow their children the opportunity - the entitlement - to learn. We could see the point in that. However, it did seem quite a drastic measure, with possible undesirable consequences. For if parents were compelled to send their children to Centres of Learning, say, would this really make them value them? Would children value what they are being forced to attend? And compulsory education would be rather hard to police, we felt. Because there were such a range of educational settings, how would we know that children weren't taking part, when they could be doing this in a variety of places? And if something was hard to police then this would either lead to the flouting of the law - bringing the law into disrespect - or to the pushing of this range of educational opportunities into institutional settings which were easy to police. We felt we shouldn't commit ourselves to compulsion yet, that it should only be there as a last resort. Indeed, we would need to know that there were significant numbers of parents who were preventing or not encouraging their children to take part in the educational opportunities on offer. And we would want to know that the kinds of persuasion which we had suggested previously had been tried and were not working for those who were not taking part. Only if both conditions were satisfied would we consider compulsion to be sensible. 'So if those conditions are not m e t . . . there should be universal compulsion?' he said, writing these words on the flip-chart. That wasn't what we had meant at all. The compulsion should only be very directly focused on those who were not educating their children. Why would

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anyone else need it? Secretly, I think, we all knew that those conditions were pretty hard to meet. Given what we had discovered about education, it seemed incredible that there would be many parents who wouldn't want their children to take part in it, or could resist the pressure of the norms of society, and that there would be many children who wouldn't want to take part themselves. Jack said: Tine. Those are your thoughts on stages one and two. Let's move on to the third stage. What are your thoughts here?' We looked at each other slightly puzzled. There was no third stage. Or at least no third stage of preparation. For the third stage was life itself. Jack back-peddled. 'Oh, I misunderstood, so stage two was longer than I thought. What, it would end at age 18?' Was that the age children reached maturity? We had thought it would be a lot younger than that, perhaps 13 or 14. All we had spoken of would prepare children to become young adults, and prepare them for life-long learning. As they reached maturity - which we agreed would vary from person to person they would be free to engage and specialize in whatever discipline and interests they had. Those young adults who felt that liberal education was their vocation (if you'll excuse the pun) would find ways of pursuing that in depth now. We had many suggestions about the ways in which this could happen, although we assumed that this would vary, given factors we couldn't know about in society. But the obvious way would be for such young people to apprentice themselves to masters in the disciplines that they had grown to love. Or, taking the 'Place Apart' notion literally, we suspected that there would be places like monasteries where those with this vocation could go, and immerse themselves in their love of learning for its own sake. And of course we didn't rule out that there would be some for whom liberal education was not a vocation, but who would want to pursue disciplines further for their own sake in a more modest way, in their spare time, or for short periods. As far as the instrumental conception of education was concerned, the world was now one's oyster. The world of employment and citizenship and parenthood were all waiting to welcome the young adult. And, having learnt all the basics necessary and having been progressively introduced into the adult world through, for example, the Centres of Learning, they would be ready to move forward, continually learning as required. Jack seemed to have something else in mind, though: 'The key does seem to be how these children will be able to afford to do all of this. But that can wait until next session.' What couldn't wait was our protests about young adults being called 'children'. That was not their entitlement. It all smacked of prolonging dependency on parents. That seemed something that neither parents nor the young adults would want. Jack smiled and pulled down the various sheets he had written on. 'These will be very helpful' he said, 'in writing up my summary'.

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COMMENTARY Careful readers will have noted that the words Jack had written on his sheets were: 'Nurseries, day care, Centres of Learning (Schools), Teachers, Teacher training, Entitlement, Universal compulsion'. I'm not sure these key words really form the basis for a useful summary of the group's discussion. But nor would terms like 'Centres of Learning, Quiet Zones and Places Apart'. For the particulars of what the group came up with aren't as important as the principles underlying them - as such particulars would no doubt vary from society to society. The focus group's ideas on the family may have caused some consternation to readers, so we'll look further at that, as well as revisiting schooling and education. The role of the family The focus group's view that the first five years were critical years for a child's development are in agreement with a wide range of research within each of the major psychology paradigms (see, for example, Donaldson (1978), Meadows (1986, 1993), Vasta et al (1995)). During these early years, for example, it is widely accepted that the fundamentals of the child's intellectual, physical and emotional development are laid down. And it is a key period for learning to take place because, apart from the super-receptiveness of the infant's brain to sensory stimulation at this time, there is also the fact that much learning at this time can simply be fun: 'It's easy and amusing! It's a jolly game, not an obligation or a chore, as learning . . . often gets to be during primary and later grades in school' (Harvery 1994, p. 3). But if education at this stage is so important, then why leave it to families? This was Jack's response, the fear of the 'ad hoc' nature of this solution. The 'ad hoc' nature of many solutions proposed here is a theme that we'll keep returning to in later sessions, and suggesting that it is not a valid reason for wanting the state to be involved in education. What considerations could we bring to bear in this case? The major consideration we must address is the ubiquitous argument that there are better ways of ensuring educational opportunities for young children than within families, that the 'naturalness' of the family environment for young children is overstated. Usefully, two of our 'Millennial Four', Michael Barber and George Walden, think along these lines. Both cite American research on the importance of pre-school education, and how this can reduce future delinquency and improve life-chances.2 Walden initially thinks this supports the notion that 'the advantages of getting three-year-old children away from fractured homes in inner cities into a secure, purposeful environment, if only for a few hours a day, seems self-evident' (p. 116). But from there he jumps quickly to wanting universal state nurseries for all 3-year-olds and above (pp. 121-2). Barber endorses not only Labour's promise of'Nursery education for all threeand four-year-olds' (Barber 1996, p. 244), but goes further and suggests that the importance of these early years requires that 'we need a policy not for nursery

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education, but for comprehensive birth-to-five education' (p. 244). Crucially, both see that this is no longer an issue concerning the small number of dysfunctional families, but is about all families. Walden and Barber of course are not isolated voices in this regard. Others in the UK saying identical things include the National Commission on Education - an influential cross-party body chaired by Sir Claus Mosler (National Commission on Education 1994, ch. 6) - Margaret Hodge (who until recently chaired the House of Commons Education Select Committee, and is now on the Labour Government's education front benches (1995)) and the Equal Opportunities Commission (1990). The deliberations of our focus group are beginning to look distinctly unfashionable. Are they completely off-beam here? We'd better look at the key American evidence which so influenced Barber and Walden, the findings of the High/Scope Perry Preschool project. Indeed, it turns out that this, together with a tiny number of other similar high-profile, 'lavishly-funded, show projects'3 is the only substantial evidence that those seeking to justify universal child care have at their disposal. So George Walden wasn't simply being lazy citing this as his only evidence, but realistically appraising the limits of what was available to support his case. The project recruited 123 black children aged 3 or 4 from inner-city Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the early 1960s. The children were assigned to either the programme itself (58 children) or to a control group (65 children). The majority, who entered at age 3, spent two years in the programme, while some 4-year-olds spent one year only. The children came from severely disadvantaged families, as measured by all sorts of social indicators, and were also very low in intelligence. The programme developed a special High/Scope curriculum and systematic staff training in this and the appropriate pedagogy, under constant supervision by specialist consultants. This involved a daily two-and-a-half-hour classroom session, plus a weekly one and a half hour visit to each mother and child in their homes. The Perry team assessed the children at several points up to the age of 27. David Weikart, the director of the project, and his colleagues were certainly excellent at presenting their findings to the widest possible audience through the media. So much so that one of the arch-critics of child care in general, Patricia Morgan, agrees that the project achieved a significant amount (1996, p. 77). Others are slightly less sanguine about its impact; Herrnstein and Murray, for example, note that the effects reported by the research group in terms of 'a higher likelihood of high school graduation and some post-high school education, higher employment rates and literacy scores, lower arrest rates and fewer years spent in special education classes' are small, and 'some of them fall short of statistical significance' (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p. 405). Spitz (1986) is the source they point to which suggests that the effects may well have been rather minimal. But in any case, let us go along with Morgan's more generous interpretation, optimistically accepting all of the project's successes - as have Walden and Barber. Do we then have to accept that it shows that pre-school education

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away from families is such a good thing? I don't think so, for four major reasons. First the Perry Preschool project is not just highly unusual, it is virtually unique in finding such impacts. 'No other programme has recorded similar effects on teen pregnancy, crime, welfare and employment and other social outcomes' (Morgan 1996, p. 78, italics in the original). Significantly, two other projects run by the same team, using, for instance, different curriculum models, 'did not achieve the same results'. Indeed, children in one of the interventions 'had engaged in twice as many serious delinquent acts' as those in the control groups (Schweinhart et al 1986). And reviewing eleven other studies of similar interventions, the Perry researchers found a mixed bag of results, certainly nothing matching the magnitude and range of the findings shown in their own work. Second, we can note that it is highly expensive intervention, quite unlike much of what goes on in terms of nursery care. The teacher-child ratio of about one to five was high, and 'most of the teachers had a master's degree in appropriate child development and social work fields' (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p. 404). Perry teachers were also paid about ten per cent above the average teachers' pay, which may have been a contributing factor to the low turnover rate. As Herrnstein and Murray note, 'Perry Preschool resembled the average Head Start program as a Ferrari resembles the family sedan' (p. 404). The expense of the project limits the ways in which it may be replicable in replacing the family environment, as we shall see in a moment. Third, the programme only shows that such intensive and expensive intervention was beneficial for severely disadvantaged children, not that it would be appropriate in general for normal children - or that such intervention would bring more benefits for children than being at home with their families. Finally, we must also note that the intervention involved the weekly visit to the family home, and involvement of the mother throughout. So 'it is simply impossible to attribute the impressive effects . . . to only the centre-based programme' (Haskins 1989, p. 279). It may well have been the involvement in family support that was a crucial factor, which would have a completely different policy implication. Given all these factors, we can say that this key piece of evidence is not likely to be particularly valuable to throw out the musings of the focus group with regard to the importance of the family. And the picture gets worse when we look at evidence concerning the everyday realities of ordinary nursery schools and day-care centres. As far as British evidence is concerned, there is the research of the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU), based at the Institute of Education, University of London, which followed children of full-time working mothers in 33 private nurseries since 1982. While lauded in the media as showing the positive effects of child care, especially that 'daycare children tended to be less timid and more sociable with unfamiliar adults than non-daycare children' (Morgan 1996, p. 23), it is hard to see how generally optimistic conclusions can be drawn from their own evidence. For instance, the daycare children didn't perform as well as the home children on language tests. And while the social differences

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between nursery and non-nursery groups disappeared once the children were in school, 'the language problem remained at six' - even though 'the nursery group parents had higher status jobs, more qualifications and higher salaries than average' (p. 24). Another worrying feature reflected one of the realities of child care - that of frequent changes of carers and care settings. In this regard, curiously relegated to the unpublished and consequently unpublicized portion of the Thomas Coram research, was the finding that 'children who had experienced frequent changes of care setting were significantly slower in both cognitive and linguistic development' (p. 24), and these disadvantages were still present by the time the child was six years of age. Anomalies such as these within the Thomas Coram findings have led to bizarre attempts to explain away some of the more disturbing findings. So, for example, the research report agrees that nurseries do have an adverse effect on language development. But to minimize the impact of this, it notes, 'if communication (received by the child) and responsiveness (to the child's communication) are controlled for', then this effect disappears (Moss and Melhuish 1990, p. 56). But this clever sleight of hand seems deliberately designed to conceal the fact that in nurseries there generally is less communication with, and responsiveness to, children than in family settings. Or again, child aggression was highest in the nurseries and least in the home setting for 18-month-old children. The Thomas Coram researchers note that this was because 'of the greater number of children in nurseries'. But isn't this precisely one of the objections to nurseries, that there will be many more children in them, rather than a contingent fact that can be discounted in order to support their positive conclusions? The Thomas Coram research is not alone in these negative findings. A large-scale meta-analysis of 88 studies published since 1957 found that if a child had regular day care exceeding twenty hours per week, then this brought an 'unmistakably negative effect on social-emotional development, behaviour and attachment' (Morgan 1996, p. 27). Moreover, there were also negative effects, albeit slightly less dramatic, in terms of cognitive development. Crucially, these negative effects were still present when factors such as the quality of care and socio-economic status of the families were controlled for. But don't young children need some such peer group settings for improved social development - to become, as the Thomas Coram research showed, 'less timid and more sociable'? On this point we can first note that these apparently 'very positive' notions should be treated with some caution, 'since this can be a sign of loneliness or neglect. It is a typical observation made of children in orphanages' (p. 40). Second, we shouldn't assume that 'peer talk' among young children is particularly advantageous to the child's development: 'Peer talk has little positive influence on language; its structure is poor and its content egocentric.' In day care, 'peer talk all too easily tends to replace more important caregiver talk' (p. 49). Third, there is increasing evidence to show that child care also leads to increased aggressiveness among children (which is of course not incompatible with the more positive spin of 'less timid and more

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sociable'), as was found in the Thomas Coram study. The seminal work in this area is that of Ron Raskins. He compared children who attended full-time day care from ages of about 3 months until they entered school at age 5, with other groups who had either no, or little, day-care experience. He assessed the children before going to school and over the first three years of schooling. The day-care children 'were more likely to hit, kick and push; bully, threaten, swear and argue; not to use strategies like discussion or walking away to deal with difficulties and to be rated by teachers as having aggressiveness as a serious deficit of social behaviour' (Haskins 1985). Moreover, this was not because the youngsters had attended poor quality day care. His sample were involved 'in one of the more well-known intellectually orientated intervention programmes - designed to help disadvantaged children do better at school' (Morgan 1996, p. 41). The picture from this and other evidence is remarkable in its consistency: day care, after adjustment has been made for socioeconomic circumstances, disadvantages children behaviourally. Finally, child-care facilities are also notoriously - and inevitably, given that many young children are crowded together - unhealthy places, with some physicians labelling child-care nurseries the 'childcare cloaca, or sewer': 'American children in centres run risks of infection two or three times higher than those for children cared for at home' (p. 38). The picture of non-parental child care is looking rather less rosy. Indeed, researchers in the USA have argued that 'care in children's own homes . . . conforms closest to government guidelines for standards in care arrangements' - more likely to satisfy this criterion than nurseries or child-care centres (Waite et al 1991, p. 46). One pilot project at Yale University achieved standards of care, adult-child ratios and physical environment as 'ideal as a programme could be' (p. 50). Yet their own evaluation report concluded: When adults have a fair capacity to be parents, their young children do best when cared for mainly by parents ... Group care, even under the best circumstances, is stressful for very young children . . . It is very difficult to duplicate in the centre more than a few of the experiences most appropriate for the toddler, experiences that he could have at home without anyone giving the matter a moment's thought . . . the child from one to three is not by nature a highly suitable member of a large group... difficulties magnify as the group increases in size... separation reactions become more acute as the day lengthens and fatigue decreases coping ability. (Provence et al. 1977, p. 277) But is it inevitable that it will be like this, or could it be better, given an appropriate 'comprehensive birth-to-five' education policy? I suggest that there are three reasons why child-care facilities are never likely to be as good for young children as family settings. First, it is implicit that defenders of day care must believe there are economies of scale which can be achieved if one person looks after several infants, rather than a mother looking after only one or two. But these

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economies of scale, as we have noted, militate against what a child needs from their early educational environment, so need to be discounted (at least if our concern is early education). Secondly, there is the belief - sometimes explicit, always implicit - that mothers4 are 'over-qualified' for looking after their children. This carries the inevitable implication that child care 'can be handed over to someone whose labour is worth less than the mother's own' (Morgan 1996, p. 33). Of course, this then means that child-care workers will be at or near the bottom of the earnings scale - in the UK they earn just above waitresses (the lowest-paid group). Notice that this is a logical truism. Clearly, if families are paying for their child care, then child carers will have to be paid less than what their mothers can earn. With low wages, this will attract a certain type of person to the job, with, significantly, the almost inevitable high turnover of staff, as other more attractive options are found. Such high turnover increases the instability of the situation in which children find themselves: 'Teams of interchangeable people may be able to clean premises but, while it matters little if floors are swept by different people every week, it matters a lot if children's caregivers are repeatedly changed' (p. 53). For the American National Center for Clinical Infant Programs stresses the importance of the stability of the environment: 'Warm, loving human relationships based on constancy of care' are essential for development and learning. Since 'early communication tends to be idiosyncratic, and pre-verbal children need time to develop patterns of behaviour based on mutually understood signals', a child needs familiar caregivers who 'know a particular infant's style of communication and can "decode"' (p. 31). Unfamiliar caregivers are 'more likely to misunderstand, or not comprehend at all'. But within a day-care environment, for reasons we have noted, such stability is unlikely ever to be achieved, undermining their educational potential. Finally, it is also almost logically impossible for a paid worker to be as concerned about a child as his or her parents will be. 'A basic, almost insurmountable, difference between hired caregiver and parent is that it is the adults who know, have known and will go on knowing an individual child who also have the greatest motivation to serve his welfare and invest in his development' (p. 32). Penelope Leach notes how this contrasts with an outside caregiver, who has less reason than a mother to celebrate an infant and therefore needs less cause to be indifferent to him. A nursery worker has less reason still to celebrate this infant because she has others to care for who may overload her or whom she may prefer. How well an infant thrives . . . depends on how much time he also spends with someone who cares not just for but about him. (1995, p. 86) Perhaps it is worth drawing back from this abstract level of discussion, to the level of human stories. One father was quoted in the Press as follows:

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Significantly, the distressed parent notes 'It was not the nursery's fault. The staff are highly trained and, by all accounts, most parents are enthusiastic about the place'. All these considerations I suggest reinforce the focus group's conclusions that the ideal educational environment for young children is the family setting. Agreed, support for dysfunctional families might be needed - and we'll come to what form this might take in the concluding chapter. But trying to mend broken families by assuming that the medicine must apply to all families is entirely perverse. If some families aren't working, then the solution isn't to further undermine all families, but to help mend the broken ones, through a variety of incentives and procedures. But there are final considerations which might lead some to object to this conclusion. Chief among them, presumably, is that it is sexist and chauvinistic wanting to drag mothers 'back to the kitchen', and that it is in the mother's interest to be able to have day care, to enhance her liberation and all that. Second is that time has moved on and we can't possibly afford to have only one parent working, because one parent couldn't afford to raise a family. To challenge the latter point, we can note that in the USA, in constant dollars, 'the income of a full-time, year-round male worker in general nonfarm labor in 1991 was at the level of his counterpart in 1958, when the norm was still one income per family' (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, p. 538). Going back still further, the same unskilled labourer in 1991 'made about twice the real income of his counterpart in 1920, a year when no one thought to question whether a laborer could support a family' (p. 538). To the first objection (and others similar) I reiterate what Winston said in his remarks in the focus group: in this book we are concerned about education, and how best to secure, nurture and enhance it in society. If our current predilections within society (for example, for two-income families) seem to militate against the advancement of early childhood education, then it is for us to point it out, not shy away from the fact because it is politically incorrect to do so.

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Education versus schooling again The second fundamental principle concerns the distinction between schooling and education. Some might assume that with their invention of Centres of Learning the focus group is conceding that schools are necessary. But this is far from the case. Crucially, there is no pretence that all of education goes on there. They are places with a specific function - preparation for working life. No one thinks that ideas on parenting should come from there - those come from the family; no one thinks that ideas on citizenship or the good life are best learnt there either - there are places for that kind of learning elsewhere in society. These places as preparation for working life are not removed from real work-places, but connected physically or virtually to them and informed by genuine problems and tasks which need solutions. Nor are they youth ghettos, breeding alienation and youth culture. Professor David Hargreaves, of Cambridge University, outlines the problem: If one wanted to create a separate teenage culture, if one wanted to make adolescents feel cut-off from adult responsibilities, the best way would be to do as we now do: segregate them for most of their lives outside the family with those who happen to have been born in the same year. (Hargreaves 1994, p. 27) And Professor Michael Rutter suggests that the most promising approach to explaining youth alcoholism, drug dependency, suicide and depression, as well as crime, is to look to the striking growth of this youth culture which marks off adolescents as a separate group in a more decisive way than earlier in the century. These changes, combined with the lengthening of youth and the postponement of economic independence, may tend to insulate young people from the influence of adults, in particular their parents, and increase the influence of the peer group. It may therefore be that it is an isolated youth culture that leads to the increase in psychosocial disorders. (Rutter and Smith 1995, p. 801) Indeed, the suspicion that schools - compulsory worlds apart - are inhibiting the preparation of young people for employment is strengthened by research exploring how young people respond to 'work experience' - time taken out of school in the final years of schooling, spending a week or two in a place of work. In Jamieson and Lightfoot's (1982) study, for example, many teachers who visited students on placements remarked upon how their pupils had matured in the experience, becoming more adult in a short period of time; indeed, a large minority of pupils said that they had objected to their teacher's visit, because it undermined their status as an adult in the work-place. Wellington (1992) similarly found that teachers thought that young people gained from being away from their peer group (p. 167). It also, they said, heightened pupils' sensitivity with regard to other people, and their confidence, giving

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them a broader perspective on life. Attendance of persistent truants was often better at work experience than at school. A recurring theme, from teachers and pupils alike, was of 'a possible deficiency in the school setting, i.e. that work experience provides pupils with the maturity, and ability to get on with other people, which school life cannot' (p. 179). Wellington concludes: The belief sometimes put forward that a pupil's transition into a 'worker' is particularly problematic for young people is not supported by this study. For most pupils the difficult transition appeared to be the move from work experience back into the role of school pupil - a direct reversal of the traditional rhetoric on transition difficulties, (p. 179) Very importantly, the emphasis which the focus group put on the early years - from nought to 5 or 6 - also brings into stark relief this distinction between schooling and education. It would certainly be puzzling to our group to realize that most educationalists, when writing about education, start with primary schools, and age 5 or 6; or, if pressed, reflect on the desirable curriculum for nursery schools for younger children. But this both neglects the importance of the earlier years of a child's life, when so much is learnt, and so much potential is created or destroyed, and falls for the trap that education is just what goes on in schools. I remember once when I was doing research in primary schools for the UK National Foundation for Educational Research, one teacher was due to teach weather symbols and basic aspects of meteorology to her class as part of the National Curriculum Science syllabus. The teacher had prepared an interesting lesson plan to help introduce her class of 5- and 6-year-olds to the topic, and was looking forward to helping them learn it all. Much to her consternation, she found that the class knew it all already. How? They'd picked it up, without thinking about it, from watching weather reports on television. It was a lesson for both me and the teacher that there was more to learning than just what was planned for the classroom. Related to the conflation between schooling and education, the focus group's discussion of the role of the teacher and technology is also worth mentioning. They thought that there were six roles of the 'teacher', viz.: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Teacher as inspirer. Teacher as learning guide. Teacher as pedagogical assistance (NB, not assistant!). Teacher as seminar leader. Teacher as human support. Teacher as supervisor.

And they were also fairly clear that it was unlikely that these six roles could be found in the same person - or that it was desirable to have them in the same person. Indeed, for two of them (learning guide and pedagogical assistance) it was suggested that these could definitely better be provided for by technology than by a person.

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Several of the educationalists we have met already would be horrified by this notion. Professor Alex Molnar, for example, criticizing moves by companies to increase information technology and video provision in schools, argues: A quick visit to a few schools and classrooms would convince most people that what children need more of is sustained educational relationships with competent adults, not more television programs or even computer monitors. (Molnar 1996, p. 75) In a similar vein, and building on many of Molnar's arguments, Robertson (1998) is also very antagonistic to technology, believing it undermines the power of teachers. In places her writing cries out for a different interpretation, but seems so caught up in the needs of teachers rather than learners that she ignores the obvious implications. For instance, she notes that one programme in Canada - the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project - wanted to 'test what happens when students have "total, unlimited access to technology'" (quoted p. 130). She notes that it would be far better to research the potential for every student to have 'total, unlimited access to teachers' (p. 131). But of course, what she fails to note here is one rather substantial and beneficial difference, as far as learning is concerned, between teachers and technology: you can't call up a teacher late in the evening when you want help with your algebra; a teacher won't patiently go through, for the hundredth time, your problems with quadratic equations. A computer lacks features which endear us to humans in other areas, but not necessarily in terms of diagnosis and remediation. A computer can give us 'total, unlimited access', whereas a teacher cannot. It was this insight that the focus group had, not that technology was always there to supplant the human touch. Robertson gets misty-eyed about teachers: Stanford educator Larry Cuban emphasizes what every teacher knows: classrooms are built around relationships, and they aren't important only to students. 'The touches, smiles, warmth, and even the frowns, annoyance and anger that pass between teacher and student cement ties that deepen learning and give gratification to teachers'. (Cuban 1986, p. 89, quoted in Robertson 1998, p. 153) I think more sensibly the focus group recognized that sometimes the 'frowns, annoyance and anger' get in the way of learning, and that is true particularly for low attainers and disadvantaged youngsters. (In any case, if it was so important, I'm sure we could program machines which did frown and get annoyed and impatient, as every good teacher does.) Robertson has another relevant criticism here. She criticizes what seems to lie behind many of the pro-technology lobby: 'the assumption that the purpose of education is primarily, or even exclusively, to acquire more information more quickly ... [But] Not only are we swamped by information

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we have no control over, but we don't know what to do with it' (pp. 138-9). While this may be true of some advocates, there was certainly no place for this in the discussion of the focus group, as far as I can tell, where they were so enamoured by technology that they conceived of education only as gaining information. Certainly information was part of the process, which was why it seemed to be very amenable to use information technology where appropriate. But the whole educational process was totally imbued with values - the 'something else' which Robertson bemoans is lacking from the information lobby. She notes that this 'something else' is infinitely more difficult... than accessing yet more information. But the tool shapes the task - and since the computer is much better at adding to the information landfill than dealing with the emotional, social, and other intellectual needs of students, we are redirecting schools to teach students how to acquire more information faster, and leaving other goals behind, (p. 139) But one of the key points made by the focus group is that the 'emotional, social and other intellectual needs' of young people may not necessarily be best nurtured in 'schools', and that trying to push them into that setting may be the worst kind of sin. Many of the conclusions of the focus group would seem to fit in very well so far with ideas on transforming education enunciated by Tom Bentley, in his Learning Beyond the Classroom. He notes that, above the age of 14, there is not much point in compelling young people into schooling at all (1999, p. 185), and says: Enrolling in a school would no longer mean entering an institution that would educate within its walls, but entering into a covenant to find the most appropriate, challenging combination of learning opportunities ... The student's education would step outside the classroom, integrating diverse perspectives and experiences into a rounded, disciplined individual view of the world, (pp. 185-6) And he notes how this fits in with Ivan Illich's ideas from 30 years ago, that we should 'de-school' society, creating 'learning webs' through which learners could find the relevant learning peers, contexts, educators, professionals or para-professionals from which to learn (p. 182). Again, we find ourselves in agreement with this. (Don't worry, there will be plenty to disagree with on Bentley, when we come to look at the ways of carrying these things forward.) But mention of Ivan Illich reminds me of Professor Robin Barrow's trenchant critique of'freeschooling and deschooling' some twenty-odd years ago (Barrow 1978). Won't his analysis undermine this sort of case? I'm not sure it does. For Professor Barrow notes:

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Nobody has ever pretended that schools were the best or even a good way of teaching journalism or train-driving. What has been consistently maintained by educators in favour of schooling is that there are some abstract bodies of knowledge that have a value and can be (most) effectively taught in schools, (p. 141) But what is being said now, consistently throughout our society, from prime ministers down to teachers, is that schools are the best places to learn not just journalism and train-driving, but to learn about democracy and citizenship and sex and drugs (and rock'n'roll) and parenting and health, and just about everything else you can think of in between. Professor Barrow endorses liberal education, believing in a body of knowledge that can be passed on between the generations - and if he is right that this is best learned in a schoollike setting, then this would be entirely consistent with the discussion above. What we are saying here is that, because of the conflation between schooling and education, schools are being increasingly seen as the appropriate vehicles for taking over all the educational functions in society. This goes against everything we have argued here about education. At the beginning of this chapter, we said that we didn't have to be committed to the notion of 'de-schooling'. However, the conclusion now stares us in the face. Once considerations from behind the veil of ignorance are brought to bear, and provided that the definitions of education are taken seriously, almost inevitably we will be moved to see schools as a very odd vehicle for education in general, although school-like institutions may be useful for particular, carefully defined purposes. We may wonder why, as a society, we seem obsessed with putting all our educational eggs into this one basket - a basket so full of holes it is unlikely to be able to carry the eggs far. With this discussion in mind, consider these recent pronouncements from the UK government: Schools can promote personal responsibility by teaching children the values of self-reliance, caring for the environment and caring for others. Personal, social and health education is an integral and important element of the secondary school curriculum. (DfEE 1999, p. 149) . . . schools are well placed to contribute to pupils' spiritual and moral development . . . . schools are often the only safe haven where young people can develop a sense of belonging to a secure community. (SCAA1996,p.ll) Good PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) . . . helps young people to learn about the value of family life, including marriage, good parenting and stable relationships. It provides opportunities for them to play a positive part in the life of their school, neighbourhood and communities. (DfEE 1999)

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When we read pronouncements such as these we need to do a double-take and ask: these things might seem desirable, they might seem educational, but why are these things being proposed for schools? Is this the best place to learn them? Or is this another indication of the government seeking to extend control over all aspects of civil society? If we seek to take these things into state schooling, won't they get distorted? Is it another example of the dangerous impact of conflating schooling and education? I think that should be the inevitable conclusion thus far. However, a warning: at several points in what follows, in order to make points easier to conceptualize - given that we haven't had the luxury of having our minds purged of the concept of schooling - we will focus on schools as a vehicle for exploring some ideas about markets and choice and competition. But this will be done only for this specific reason, and not because we are falling back into the trap of conflating schooling and education. This is the first strand of our 'reclaiming education' - reclaiming the concept of education from the tyranny of the concept of schooling. But now we come to what may be the more uphill struggle. Can we reclaim the practice of education from the state? Raised in this discussion was the role of the family in education - which many may have found contentious. This relates to the concepts of equity and equality of opportunity. We turn to these - perhaps the most powerful and intuitive of the major justifications for the state to be involved in education - next. NOTES 1

It is only a 'sharing'. I won't be getting into the deeper philosophical debates about what the verb 'to educate' signifies, nor getting involved in too much conceptual analysis about education, nor seeking to adjudicate between the different justifications for education put forward by a whole host of philosophers. Readers who wish to pursue these ideas further could consult Wilson (1979) as a great introduction, then Bailey (1984), Barrow (1976,1981), Dearden (1968), Hirst (1974), Passmore (1980), Peters (1966), Pring (1976) and White (1982) - all books which have influenced my writing in one way or another. 2 Barber (1996, p. 242) doesn't give any source, but it is clear he has in mind the Perry Preschool project. Walden cites one source which is, according to him, 'BerruetaClement, 1984, Changed Lives: Monographs of the High, Scope (sic) Educational Research Foundation' (cited on p. 116). I assume he means the report by BerruetaClement, J. R., Schweinhart, L. I, Barnett, W. S., Epstein A. S. and Weikart, D. P. 1984, Changed Lives: The Effects of the Perry Preschool Program through Age 19, Ypsilanti, Michigan, High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. 3 There is also evidence from Sweden held up by pre-school advocates. But this is found to be mixed, not reinforcing the accepted picture that it is pre-schooling, rather than family socio-economic status say, which is the crucial determining factor in better school performance and social factors. Indeed, some studies in Sweden are not finding this effect at all, or finding the reverse effect, that homereared infants were the more explorative and communicative (Morgan 1996, p. 28). 4 I have followed the standard usage in the literature and written of mothers - but of course there is nothing in what I have said which would rule out that it could be

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fathers instead doing this - all we need is one parent at home. However, there may be sound biological and social reasons why this is a role for the mother, not the father, which are beyond the scope of this book to explore (see for example Barkow et al. 1992, or for a more popular account, Moir and Moir 1998).

Session 2 Equity

PROLOGUE A touching faith Maris O'Rourke, Director of Education at the World Bank - and previously the Secretary for Education in New Zealand, behind many of their choice and devolution reforms - was asked at a recent conference in London1 why she thought that governments should be involved in education. 'The bottom line', she said, 'is to promote equity.' There were many murmurs of assent in the room. My experience is that this is the bottom line for most people who give this matter any thought. Equity - or one of its popular synonyms, equality of opportunity or just plain equality - is the principal reason why government intervention in education is justified. There will be other reasons too, reasons which we shall come to in later sessions, but the promotion of equity seems to be the most intuitively obvious and appealing. This is neatly encapsulated in one of the anti-privatization books which we have already encountered, No More Teachers, No More Books, by Heather-Jane Robertson. She writes: Giving all children the opportunity to enjoy an equal education, determined not by the wealth of their families but by the resources of their communities, is ... a truly democratic ideal... a shared public commitment in achieving greater equity is the only reason for public schools to exist. (1998, p. 188) I find it a rather touching faith that governments could provide equity in education, given their record to date. As Robertson notes, this is an ideal which 'has never been fully realized' (p. 188). But it's touching to think that she, and others like her, suppose that it ever could be realized. In the developed world, we see a huge disparity in state schools from middle-class to working-class

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areas and within areas themselves. In the UK, for example, in terms of outcomes, Dr John Marks (1999) has shown that some comprehensive schools will have five or six times fewer pupils obtaining comparable levels at the school-leaving examinations, GCSEs, as other schools within roughly similar socio-economic catchment areas (p. 18). This theme repeats what has been found in other examples of his earlier work (Marks and Pomian-Srzednicki 1985) where he found that students in comprehensive schools in one local education authority could, on average, obtain more than twice as many exam passes as their counterparts of similar social class in another LEA (p. 11). In the famous work (The School Effect) which really set the scene for much of the 'school effectiveness' research in the UK, the authors showed that 'different secondary schools achieve substantially different results with children who are comparable in terms of background and attainment at an earlier time'. They also showed that 'these school effects are far more important than any differences in attainment between black and white children' (Smith and Tomlinsonl989,p.3). In developing countries - this is true in developed countries too - one of the key proxy indicators for inequity is the proportion of public funds spent on primary schools as opposed to higher education. Higher education is the province of a tiny elite, by and large, in developing countries; the poor generally only have access to primary education. Given this fact, we would assume that an equitable system would spend a small proportion of public funding on higher education, to reflect the small number of young people who pass through to university, and the bulk of its funds on primary education. So we might expect the proportion of funds to tertiary to be in the range, say, of 3 to 5 per cent of total public expenditure. The reality is very different. For example, in the 22 countries in Black Africa, 15 per cent of all public expenditure goes on the 2 to 3 per cent of the population who are going on to higher education. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the figure is 17 per cent (Horn 1999). These raw statistics don't convey the true human story behind these figures, though: at a recent United Nations expert group meeting in New York, the economist Larry Willmore told the story of his highly intelligent secretary in Brazil. Larry found that this woman, from a very poor background, was studying for her degree at what was widely thought to be an inferior private university, and paying expensive fees to boot. Why was she doing this? It was obvious, she said. Yes, she had been accepted for the elitist - and free - public university. But she had to work to support herself and her family, and the public university only ran courses during the day; the private university, aware of its customers' needs, on the other hand offered classes at night. And she could do her degree in far less time than at the public university. In other words, public universities throughout the world are specifically geared for the children of the upper-middle classes, who can afford the leisurely progress of full-time study, supported by generous and long-suffering parents; they are not geared up for the less privileged. Yet these same universities receive a hugely disproportionate amount of public funds.

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So, as I say, a touching faith that governments can provide equity in education. Nonetheless, there will be many who argue that, while governments might not have succeeded perfectly, they will much better achieve equity than the private alternative.2 Indeed, some people might believe that recent evidence about choice systems in education apparently exacerbating inequality is a nail in the coffin of any ideas about markets in education. It can't be stressed enough - as we have already done in the Introduction - that criticisms of government choice systems are not criticisms of markets in education (remember: 'choice systems in education are as far removed from real markets as real freedom is from the prisoner'). Indeed, it would be surprising if such government choice systems weren't inequitable - although not necessarily more inequitable than zoning systems. Consider a neighbourhood with three schools, with 'school choice' reforms introduced. Suppose that one of these three schools is perceived to be much better than the others. It will become oversubscribed, but will not expand its intake, or take over other schools. Instead, it selects pupils either by interviewing parents or operating strict geographical selection criteria, or giving preference to siblings of existing pupils. All of these, of course, bring unfairness into the procedure. Because if you do not live in the neighbourhood (perhaps because property prices have been driven up) or do not have articulate, connected parents, then it is unlikely you will be admitted to the popular school. And of those turned away from the popular school, it is the more wealthy who are likely to send their children away from the neighbourhood altogether, to better schools out of the district, or to private schools. So two of the schools in the neighbourhood are likely to be deprived of better motivated parents and children, and may well go into decline. But the competitive pressures on these schools are not as they would be in a genuine market - and this is one of the key differences. So if a school goes into decline, it is unlikely to be closed or be taken over by another company. It can 'bump along' in listless mediocrity as a 'sink' school, trapping the pupils within it in a spiral of cumulative disadvantage. This is the key source of the inequality and unfairness for critics, and I think there is a lot of sense in critics' arguments along these lines. But the crucial point is: is this the market operating? Or would a more authentic market be better? I can hear protests from some readers: if these are criticisms of choice systems, surely real markets will carry all the disadvantages of the choice systems, but be even worse? The argument in this chapter is that this is completely off-beam, and that the private alternative can deliver equity or equality of opportunity, and that democratic states cannot. These ideas I know will be counter-intuitive to many. To see how we arrive at these, let us stand back for a moment and ask what it is about equity that is important, and why it is that we think the state is needed in order to provide it. And we will have to do some more thinking about markets in education too. Do governments achieve universal education? Let's start from scratch. On the simplest level, it is clear that a necessary

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condition of equity or equality of opportunity3 would require that we have universal educational provision. If some young people are not getting at least the basics of education (and most of us want all young people to be getting much more than that) then clearly we have not achieved anything approaching equality of opportunity or equity. Do we have such universal provision under the state? Most people will argue that we do in countries such as the UK. This is because it is assumed that if there is universal schooling in law then there must be universal education in practice. However, this is far too simple. Even in terms of schooling only, this is not the case. Tom Bentley, using figures estimated by Professor Tim Brighouse, Chief Education Officer of Birmingham, suggests that currently one in ten of all young people are not in school (Bentley 1999, p. 75). The Department for Education and Employment's own figures are that there were 12,700 pupils permanently excluded during 1996/97 (DfEE 1999, p. 47). Dr Dennis O'Keefe of the University of North London reports that over 30 per cent of students regularly or sometimes play truant from school (O'Keefe 1994). Some universal schooling, indeed. But then when we come to ask about universal education, even these figures over-state the case. For the point of universal schooling is presumably not just to achieve 'bums on seats' in the school itself. From an equity point of view we want it because it promotes at least literacy and numeracy for all, and all the other educational basics (as well as much more). Then it is sobering to realize that in the UK, for example, there is an extremely high level of 'functional illiteracy and innumeracy' - that is an inability to cope with the reading and numerical demands of everyday living. In Britain 40 per cent of 21-yearolds admit to difficulties with writing and spelling, nearly 30 per cent difficulties with numeracy, and 20 per cent difficulties with reading and writing (Central Statistical Office 1995, p. 58).This is after eleven years of compulsory universal state schooling. Similarly in a recent survey conducted in Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and the US - all countries with universal compulsory schooling - 'roughly a fifth of the populations' of all of these countries 'were found to be barely literate - unable, for instance, to read and grasp a bus schedule' (Coulson 1999,p. 9).This doesn't seem much of an advertisement for government potency to relieve inequity through universal schooling. These facts suggest that universal education is an aspiration which state systems have failed to meet. So legal universal state schooling does not imply that all are in school, nor does it imply that all receive the benefits of education. This is very important to grasp. Can we have universal education without the state? The former Education Minister in the UK, George Walden MP, in We Should Know Better (one of our 'Millennial Four') employs the 'eye-catching device' of asking what would happen if 'the top 7 per cent of society woke up to find that private schools were no longer there' - 7 per cent being the percentage of

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parents who send their children to private schools in England and Wales. Implausibly he goes on to argue that they would devote their energies to improving state education for all, rather than just their middle-class neighbourhood schools, and, stretching credulity even further, that the teaching unions and government departments would simply acquiesce in their highminded demands. But a more revealing and valuable 'thought experiment' would be: what would happen if the great majority of the population awoke to find state schools no longer there? Walden, and presumably all those to whom this question has not occurred, must assume that people would be frankly stumped, incapacitated until Nanny State stepped back in to save them from themselves. But there is enough historical evidence available to suggest that this would not be the case - evidence which leads to a reassessment of the argument that state intervention is required to achieve universal education. And it is here, as we mentioned in the Introduction, that we can get the first jolt to our thinking about education and the state. For in several countries including the UK, USA and Australia - it has been argued that, before the state got involved in compulsory schooling or even funding, we did have almost universal schooling provision - and that the progress was such that universal provision was just around the corner. The data is mainly on schooling, although data on literacy rates backs it up. But in any case, we can be much more sanguine about using schooling data from the nineteenth century. If schooling is not compulsory, then it is only likely to be used if it is producing benefits to its customers. So it is much more likely to have had positive educational outcomes than now when it is compulsory for all, and parents have no choice (within law) of whether to use it or not. And, lest anyone should think this is simply an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, there is plenty of evidence to show that in France and Germany too there was a large amount of educational opportunity taking place without the state and that the state came along and suppressed and supplanted these opportunities. These arguments are also rather strongly reinforced by evidence from many developing countries which shows that, where state provision of schooling is patchy, there are huge proportions of students in private schools. For example, in Colombia, 28 per cent of total enrolment in kindergarten and primary education is in the private sector, increasing to 40 per cent at secondary school level; in Argentina and Cote dTvoire 30 per cent and 57 per cent respectively of secondary school enrolment is in the private sector; Indonesia has 23 per cent private primary and secondary school students, and currently a massive 94 per cent of private higher education students. And these students are not just from the elite, but stretch right down to lower socioeconomic groups (IFC, 1998). All these figures are suggestive - I agree, no more than that - that if government is not ready to provide schooling, the private alternative will. For the most substantial evidence, let's look at the situation in England and Wales4 first of all.

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Education without the state: England and Wales If asked to consider what 'education without the state' was like in Victorian England, I would guess that the majority of readers would assume there was very little of it going on for the working classes, and that what was there was of a very poor quality indeed. In a recent debate, one learned person threw at me the statistics that there was '70 per cent illiteracy' before government got involved in education in 1870. This kind of figure seems to be an exaggeration of the figure which many of us may have been brought up on from history books such as British History in the Nineteenth Century, by G. M. Trevelyan, and Sir Arthur Bryant's English Saga. Trevelyan notes that, on the eve of the 1870 Act which laid the foundations for state education in England and Wales, 'Only about half the children in the country were educated at all, and most of these very indifferently. England, for all her wealth, lagged far behind . . . several foreign countries' (Trevelyan 1922, p. 354). And Sir Arthur similarly comments that 'The great mass of the nation was illiterate. In 1869 only one British child in two was receiving any education at all.' (Bryant 1953, p. 125) If it was that bad, then it would seem that the situation in England and Wales certainly won't provide any support to our argument about universal provision without the state. In fact the reality is strikingly different - and we will see in a moment where these historians have picked up their misleading statistics which have had such a profound influence. We owe much of our new insights into the possibilities of education without the state from the seminal work of Professor E. G. West, now professor emeritus at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His Education and the State, first published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), London in 1965, provoked an outcry at the time - and even led to a libel trial when the editor of the New Statesman published a review suggesting that West had concocted his data. The case was won by the IEA, and, showing the touching greed-less innocence of the times, they settled for an apology. As far as the quantity of schooling is concerned, Professor West argued that prior to the major state involvement in education in England and Wales through the 1870 Forster Act, school attendance rates and literacy rates were 90 per cent or above, and that state intervention, far from being required to ensure universal attendance and literacy, merely reinforced a process that had been developing for some time. What Professor West did was simple. He went back to the original sources rather than relying on historians like Trevelyan and Bryant. And these original sources reveal a strikingly different picture. When reading these accounts, remember that the really significant government intervention in education did not occur until 1870, when William Forster introduced state provision through local school boards, although there were small subsidies to a small minority of schools (not larger than 15 per cent) from 1833.5 So, first, back to James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, writing as early as 1813:

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Reclaiming Education From observation and inquiry ... we can ourselves speak decidedly as to the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the lower orders in England. Even around London, in a circle of fifty miles radius, which is far from the most instructed and virtuous part of the kingdom, there is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing, (quoted in West 1994b, p. 170)

This 'love of education' was being demonstrated by the working classes a full 57 years before the 1870 Act. How were such schools funded? Mill added: 'We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school' (ibid., p. 171). As Arthur Seldon, the intellectual leader of the IEA, points out, reviewing this and other evidence: 'Education would have been among the earliest candidates for household budgeting after the staples of everyday life' (Seldon 1990, p. 257). We don't have to be satisfied with Mill's anecdotal observations. Estimates for the Parliamentary Select Committee in 1818 and 1834 showed that the number of pupils in schools had increased from 478,000 in 1818 to 1,294,000 in 1834 - and all 'without any interposition of the Government or public authorities', as Henry Brougham, the Whig statesman, put it in a speech to the House of Lords on 21 May 1835. These figures can be put into perspective by recognizing that the figure for 1818 is roughly the figure in private education today in England - about half a million. Brougham was so impressed by this growth in schooling, that he spoke of the 'irresistible conclusion' that, given 'such a number of schools and such means of education furnished by the parents themselves from their own earnings . . . it behoves us to take the greatest care how we interfere with a system which prospers so well of itself (quoted in West, 1994b,p. 173). His fear was that, if working-class parents were made to pay new rates and taxes for funding subsidies for state education - and the taxation system was heavily 'regressive', hitting working-class people hardest (with 60 per cent of taxation falling on food and tobacco around this time) - they would simply be unable to afford to pay for schooling. And so private schools would disappear: 'There would ultimately be no net increase in the growth of schooling but simply a change in the pattern of the existing provision' (ibid., p. 173). The numbers continued to rise, until by 1851 there were 2,144,278 children in day schools - of which over 85 per cent were in private schools, that is, 'schools which derive their income solely from (fee) payments or which are maintained with a view to pecuniary advantage' (ibid., p. 175). It is also important to note that the remaining 15 per cent or so were in so-called 'public schools', but this meant schools 'supported in any degree' by government subsidies - which were usually rather minimal at this stage. Interestingly, David Mitch has shown that the private schools at this time were not only more popular and at least as effective in promoting literacy and numeracy as

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the subsidized schools, they actually spent roughly two-thirds of the amount spent by the subsidized schools per pupil (Mitch 1992, p. 144). Finally, there was the 'mammoth report' of the Newcastle Commission on Popular Education, set up in 1858 and reporting in 1861. Its results estimated that about 95 per cent of children were in school for up to six years. The remaining small minority could be accounted for by sick children, children educated at home, and also perhaps an error in estimation (West 1994b, p. 177). Moreover, on the funding of the educational opportunities, we find that even in the minority of schools in receipt of some state funding, two-thirds of funding came from non-state sources, including parents' contributions to fees, and church and philanthropic funds (West 1983, p. 427). Even here the biggest part of the school fees were provided by parents (ibid., 427). Moreover, the Newcastle Commission very significantly also reported that the proportion of scholars to the population as a whole was now 1:7.7. On this basis, they concluded: The proportion of children receiving instruction to the whole population is, in our opinion, nearly as high as can be reasonably expected. In Prussia, where it is compulsory, it is 1 in 6.27 ... in Holland it is 1 in 8.11; in France it is 1 in 9.0. The presence of this proportion of the population in school implies . . . that almost every one receives some amount of school education at some period or other . . . (Education Commission 1861, p. 293) Finally, concerning schools, Table 1 gives some interesting estimates of net national income spent on day schooling in the period 1833 to 1965.6 The estimates are that the percentage of national income spent on the schooling of children under the age of 11 was superior in 1833 to the situation which pertained in 1920, and roughly comparable with that spent in 1965. Only at higher levels was significantly less spent on schooling in 1833 than in 1965, but again this was more than in 1920. All these figures are about schooling, of course, and our caveats noted earlier should be borne in mind. But there is also much data on literacy rates 1833

1920

1965

Children all ages

1.0%

0.70%

2.00%

Children < 11 yrs

0.8%

0.58%

0.86%

Table 1: Percentage of net national income spent on day schooling,

1833-1965

Source: West (1970), p. 87.

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in the nineteenth century too to help support the notion that schooling was actually having a desired educational impact. First, it is important to stress that, far from being in the vanguard of promoting literacy, governments were severely hostile to the growing literacy amongst the lower classes from about the seventeenth century onwards. The Licensing Act was passed in 1662, 'renewing existing limits on the number of legal printers and appointing state and Church authorities as official censors to eliminate whatever books they found heretical or seditious' (Coulson 1999, p. 92). Under this legislation, in 1663 a printer called Twyn was hanged for the crime of publishing that 'the execution of judgment and justice is as well the people's as the magistrate's duty' (Fox Bourne 1887, p. 28). Aware that such hard-hitting measures were only serving to foster popular dissent, in the eighteenth century the government went for more subtle methods of discouraging reading, with an advertising tax, stamp tax, and an excise tax on paper all imposed on newspapers. These taxes were only repealed in 1853, 1855 and 1861 respectively (West 1994b, p. 49), all within the period when private schooling was expanding so dramatically. But far from succumbing to the government's efforts to sabotage the spreading of literacy, ordinary people lapped it up, so much so that by the end of the Industrial Revolution, in the 1830s, it was estimated that already 'between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working classes' were literate (Webb 1963, p. 164). It must be stressed that the only contribution government intervention made to this end was to seek to curtail it. And why they were seeking to do this is clear. It is estimated that Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man - which Thomas Malthus complained in 1803 was doing 'great mischief among the lower and middle classes of this country' (Malthus 1958, p. 190) had sold over a million and a half copies, while William Cobbett - the 'original de-schooler' we met in Session 1 - sold 200,000 copies of his radical pamphlet Address to the Journeymen and Labourers in just two months (West 1994b, pp. 158-9). By 1826 James Mill noted that amongst 'the lowest people' literacy was now the norm, and that reading, writing and accounts were 'requirements now common to the lowest of the people' (Mill 1826, p. 271). Further comprehensive statistical evidence is offered by Professor West, including records of educational qualifications of criminals, records of workhouse children, work-place literacy returns, and numbers of people signing the marriage register. From these various sources, he concludes that '93 per cent of school leavers were already literate when the 1870 board schools first began to operate' (West 1994b, p. 167). Elsewhere I have explored disagreements with West (Tooley 1994 and 1996a) on these issues, and suggested that as far as the quantity of educational opportunities was concerned, most would now concur with the educational reformer and philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing in 1834, that: 'As far, therefore, as quantity of teaching is concerned, the education of our people is, or will speedily be, amply provided for' (quoted in Garforth 1980, p. 114). In other words, the picture revealed by West - and now supported by

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others - is nothing like the 'lagging far behind' other foreign countries portrayed by Trevelyan, or the suggestion of mass illiteracy offered by Sir Arthur Bryant. If this is the true data, where did these historians get their figures from? They surely didn't just pluck them out of thin air? It seems that they will have got their figures from the architect of the 1870 Act himself. For when Forster introduced his Education Bill of 1870 into Parliament, oddly he made hardly any reference to the Newcastle Commission's findings. Instead he relied on evidence from a small-scale survey conducted by two inspectors in 1869 over a period of a few months in four industrial cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - in contrast to the Newcastle Commission which had taken three years to produce their findings using five Commissioners and ten Assistant Commissioners (West 1994b, p. 180). In Liverpool, for example, he argued that, out of an estimated 80,000 children of school age, '20,000 of them attend no school whatever, while at least another 20,000 attend schools where they get an education not worth having' (quoted p. 181). In other words, here we have at least 25 per cent and, if the quality judgement is believed, up to 50 per cent of the relevant population not in schooling. Hence the figures used by Trevelyan and Bryant (note that they have already exaggerated them slightly, and ignored caveats). At first glance this seems a major discrepancy. And, as we have noted, later historians have tended to side with Forster's figures, rather than those of the Newcastle Commission, the suggestion being that the Newcastle Commission were 'looking for facts which would paint so favourable a picture as to relieve the government from too embarrassing a growth of educational expenditure in the future' (ibid., p. 181). Now, if one is to 'deconstruct' one set of statistics, then one should, in fairness, also deconstruct the other side too. Perhaps the opposite conclusion could then be levied at Forster's inspectors, that they wanted to paint 'so bad a picture' in order to ensure that their own department was entrusted with the expansion of the education system. However, we don't need to engage with the discussion at this level, for there is a more obvious discrepancy which can resolve the dispute rather easily. For the Newcastle Commission had discovered that a typical child was at school for 5.7 years. But Forster in calculating his figures had assumed that the school-age population was for eight years, i.e. between the ages of 5 and 13.7 Even if we assume that the school age period had increased from 5.7 to 6 years by the time of Forster's survey, then we can see that this alone will cause the major discrepancy between the two sets of figures. For instead of Forster's estimated 80,000 children of school age, we are likely to find a reduced figure of, say, 60,000 (i.e. 6/8 of 80,000) who were actually of school age. But this was exactly the figure that Forster's survey did find in school! The fallacy that Forster committed would be rather like defining the proper school-leaving age in England today as 20 years, and then claiming that, say, 25 per cent of 'school-age' children were not in school at all. So the source of the popular misapprehension about the quantity of schooling in England and Wales is easily found - and just as easily dismissed. Those who might argue that the government needed to intervene in

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education in England and Wales do have another possible avenue, however. This would be to question the quality of schooling offered at the time. This was certainly John Stuart Mill's problem with the private alternative in education in the nineteenth century, writing, 'It is the quality which so grievously demands the amending hand of government. And this is the demand which is principally in danger of being obstructed by popular apathy and ignorance' (quoted in Garforth 1980, p. 114). However, when evidence for poor quality of schooling is reviewed, I have argued elsewhere (Tooley 1996a, pp. 35-40) that it may not after all be that convincing - taking into account all the time, of course, the poverty in Victorian England which means that the quality shouldn't be judged by our standards today. For example, doubts must be cast on the suggestion commonly put forward that government inspection led to higher quality of education: the inspectors' early official concept of educational efficiency meant 'a schooling which scored high marks in divinity and morality' (West 1994b, p. 104). Indeed, some schools were deemed worthless precisely because of failure in moral and religious training. But it is likely that many parents felt that these aspects of education were being largely catered for in the family and in the Sunday Schools - 'on week-days families were demanding education in more "practical" matters' (ibid., p. 91) such as reading, writing and arithmetic. Moreover, it must be noted that inspectors making these criticisms are known to have had particular biases. For example, H. S. Tremenheere, in the early 1850s, noted that the people's education enabled them to read 'seditious literature without having the moral or intellectual strength to discern its falseness' (quoted Stephens 1987, p. 133). This was literature which was 'exaggerating the principle of equality before God and the law', and encouraging workers to be antagonistic towards their employers (ibid., p. 133). With prejudices like these, perhaps we shouldn't be taking these inspectors' reports so seriously, but instead be engaged in a critical deconstruction of their motives. Furthermore, David Mitch has also explored the quality of private schooling in Victorian England by attempting to compare literacy rates in private and public (i.e. state) schools. His first statistical analysis showed that enrolment in private schools improved literacy rates for men and women, whereas enrolment in 'public' schools (i.e. with any, however small, state subsidy) had a negative impact on male literacy, with the effect on female literacy negligible. Controlling for factors which could have affected these results, such as the differing nature of the clientele in each school, Mitch still found private schools had a significant positive impact, against an insignificant impact for public schools. (Mitch 1992, pp. 147-9). Taken with other criticisms and discussion, my suggestion is that the criticisms of poor quality schooling were not as well founded as some might believe. However, there was one other aspect which is worth noting finally. It is commonly held that not only did the state need to get involved in the funding and provision of schooling from 1870, but that an essential part of its later intervention was also to introduce the regulation of compulsory schooling. Only in this way could adequate educational opportunities be provided for all.

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Does the historical evidence support this part of the accepted wisdom? It seems again it does not. First, historians note that there were many reasons which led to positive parental attitudes to schooling, and that these were gradually increasing throughout the nineteenth century. The historian W. B. Stephens - interestingly while trying to show that compulsion was necessary - notes in passing that not only were there economic benefits to schooling, but there were also political and social ones. There was the desire to be respectable in the eyes of local clergy and others' (1987, p. 49), as well as the attractions of 'reading for pleasure and the ability to communicate with relations living at a distance'. Moreover, 'as schooling became the norm the completely unschooled became increasingly untypical, a situation which must have brought its own pressure to conform' (p. 50, my emphasis). We can note how this fits in with the focus group's discussion in Session 1 of the ways in which norms in society can be created which enforce the desire for education. Stephens further argues that 'From 1840 schooling appears increasingly desirable socially and also functionally advantageous in an increasing number of jobs' (p. 51). Moreover, 'the vast expansion from the 1830s of didactic evangelical and utilitarian publications, of political and commercial literature, and of newspapers, radical and otherwise, attest to a working-class society in which the ability to read must have added to the economic advantages political and social ones' (p. 51). This trend in schooling norms would have a considerable bearing on the need for compulsion. If there were social and political, as well as economic, advantages in sending children to school, and if there were norms that made this more favourable, then it is likely the rate of schooling would continue to increase. But historians do note that there were negative attitudes of parents that would need state compulsion to overcome. These seem to be of four kinds; but three of these concern economic factors which may have influenced parental choice about sending children to school, and which were likely to have disappeared as factors as the wealth of the nation increased. The first is the actual fees for schooling, while the second is the opportunity costs of sending children to school, that is, the benefits forgone of children's income and assistance around the house that could be had if children had not gone to school. Both of these are likely to have been quite a considerable deterrent to many poor parents. Third, many poor parents were quite suspicious of the economic benefit to be derived from schooling their children, and so were not prepared to make the necessary sacrifices for no economic return. A common saying among the working classes was: 'The father went down the pit and he made a fortune, his son went to school and lost it' (ibid., p. 123). This attitude was reinforced by some employers who, while promoting schooling 'admitted that their most skilful and best-paid workmen were not necessarily those who were literate' (p. 124). Clearly, as England and Wales grew in wealth, the importance of the first two factors would have rapidly diminished. The third would be influenced by the demands of employment, and as industrialization increased, the demands

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of employers for a schooled, skilled workforce likewise increased. A survey in the 1840s found that employers in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Birmingham unanimously agreed that education led to workers who were 'more trustworthy, more respectful . . . more accessible to reason in disputes over wages or changes in routine, better conducted in their social duties, and more refined in their tastes and use of language' (ibid., p. 136). Again there seem to be very strong pressures from industry for educated workers, pressures that would have found their way down to parents and children. However, there is a fourth factor influencing parental attitudes towards education which is of a different, non-economic kind. This was that some working-class parents were greedy and lazy and feckless. But all the evidence suggests that these were a very small minority. The majority of the working class in England - as all the foregoing statistics show - were responsible and concerned for their children's education. Finally, concerning the provision of higher education in England and Wales, we see what must now be a rather familiar picture. While most people seem to think that we have state-funded and regulated universities because without the state, we just wouldn't have any higher education at all, the reality is sharply different. Government intervention was certainly not needed to create higher education in the first place. Such intervention until 100 years ago consisted only of the minor regulations allowing for the registration of Royal Charters. From the Tudor period right through to 1919, 'the advancement of learning' was regarded as a charitable activity, the proper province of the individual and not of the state. This was true not only of Oxford and Cambridge, but also of the new civic universities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Manchester University, for example, was named after its founder as Owens College. John Owens donated £100,000 to found this, and 90 per cent of the remaining £300,000 initial endowment came from individuals (merchants, manufacturers, engineers and lawyers), with only 10 per cent from business and other organizations. A similar variety of large- and small-scale philanthropy funded the universities of Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Hull, Nottingham, Reading, Southampton and the University of Wales. Note how it was civic and - in the latter case, national - pride which in part prompted these donors, as well as a normal philanthropic interest in self-aggrandizement coupled with concern for the disadvantaged. Let us be clear: these institutions were opened and initially flourished without any state funding or provision, and with only the minor regulations accompanying registration for their Royal Charter. Government did intervene in the late nineteenth century to prop up some failing universities, such as Sheffield, in a misplaced notion that the statesupported universities in Germany were the cause of their economic success (but the much admired success of Germany's steel industry, for example, was made possible by the work of an amateur Englishman, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, and his suburban backyard scientific discoveries, and had nothing to do with the German universities). But it was the First and Second World Wars

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which really brought about government intervention in higher education - a sobering realization for liberals, that it was caused not by their high-minded ideals, but by the dirty contingencies of war. But at most, such intervention was only necessary as a temporary expedient, not something to be maintained in perpetuity. New funding, however, brought new regulation, and new vested interests with expectations of continuing state funding. From 1946 to 1979, the state gradually took over responsibility for full funding of the universities. In particular, the Robbins Committee in the 1960s was instrumental in this process, leading to the first huge state-sponsored expansion of higher education. However, if the Robbins Report is examined closely, it reveals startlingly different conclusions from the ones which were presented at the time, that only drastic expansion of British higher education could avert national decline. For hidden away in the main body of the report are crucial comparisons with two important competitors. Curiously, these didn't find their way on to the pages of the summary - presumably because they didn't gel with the prejudices of Lord Robbins. First, Britain's greatest competitor, Germany, had a smaller proportion of students in higher education than Britain, and it was admitted that Germany's recent economic growth was not the result of any increase in young people in higher educationl Second, concerning our other major competitor, America, the single most important difference between our higher education systems was that Britain fell far short in terms of private expenditure, but was equal in terms of public expenditure. Again, this crucial fact is ignored completely when finance is considered, and recommendations made.8 The Robbins-inspired state-promoted expansion of higher education, like the gradual encroachment of state intervention previously, was not justified on economic terms, and, if social equity was the concern, it has failed miserably, with exactly the same proportion of children of working-class parents in higher education in 1995 as there were in 1960. Education without the state in America and Germany Briefly, we'll glance at the situation in American and Germany,9 to show a similar picture of extensive provision without the state. Education in the new United States of America followed a similar pattern to that in England and Wales. Typical of each of the states, in New York State, the Superintendent's Report of 1836 asserted that 'in the common schools, private schools and academies, the number of children actually receiving instruction is equal to the whole number between five and sixteen years of age' (quoted West 1994b, p. 304). That is, there was universal schooling without being free (although it was subsidized) and certainly before any compulsion laws were introduced. Across America as a whole, it has been estimated that before public schooling got started, at least 75 per cent of the population was literate, and probably more: in the 1850 US census, only 10 per cent identified themselves

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as illiterate (Coulson 1999, p. 84). Particularly fascinating to observe is how little impact compulsory attendance laws had. In all the American states, schooling was made compulsory between 1852 and 1918. But enrolment of white children didn't go up - this government intervention succeeded in lowering the rate of enrolment by 2.6 per cent! (using data for the years between 1850 and 1900).There was an aggregate increase during this time, but only because of 'the dramatic rise in black enrolment following the abolition of slavery - from 1.9 per cent in 1860 to 31.1 per cent in 1900' (ibid., p. 84).10 It was not until after 1920 that the schooling enrolment rate again began to increase, when the population became more urban and industrialized. As implied in our discussion of England and Wales, this reduced the demand for child labour and raised the economic value of literacy and education. Finally, in the German states prior to the Reformation there was a burgeoning private school sector, and even travelling scholars in the remote rural areas. These were a response to the fact that more and more ordinary people wished to learn German, as opposed to Latin, a demand to which the existing church schools were reluctant to respond. There was even a range of teachyourself-reading books; one had the memorable Germanic title: A Most Useful Book of Sounds, Illustrated with Figures Giving the True Sound of Each Letter and Syllable, from Which Young Men, Husbands and Wives and Other Adults, Also Children, Girls as well as Boys, Can Easily Learn to Read in as Little as 24 Hours. (Strauss 1981, p. 97) The Reformation put a temporary halt to the growth of these burgeoning private schools; however, after several decades, the private elementary schools again expanded, responding to the even greater demand for reading and writing instruction after the Reformation. However, the growth of these schools was cut short by Luther and his associate Melanchthon, who called for the creation of a government-run school system. Andrew Coulson follows the story: The reformers' plans were largely successful, and soon the existing private elementary schools were joined by state-run institutions. Because they were paid for by taxes rather than tuition fees, the new schools tended to make private instruction financially burdensome. (Coulson 1999, p. 67) So parents were faced with a choice between state schools that were free, or heavily subsidized, and private schools that charged fees - and those that opted for the private schools had to pay twice, still being required to pay the state education taxes. Moreover, Private schools were further discouraged by the attitudes and actions of the new state educational authorities, who derided and persecuted such schools. Attempts were even made to legislate private instruction out of

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existence, and in response private schools were sometimes forced to carry on their classes clandestinely, (ibid., p. 67) Nevertheless, there was some resistance from local people. For example, in the municipality of Heidenheim, the Duke closed the private (German-teaching) school, replacing it with a state-funded (Latin-teaching) school. But the town leaders responded in writing: Our young people, most of whom have no aptitude for Latin and are growing up to be artisans, are better served by a German teacher than a Latin master, for they need to learn writing and reading, which is of great help to them in their work and livelihood, (ibid.} But such resistance was ultimately futile; education 'became religious indoctrination ... legally mandated by the state' (ibid., p. 68). And the rest is history. The galloping horses For England and Wales, E. G. West (1994, p. 173) memorably remarked that 'when the government made its debut in education in 1833 mainly in the role of subsidizer it was as if it jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping'. And one can infer from all of the figures we have given here that there was a similar jumping into the saddle of galloping horses by other governments throughout the world. Without government, we suggest, the 'horses' - the private education alternative - would have continued to gallop. The suggestion is that our historical exploration has led to an undermining of the notion that universal education requires state intervention. The evidence from England and Wales and the United States in particular, leads to the extrapolation that, with increasing wealth and the overcoming of economic conditions which undermined parental desire for education, universal education could easily have been achieved without the state. A closer look at equity Let us stand back from this for a moment, and be clear what is being concluded. With regard to our 'simplest level' of equity or equality of opportunity - that we need universal educational provision - we have no particular evidence to suggest that states can do it better than when states are not involved. With states trying to enforce universal schooling, many fall through the net, both in terms of those who don't go to school at all, and those who seem to achieve no educational benefit from it. But without states enforcing universal schooling - and without them even paying for it - historical evidence shows almost universal provision, and simple extrapolation suggests that there could have been universal levels had the state not got involved (although we can't prove it). But the conclusion is inescapable: we cannot say that government is better than no government in this regard. I don't think that

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this is a matter for judgement on anyone's behalf, or that there is room for disagreement on this issue. However, all is not lost for those who want state intervention for the purposes of equity. For they will say that this simple condition - universal education at a basic level - is not what they're after at all. Equality of opportunity demands far more than that. When we start to look at more complex conditions of what is required, then we will see why we need state intervention. Overriding families In a monograph a couple of years ago I suggested that, because equality of opportunity and equity were so difficult to define, one plausible approach would be to try to ensure that everyone has an adequate minimum education (see Tooley 1996a, Ch. 4). Then I suggested that, with this in mind, we could show how markets in education could satisfy this. However, I have been taken to task for this solution on several occasions, most compellingly by the philosopher Harry Brighouse. Dr Brighouse does concede that if I was correct in rejecting equal educational opportunity in favour of an adequate minimum education for all, then my case 'against state funding of education' would be 'very strong'.This is because he agrees with my 'reasonable assumptions about the concern parents have for their children and the widespread knowledge that education provides valuable future opportunities'. Given all this,'government intervention would be unnecessary to achieve a minimum adequate education for most, since all but the very poorest and most irresponsible parents would devote considerable personal resources to their children's education' (Brighouse 1998, p. 139). That in itself is nice to know, reinforcing our discussions above. However, Brighouse does not think I am correct in rejecting 'equal educational opportunity' at all. In part this argument is along the lines that I have misinterpreted various philosophical arguments. Rather than explore these now, I propose another tack. Let's assume that Brighouse is right in his criticisms of my position. What follows? In particular, does this mean that we would have to abandon the private alternative as a suitable vehicle for equality of opportunity? What Brighouse insists, in common with Robertson's position noted already, and in common with many other concerned persons, is that equality of educational opportunity 'requires educational opportunities to be insulated from family background' (p. 140). To show this, he argues that: No-one can deserve the educational disadvantages they suffer simply because they have their particular parents... it is hard to see how deliberately leaving intact institutions which ensure that some get more than they deserve and others get less than they deserve expresses equal respect, (pp. 145-6)

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So the policy outcome for Brighouse is simple. Given the desire to insulate education from the impact of parents: . . . this means that the state has an obligation to ensure that, as far as possible, equal educational opportunity is realized in the school system. Practically, this requires that it fund schools for most children out of taxation, and that it regulates schooling to ensure that no child has greater educational advantages because of the family it was born into or the neighbourhood in which it lives, (p. 148) So this is what is required by equality of opportunity, universal comprehensive schooling to ensure that as few advantages are passed on to children as possible. That is, that equality of educational opportunity implies that 'the quality of the education received by each child should be independent of the level of wealth, education, and wise choice-making ability of his or her parents' (ibid.,p. 138). The argument is clear, but flawed. I find three difficulties with this approach, plus one major opportunity which Brighouse, not surprisingly, has overlooked, which could transform the way we think about equity and education. It's not surprising that he has overlooked this 'major opportunity' because it depends on the second of the 'jolts' to our thinking which I want to inflict upon readers, the findings of the global education study. We'll meet these at the beginning of the next chapter. But in combination, these three difficulties and the overlooked opportunity completely undermine the case for state education to promote equality of opportunity, and show how the private alternative could accomplish this. The first flaw is that which we've already mentioned earlier, when we noted the 'touching faith' that state intervention in education could provide equality of opportunity. We've noted empirical evidence from around the world which shows rampant inequity in public funding of education. But perhaps Brighouse, Robertson, O'Rourke and others who think in this way believe that with 'the right sort of government intervention it could all be different, or that, in any case, markets in education would be much worse. The problem here is that there is a huge literature which points to the problem of 'middleclass appropriation of welfare', which suggests that, if education is provided on a universal level, the middle classes will inevitably benefit more than the disadvantaged. And this is not only claimed by 'right-wing' public choice theories either; Professor Julian Le Grand of the London School of Economics, and close to the intellectual heart of New Labour, argues that: There was a time when many people in Britain believed that state provision of such services as health care, education, housing, even transport, free or at heavily subsidised prices, would in itself be a significant contribution to redistributing income to the poorest members of the community.. .These dreams were not fulfilled and it is important to understand the reasons ... [There is] a large amount of evidence sug-

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And education is one of the 'many cases' where benefit is for the middle classes rather than the poor. The theories he puts forward, building on the evidence from countries such as the UK and Australia, show how the middle classes will inevitably 'muscle in' on welfare. Those who are interested in following up some of the sources on this issue can read the classics by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (1962), and Anthony Downs An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). The key behind all these arguments is to call into question the traditional assumption that politicians and civil servants are motivated only by the desire to serve the public, rather than with regard for their own interest. Interestingly, this was an assumption once held about merchants too, long since abandoned with the rise of classical economics and its assumption about homo economicus, rational economic man. What public choice theory, reasonably, does is to question, in the light of all the evidence and anecdotes about the behaviour of politicians, why we ascribe such noble aims concerning the public good to them, or whether so-called public servants also need to be rudely knocked off their pedestals. When this is done, when we stop looking at politics through the rose-coloured spectacles of the public good, then we realize that it is a realistic assumption that the motivation of people in government is also self-interest, tempered of course in politics as in business - by moral considerations. The upshot of it all is that politicians 'exchange' policies for votes. To be most successful in doing this, political parties have to converge on policies which benefit the 'median voter', what in the UK we tend to call 'Middle England', rather than being overly concerned with the poor and disadvantaged. The way New Labour and the Conservatives are jostling over policies which can win over the middle classes is a living embodiment of the public choice theorists' claims. The second difficulty with the type of position espoused by Harry Brighouse concerns the negative incentives that this might bring to families. For the whole point of Brighouse's argument is that in terms of equality of opportunity or equity, what we want is that the quality of education received by each child is 'independent of the wealth, education or ability to make wise choices of the child's parents'. Equality of opportunity is when children don't suffer as a result of the disadvantage of their parents. But some might balk at this suggestion, for it would signify a world where parents can be as feckless as they want, and the state will just step in to help the children. So, some might argue, what will it profit a father to work hard for his children, to provide as many opportunities as he can for them, if the whole point of state intervention is to make sure that he can't benefit his children any more than the father who is feckless? Of course, those who are in favour of state education for equality will say this is precisely what they want to do, to protect children from their parents. But in doing so, this may well unleash huge social consequences that further undermine families.

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I don't propose to take this objection any further here: those who will be sympathetic to it will already, I suspect, be sympathetic to the private alternative, and need no further convincing. And it is those who find the whole flavour of the discussion of equality of opportunity appealing whom I want to engage with. And there is no need to fight it out on this particular patch, because there is a much more glaring flaw in the equality-of-opportunity proponents' argument. This, our third objection, relates to the oddity of the proposal to use schools to help equalize society. It brings us back to the issue raised in Session 1, of the conflation of schooling and education. If it is equality of educational opportunity that we are looking for, why focus only on schools? Equalizing schooling as a way of wanting to equalize opportunities seems an unduly modest effort. Social reformers want to insulate, as far as possible, children from the unequal influence of their families. So they propose to do this by equalizing schooling for all. But of course this won't be enough. The paradox is, surely, that the more you equalize schooling, the more important family influence will become. Suppose we've managed to achieve a fully comprehensive state schooling system, all funded free at the point of delivery. There are no state schools which are any better than any others. But if there are still limited goods to compete for - that is, positions which people want in hierarchies in work or elsewhere - and as long as it still matters to some families that these positions are attained, then hierarchically-inclined families are not just going to sit back and acquiesce in this situation. If concerned parents knew that their children were at better schools, they might relax a little: knowing that schooling has been equalized, they will certainly struggle to ensure that their children have access to as many educational opportunities outside of school as they can provide. So equalization of schooling will have done nothing to undermine the fact that children of advantaged families still have the edge. It will have done nothing to solve the problem of unequal education. To arrive at real equality of opportunity, you'd have to abolish the family. That much seems obvious to me. I put forward this argument in more detail elsewhere (Tooley 1995b, Ch. 2). Brighouse thinks I'm wrong on these grounds too. He agrees that of course state comprehensive schooling can't 'eliminate the problem', but it can do something about it: Compulsory equal state schooling would designate around 15,000 hours of each child's life in which their parents could not be conferring on them opportunities superior to those which others will enjoy.The fact that some problem cannot be eliminated never justifies abandoning attempts to mitigate it. (Brighouse 1998, p. 146) Crucially, Brighouse notes that, without comprehensive schooling, this puts socially aware parents like him in an awful moral dilemma, and they would only be able to satisfy their consciences by 4refrain[ing] from conferring significant positional advantages on their own children' (p. 147). But as soon as parents like him know that there is 'compulsory equal state schooling for all',

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he can communicate 'his enthusiasms for cooking, cricket, the history of the Russian revolution or obscure radio comedy' confident that this will not 'advantage his child unfairly' (p. 148). The smugness of the liberal father! But this is where it all seems unduly modest. Either you value equality of educational opportunity or you don't. If it is the primary goal, as it is for Brighouse, 'lexically prior' to other social and personal goals, then why be so modest in your attempts at trying to achieve it? Why concentrate all these efforts in equalizing schooling, at great expense and costs to liberty and parental responsibility, when we know that children are only in schools for so little of their time, and that outside educational influences are so important? This is not an argument to say that schools don't matter -1 think the evidence shows that they do. But they can't compensate for the advantages that families bring in the way that the equality-of-opportunity lobby seems to hope. So the question for Brighouse and others who think like him is: why should he be allowed to share his enthusiasms for 'cooking, cricket, the history of the Russian revolution or obscure radio comedy' with his children, if this unfairly privileges them? And why should he be allowed to pass on his superior genes to his children, and the loving home environment which has nurtured and protected them, when some children don't have these things? Why is he so modest in his attempts to alleviate the pain of inequality that children have? Why doesn't he go the route of the early twentieth-century social reformers and this was very definitely a left-wing phenomenon - and plump for eugenics as a way of solving the problems of the lower classes? I guess the answer to these questions is simple: that all of these things offend other values, the liberty of the father to care and love his family in the way he wants to, or the liberty of people to pass on their genes to their children. But if that is his reason, then he is conceding that equality of opportunity is not his highest priority, that it doesn't necessarily override liberty. I hate to accuse colleagues of bad faith, but that is what I smell here: for I think there is probably a recognition in his writing that, for fathers like him, it won't really matter that much if his children go to an 'equal' school, which may mean one which will offer them fewer opportunities than they could get through a private alternative. It doesn't matter precisely because he can make up for what is lost in schooling through sharing educational passions with his children in the evenings and weekends and holidays, and through his good genes and secure home environment. He doesn't really think that schooling is so important for middle-class parents like him, and he is right. And he is right in part precisely because of the distinction we made in our first session, that schooling and education are not the same. Through his proposals, he can provide as many high-quality educational opportunities outside of schooling, and guilt-free to boot, without feeling he is impinging upon equality of educational opportunity. I am afraid that is not good enough. So what we have said is three-fold: that it seems naive to suppose that in a democracy you can ever get equal schooling; that seeking to undermine family influence could have a dangerous negative impact on society as a whole; and, most importantly, that such a modest proposal for equality of educational

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opportunity is hardly going to achieve much, precisely because it leaves middle-class families pretty much intact. Those are my objections to the defence of equality of opportunity as shielding children from the influence of their parents. But I am not wholly unsympathetic to the ideal. I caught a snatch of a BBC television programme in a break from writing this, for instance. It was one of those 'docu-soaps' which filmed various families going about their everyday business, in this case focusing on four couples about to get married. Some of the engaged couples had children already. We saw, much deeper than I cared to see, details of their home lives which made me agonize about the futures of the young children growing up there. And I, like I'm sure Brighouse and other concerned individuals, felt pangs of heart-ache and soul-searching for these children. I can see why Brighouse wants to do what he can to create an environment where those children are somewhat insulated from the influence of their parents, at least for a few hours each day. Ideally, we'd like them to come under nobler influences, in an environment where a higher form of learning was valued, and the children's tentative learning attempts weren't stamped upon by their parents in the way that we saw on the awful television programme. And it is this sense of paternalism which has inspired many a social reform, and very likely the reforms we've been looking at from 1870 onwards in England and Wales. But the problem with this paternalism is this. Guessing now, the schools these children go to are probably similar to the worst type of school I described in the Introduction, schools which make you positively angry that children can be trapped there, for however few the hours. These schools are not doing anything to promote equality of opportunity, but are probably reinforcing their children's negative home learning. Trying to use the state to equalize educational opportunities has not worked, and, for the reasons we have started to outline in this session and will continue to develop throughout the book, cannot work, and may also have all sorts of dangerous and unforeseen consequences. But is there nothing we can do about such children? Of course, one must keep it in perspective; the great majority of families are not as dysfunctional. But for those that are? I mentioned earlier that there was a missed opportunity, which had Brighouse been aware of, may have made him realize that there could be an alternative way forward. We'll meet this alternative at the beginning of the next session. But let me just set the scene. Another place, another television channel: this time CNN in a New York hotel. An advertisement came on for a hotel chain. We saw a clean-cut young couple arriving at hotels in various towns and finding rooms of poor quality. 'Wouldn't it be great if you could know that quality was the same in Wichita as it was in Washington?', asked the voice-over. The CEO of the hotel chain then faced camera and solemnly said: T guarantee to you that the quality of my hotels is the same throughout the country. Wherever you go, the quality remains the same. That's our promise to you.' Or words to that effect. The point is that, as far as hotels go,provided you can afford the standard rate - and we'll come on to that aspect in a moment - you can be assured that the brand

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name of the hotel chain brings 'equality of accommodation opportunity'. Under this chain, there are no 'sink' hotels. Another example. I did my shopping today at what was for me a new branch of, let's call it Safebury's supermarket, because I have recently moved home. Everything about the store was familiar, and I did my shopping with ease, picking up the same variety of goods and same brand-named goods. The service was the same, and I could even use my same loyalty card. I have been shopping at Safebury's for twenty years or so now. Around the country, the quality has been the same. In poorer or richer parts of town the quality has been the same. Somewhere, I am sure, in their mission statement is that guarantee, that quality is the same wherever you go. Again, provided that you can afford to shop, 'equality of shopping opportunity' is guaranteed by the supermarket chain. There are no 'sink' supermarkets under this chain either.11 This means that children whose parents shop in these supermarket chains are guaranteed that the wealth and income and background of their parents will not influence the quality of the food they can purchase and the surroundings in which they shop. Children whose parents shop in these supermarket chains are guaranteed that they will not be subject to 'sink' supermarkets. I suggest that this lesson can be transported to any areas of activity in which we take part where markets lead to strong competing brand names,12 and where these brand names control a large proportion of the market. The question raised is this. If we could have strong brand names and competing companies in education, could this also guarantee no more 'sink' schools - and other educational settings? Let's spell this one out slowly. First, some might think that my caveat about affordability totally begs the question - provided that you can afford it is precisely the point of concern. But I don't think that funding is the only issue - and rest assured, we will come on to this in some detail shortly. For there is also the equally important issue of quality. For what horrifies so many of us in state education is that there is such a huge variability in the quality of schools, and that the disadvantaged usually go to the worst schools. I find it abhorrent that some children are in schools which are sub-standard, which are crippling them. I find abhorrent the idea of'sink' schools and schools which acquiesce in low standards. Part of what is important about equality of opportunity is surely that such low quality in education should not be tolerated. But notice that in state schools, funding is provided, so that those students currently in poor schools are able to 'afford' them, in the sense of the hotel and supermarket examples given above. In other words, my caveat is satisfied under the state school example! Students or parents are able to afford state schooling but, unlike in the chain or supermarkets or hotels, this still does not guarantee equal quality. The point is that poor quality - the 'sink' school mentality - is not tolerated in other areas of our lives governed by markets with competing brand names. There is not a 'sink' supermarket or 'sink' hotel in Safebury's or the hotel chain. So even though the poor can afford the school - because it is provided free to them by the state - they do not have the same guarantees that shoppers and business travellers take for granted. That state of affairs is what /find abhorrent.

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But this leads to the following possibility. If part of the desire for equality of opportunity is that we abhor 'sink' schools, and want a guarantee of quality for all children, no matter what their parental circumstances, then one solution could be competing education companies with strong brand names providing for them. This, and not comprehensive state schooling, could be a way of ensuring that all children, whatever their parental background, could enjoy educational opportunities of as high a quality as anybody else - including those with better parental backgrounds. Just as all parents can shop at their local Safebury's and know the quality of food and service will be the same in their locality as at anywhere else around the country, so all parents could be able to send their children to excellent schools. If there were these competing education companies with strong brand names, there need be no more 'sink' schools. And no children need suffer. I am sure some readers have thought of at least three objections to this idea. The first might be that, even for all those parents who can afford to shop at Safebury's, this doesn't necessarily mean that they buy their children equally nutritious food. So there could still be gross inequity in nutritional standards, even though all can shop at a known brand. So if the analogy holds, there could still be parents who 'shop' at a known brand school who wouldn't purchase as high-quality opportunities as others for their children (particularly if there were options to pick and choose from), and so there could still be gross inequity even though all families have the benefits of strong brand names. This objection could be met, though, within the private alternative. Recall that we spoke of three levels of state intervention: provision, regulation and funding. All we have thus far said in terms of our brand names is that they would seem to suggest that there is a strong argument - on the basis of equality of opportunity, this can't be stressed enough - to have educational provision not by the state, but by competing market brands. But this in itself says nothing about the kinds of regulation (or funding, which we'll come to in a moment) these companies might be under. So the current position might be, if this objection was considered appropriate (and more powerful than in the food case, where we don't think this kind of intervention is appropriate), that we need regulation of these brands to ensure that parents couldn't pick and choose to the detriment of their children from the types of courses on offer, and so couldn't undermine equity in that sense. We'll leave this possibility hanging for a moment - and return to it in Session 3. The second objection concerns funding. 'Those who can afford it' is still nagging in the minds of many readers, who are assuming that I am, heartlessly, going to ignore the plight of those who cannot afford the opportunities on offer by the educational companies. I'm not. However, what happens in the case of food and supermarkets? Here we recognize in societies like the UK and USA that there are some too poor or irresponsible to spend money on feeding their children. This has led us to different solutions at different times from targeted philanthropy in the nineteenth century (see Olasky 1992) to targeted welfare benefits in the latter half of the twentieth century. And many

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families and small communities will have had their own, smaller scale solutions to this problem, in terms of transfers of wealth between generations (I mean grandma cooking nutritious meals for the children of an irresponsible parent, say). The principle is that we can overcome the problem of some being too poor to buy food for their children without touching the suppliers of food at all. We don't think of the solution in terms of nationalizing the supermarkets and creating national food kitchens for all children. We simply ensure, through philanthropy or the state, that all parents have enough funds so that a poor family can be shopping alongside a rich one, both paying for their goods in terms of money at the same checkout, but one is subsidized (by the state or philanthropy), the other not. We take that solution so much for granted that we may forget just how this particular targeted intervention works. There is no obvious reason why a similar situation couldn't apply in educational chains too. But based on the argument thus far, there is also no obvious reason why there shouldn't be universal funding either. All we have said is that there is a strong argument for competing brand names to provide (aspects of) education, if we are seeking to ensure equality of opportunity. We haven't touched on funding yet. This is almost a cue for the focus group, who are waiting to get to grips with this particular issue. Before we move on, there is a third objection which readers may have in mind: so where are these educational companies? If education could be just like supermarkets or hotel chains, why don't we see entrepreneurs building these chains of private schools, just as they have done in these other areas of our lives? I think the answer to this in terms of countries like the UK and the USA lies with the immense size of the state sector - in both countries it is 90 per cent or more of parents who send their children to state schools - and with the tax laws. The near-monopoly of the state sector, and the perceived lamentable quality of it in the eyes of middle-class parents, allows the private sector to be complacent about cost and quality, and not strive for innovative ways of creating costeffective, high-quality brands for a mass market. Those parents who patronize private schools now will do so whatever the quality of the schools, provided only that they are marginally better than those in the state sector, and will pay whatever is demanded from the suppliers in this sellers' market. And the tax laws too make it sensible for schools to be charities or not-forprofit foundations - for then they can be exempt from taxation, and who would want to pay taxes if they could be avoided? But such foundations, in general, will again not have the incentives to seek cost-effective high-quality solutions (Lieberman 1989). In part this is because not-for-profits may exhibit inefficiencies which are not there in for-profit companies. They are very likely to expropriate (rather than re-invest) surpluses made by the foundation, for example (West 1989). And they are also more likely to be sluggish in the adoption of innovation, because they lack the incentives to do so. In part, this is because there are not in general entrepreneurs within such organizations, only administrators or decision-makers. As Charles Murray suggests, 'The private school system that currently exists is analogous to the private restaurant system that would exist if the government maintained mediocre but free

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restaurants - a shadow, in size and variety, of the system that would exist in the absence of the government product' (Murray 1997, p. 94). These points will be taken further in Session 5. Someone with an interest in catching me out might observe on this point that in other developing countries, as was noted earlier, the private sector is much larger. So why aren't there education chains in those countries? That's another question which deserves a longer answer. We'll tackle this in some depth at the beginning of the next session. But before we do that, the focus group is gearing up to address this important issue of funding.

FOCUS GROUP In which we look at how education should be funded, especially thinking about the social value education brings, in addition to its personal benefits. Jack began, turning over to start with fresh pages on the flip-chart: 'Good. We've established what education is, and how it might be delivered. Now, how should education be funded?' He reminded us that we didn't know what positions we held beyond the Veil of Ignorance. So whatever we concluded must be fair for wherever we were - the child of the millionaire or of the unemployed single parent, or anywhere in between. We started on the first stage of education, for children from birth to about age 5. Here we had said families were the most important educational agency. We supposed that to educate one's children - the liberal and instrumental modes being more or less identical for this period - would be one of the highest priorities for families. But it wouldn't need much additional funding as such, separately from buying food and clothing and all the other everyday parts of living. All it required was that the child learnt to read and write and count, and spent time playing and learning social skills with parents and friends and relatives. Nothing here would be particularly expensive, it seemed to us. 'What about where families are very poor? You could be in one of those families!' Jack said. Winston said: 'How much money does it cost to teach someone to read? Surely not much.' Jack held up his hands and said, 'Fine, it's not the most important area, so let's move on to the others and see what we come up with there. What about the second stage?' Here, while again the liberal and instrumental conceptions converged on a common curriculum, we did look at them separately, just in case. To help us with the 'preparation for working life' part, we first called up evidence on personal returns on education. With Jack's assistance, we consulted Arthur (the computer) and found that such information was available. The personal rates of return on education were so high, it would

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seem that there would be very great desire to invest in these types of educational opportunities for oneself and one's family. We guessed that it would be as important to want to invest in this aspect as it would be to buy food and clothing for children. All of this suggested that the great majority of people would want to pay for this type of educational opportunity for their children. And when we were also allowed to look at historical evidence and evidence from developing countries around the world, we found that this was indeed the case - parents really did see it as an obvious sacrifice to make, if necessary. It was definitely a priority to them. Our second line of thought was wondering how expensive these types of opportunities would be - because clearly it would not be good enough that most people wanted them, if no one could afford them at all. We looked at the types of opportunities that would be required - the learning of basic and more advanced knowledge and skills, and learning about different work-place environments and opportunities. And we considered that the whole range of teachers, or 'learning supporters', would probably be needed here. But the key to funding here (and remember, we were only talking about the 'preparation for work' type of instrumental education) lay in the Centres of Learning we had thought up. In the earlier years, these would be helping children with the basics of learning how to problem-solve and 'master the brief, in Winston's phrase, of any new project, by creating artificial, simplified projects. But pretty soon they would be giving, under supervision, real projects to older children, and seeking real solutions. And these projects could come from all over the world, through the virtual learning places created. Presumably these real solutions would be worth something financially. So we saw the possibility of two types of Centres of Learning emerging: first, there would be those created by some businesses themselves, in order to bring a diverse range of young people into the company, training them as apprentices in problem-solving. Second, we saw the possibility of Centre of Learning companies themselves being established which would sell their services to a variety of businesses. Both types would employ a variety of 'teachers' (in the six senses we had differentiated) to help the young people. But these could often be employees of the company, working for an hour or two to supplement their wages (or volunteering to have variety in their work). In both types, again, what we had called the Quiet Zones of the Centres of Learning would offer invaluable facilities for businesses wanting to do staff training too. All of these factors would seem to mean that the Centres of Learning could be heavily subsidized and would either be extraordinarily cheap for parents, or possibly free. We then started musing about whether it would be children or their parents who would fund attendance at these centres - if it was required - but Jack soon took us off this track, saying that it wasn't at all relevant. Actually, for what it's worth, we thought it seemed slightly relevant. We concluded that although it would be sensible for parents to fund their children at first, as children became older it would seem that young adults would be very keen to become independent of their parents, and parents wish to encourage that

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responsibility and independence. Anyway, as I've said, Jack firmly pushed us away from this line of thinking, saying no one would understand our interest in this topic beyond the Veil of Ignorance, saying something along the lines that it might even ruin our credibility if we reported on it. So I won't. Jack dismissed the idea that the Centres of Learning could be free, presumably based on his greater knowledge of what was actually going on in the real world, so we deferred to his greater wisdom here. So: what should happen to those parents (or children, some of us mentally inserted) who couldn't afford to pay for their education of this type? We had suggested that for the majority there would probably be no problem, and had been backed up by some historical evidence to that effect. But there would be a minority perhaps as much as five per cent - who wouldn't be able to afford these expenses. And, as Jack reminded us (although we didn't need reminding) we would want to create a system which was just and fair, for it could be one of us who was transported back to the world beyond the Veil as being too poor to fund this type of education. Jack also said 5 per cent was probably too low, so we thought in terms of a figure of up to 10 per cent. After much discussion, we came up with one solution. First, if some families (parents or children) couldn't currently afford educational opportunities themselves, they might be able to in the future, and would realize that it was a good investment in their own 'human capital' to do so. This would provide a terrific incentive for banks, companies and the Centres of Learning themselves to search for ways of offering loans. There may be some difficulty with collateral on the loan, but it seemed to us that it was not beyond the wit of bankers to devise ways of tapping into the future earnings potential of individuals. Ruth suggested that we might be able to devise systems which brought into play an honour system, so that peer-group pressure was brought to bear to repay loans, thus reducing the need for collateral. This was our first solution. Jack didn't seem to think this would have much applicability, and reminded us that we were talking about poor people. We couldn't see his point first of all, and asked him to elaborate. Toor people', he said, 'will default on loans, and won't be attractive to bankers.' I must admit to being rather astonished at this libel on the poor, and clearly this was shared by others. There was nothing in our minds, admittedly wiped clean of conceptions of what life was like beyond the Veil, which suggested that poor people were necessarily like this at all. Of course some might be, as some richer people might be too, but why should it apply to all the poor? Winston pointed out that some people may be poor in financial terms, but that wouldn't mean they were 'poor in spirit' too, as he put it. They would still be responsible and have integrity. Jack said: 'Fine, so let's just suppose that some might, but that there are some people who are both poor and not responsible in this way.' Jack continued, 'We don't necessarily want all our solutions to depend - do we? on entrepreneurs coming up with mechanisms which may not work in practice.' So we were back to the drawing board. The ensuing discussion went something along the following lines. It would be in no one's interest to have young people in the community who were not

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employable, who had no basic skills and knowledge, and who would be alienated from the rest of society. They might turn to crime and anti-social behaviour. They would impose costs on us all. And many of us, too, we were sure, would be moved by common humanity for the plight of the poor, and not want children to suffer in this way, simply because of the poverty of their parents. (After all, it could be one of us, and we were bonding through our deliberations, and wouldn't want to abandon a new friend to such a fate.) Jack perked up at this. He said: 'So you're talking about social benefits 'externalities' is the technical term - of education. And social benefits leads us obviously to think of a solution in terms o f . . . ?' He wrote 'social benefits' on the flip-chart and an equals sign next to it, but then waited, to see if we could match his preferred solution. He waited. None of us answered immediately. Joel was scribbling madly on his pad. Eventually he piped up: '... in terms of... the state.' Jack sighed, with relief clearly written all over his face. 'Yes, exactly', he said, 'that would be the obvious mechanism wouldn't it? Joel, do you want to continue?' Joel looked down at his papers and said: 'The STATE, it's my own acronym: the Society for Teaching Altruism to Everyone'. Clearly, Joel was in a playful mood. He continued: 'It would have as its motto: "It is better to give than to receive" and would encourage all to consider ways of helping to fund those children who couldn't afford to pay for their educational opportunities.' Much, it seemed, to Jack's consternation, we all then threw our own suggestions behind how this might work in practice. The most obvious mechanism would be for all those Centres of Learning to offer (further) subsidies, on a rolling scale from 100 per cent subsidies to more modest contributions, to those who were too poor to pay the fees. So in most cases, we saw that there would be some parental (or student) contribution, however nominal, in order to ensure that the family still felt in control of the educational process. These subsidies could then be funded out of the general funds of the institution. And this could either be found by putting a modest surcharge on those who were paying fees, or by the institution canvassing around other companies and businesses and getting them to contribute funds to help the poor. It was clear to us, with various back-of-the-envelope calculations, that such institutions could probably afford to subsidize even 10 per cent of their students in this way and, hey presto!, the problem of the poor is solved. And, drawing up some evidence from Arthur, we did see many examples of educational institutions around the world funding subsidies for fully 10 per cent or more of their students, in exactly the way we had envisaged! It was gratifying to find the world beyond the Veil corresponding to the logic behind the Veil. Finally, we pointed out that, if some educational institutions really couldn't afford to do this, or couldn't find donations from elsewhere, here would be a place for a dedicated society to be set up, which would solicit donations from philanthropists and distribute these through various mechanisms to the poor, so that they could partake of opportunities in the educational centres.

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One difficulty with either system was how these subsidies would be administered. It was clear that this would have to be very carefully accomplished, because it would be important that nobody cheated on this, and gained subsidies even though they didn't need them. The disincentive and potential divisiveness of these subsidies were apparent and needed careful reflection upon - for if some parents were scrimping and saving in order to fund their children, there would be a big disincentive if they saw other children getting free places when their parents were wasting funds. Eventually we agreed that a committee, made up of local people and the good and the great, should be able to consider all cases for help sensitively but not sentimentally, and allocate funds sensibly. We were evenly divided in the group as to whether or not recipients of these funds should be made to stand out in any way. Some of us didn't want the poor to be 'stigmatized', feeling that their internal gratitude would be enough to ensure they worked hard and made major benefits. Others of us felt that such 'stigmatizing' - although we didn't like the word - would be helpful to ensure that there was no incentive to cheat. But this needn't be anything other than asking such students, or their families, to help contribute in their spare time to, say, the cleaning and maintenance of the premises. Some felt this might cause disincentives to students, and make them feel unworthy. In any case, we didn't reach a conclusion on this, and thought it was a decision which could be taken at the institutional level, with any difficulties ironed out in practice. Jack took it all in, and was visibly chewing his bottom lip as he said 'Good, interesting'. 'But', he continued, 'isn't this all a b i t . . . ad hocT He said those words decisively and dismissively. He asked us to reflect on the distinct possibility that this altruism would not provide enough funds or that the stigmatizing would be a serious problem. What then? 'Remember: it could be you being the poor person. You wouldn't want to be in that situation would you?' The ad hoc nature wasn't totally desirable of course, but, as Winston pointed out, 'we live in an imperfect world', and ad hoc solutions might be the best we could have. Jack said: 'That's true, but remember, you can use the power of the state the real state - and this may bring in new solutions, think imaginatively'!' Ruth took up this challenge: 'I suppose we could have some regulations to compel educational institutions to fund 10 per cent of their students in this way. That might prevent the ad hoc nature of the solution.' A couple of us felt that this might distort the process somewhat, bringing different psychological mechanisms into play. As it stood, our proposal would be acceptable to all paying students in the school because we would be able to appeal to their public-spiritedness (that they wanted to help the poor, in part because of their own self-interest, but also because they cared). Once the state intervened to compel the educational institutions to do this, then this may alienate them: they would no longer be doing it from their genuine desire to help, but because they had to. And it may also bring in psychological problems for the recipients too. Before, under our proposals, they would be receiving funds knowing that it was from the generosity of other families or other

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businesses. Now, they would be receiving funds because some distant power told them they had a right to them. Gone would be the link between their receiving the funds and the generosity of their neighbours. And this may make them feel less inclined to benefit fully from the opportunities presented to them. And once you started to talk about rights in this way, then it would be awfully hard to discriminate between those who were really deserving of the funds and those who were not; the state may not allow institutions to use their discretion and discernment in the ways discussed. It also seemed to bring in the possibility that, once the state was compelling institutions to accept students in this way, then it might also feel it had other authority to regulate the institutions, and we hadn't discussed whether or not this would be desirable. 'Give the state an inch, and she'll think she's a Ruler', said Joel. Anyway, we had to admit we didn't know how serious these problems would be and accepted that they may not be serious, in which case the initial compulsion might not be so bad. But the onus of proof would seem to be on showing, first that it was necessary, that the voluntary mechanisms couldn't work, and that it wouldn't have these undesirable implications, for the poor and those who weren't. Jack said: 'So if you were poor, that's what you'd want, to be reliant on other people's charity? Fatima, that's what you'd want? Sanjay . . . you wouldn't mind that?' Fatima and Sanjay looked apprehensive - did this mean that Jack was giving away that they were the ones who were poor beyond the Veil? Fatima said quietly: 'If I was poor I would want to have my integrity and respect intact. I would rather not rely on others, but if that was all that was possible, then I would rely on them until I could become independent myself, and give back to the community.' Jack said: 'Okay, we might come back to that in a moment. Because I'm not sure we've exhausted the role of the state here. But let's turn to other parts of education, and see whether that takes us any further. I think you'll see when we look at the social aspects that a new dimension is brought in. Then we'll think differently about all these issues, I'm sure.' We considered the liberal education aspect. In fact, this didn't seem to bring in many other considerations than before. It was likely that liberal education would not only give considerable personal returns in terms of satisfaction at pursuing something of intrinsic value, but it would also be likely to train the mind in ways which would mean that it would also have high personal rates of return in terms of a future career, if such was desired. So for many families it would again seem a very sensible investment for their children. And again, it would also seem to be in the main rather inexpensive. Once children could read and use technology, it would seem that enough literature, history and philosophy to keep one going for many years could be available for the price of a few second-hand books or a computer linked to the Internet - and this could be shared by many, so reducing the costs. And we noted that some aspects of the liberal tradition - mathematics and the sciences most obviously

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- would overlap with things to be learnt in the Quiet Zones of the Centres of Learning, so this would also mean the possibility of savings. Winston did remind us again that we would want to be completely sure that this didn't lead to an undermining of these things being learnt for their intrinsic value, and we agreed with that. 'Come on', said Jack, 'you're neglecting rather obvious things, aren't you? What about the teacher? Do you think they come free? And suppose there are children who don't want to learn liberal education, then what? And what about the third stage of education, further and higher education?' It was true, we'd overlooked several important issues. We reminded Jack that there were six levels of 'teacher'. And the more we though about it, yes actually, some did seem to come for free. For in terms of liberal education, that first level, the 'inspirer' and motivator, surely these would be people both committed to, and practising one of the liberal arts? There would be great musicians and writers and artists and philosophers and historians. It seemed obvious to us that such people would not be shrinking violets. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of society to ensure that they reached the widest possible audience. There could be television programmes devoted to their arts, accessible to everyone. Ticket sales for performances, for example, could subsidize the wider distribution of the artist, to inspire and motivate a wider audience. Or advertising could subsidize it to the same effect. Surely? As far as the other levels of teacher were concerned, yes some of these may cost money. The teacher as guide would not cost much - because the canons of literature to be studied would be well known and probably already in the public domain. Perhaps the most important teacher in the liberal tradition would be the 'teacher as seminar leader'. In the liberal tradition this would be where much of the grappling with the concepts and ideas would be had, through discussion. Fatima said: 'If I had a passion for art or history, I'd want to share that passion for nothing.' That did seem to be the way a couple of us felt, that, probably in our spare time, we could devote ourselves to leading seminars which would help introduce young people to our passions. But Winston said that he wouldn't do it for nothing, that he could see a good income in being a peripatetic philosopher, guiding young people to love learning, charging modest fees and travelling expenses. And when we consulted Arthur about whether people would be willing to pay for these experiences, we found that in Ancient Greece it was completely normal to have such peripatetic teachers, moving from town to town offering their services to whomsoever wanted to learn, then moving on when the market was exhausted, or a better competitor arrived. It was all part of their thriving learning society. But - being brought back to the case by Jack - if young people couldn't afford these, then again, there would be an obvious place for exactly the same kind of philanthropy and subsidized places which we'd already thought up for vocational education - although there didn't seem to be the same possibilities for loans this time, given the uncertain personal financial returns of liberal education. But for philanthropy, liberal education would seem to be even more of an

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obvious winner. Part of the desire to support liberal education would be because of its wider social benefits, it seemed. Someone might want his child to learn about philosophy or literature because he thought that this would enhance her life. But, very importantly, he would also want her to live in a society where such culture and learning is valued. So of course he would be willing, provided he could afford it, to pay slightly more for his child to attend the seminar of a peripatetic philosopher (Winston's idea) if this meant that a poor child could also attend. For the poor child's attendance would help reinforce the cultural dimension of his society, giving him further benefit. That was apart from the pleasure it would give him seeing the child of someone poor engaging with the ideas too. And as for what to do about those children who didn't want to learn, this was the same question as Jack had pressed on us in the previous session. We would want to inspire them to learn, and would use all efforts in society to ensure that they and their parents were inspired to learn, and that the norms of the society were geared up to this end. Compulsion, the solution Jack had proposed in the previous suggestion, not only had negative implications, but it also seemed morally repugnant in terms of liberal education. The last thing someone with a passion for any parts of the liberal tradition would want would be to try to force children to partake in it. Inspire and motivate yes, compel no. Finally, we considered Jack's 'third stage' of education. There didn't really seem to be much to add to anything else we had considered. For 'further and higher education', as he called it, was all about young adults and adults pursuing their careers and interests. Now not only was there the earlier possibilities of family funds, loan schemes, subsidized places and philanthropy, but there was also the young adult's earnings which could be used to fund this stage. It was beyond the realms of imagination to think that all of these facets would not provide enough funding to ensure that all could have access to what they desired and needed. Jack said: 'Fine. I'll let you get away with that for now. What of the social aspects of education?' He reminded us of the elements that we had discussed previously, including education for democracy and social cohesion, economic growth, the fostering of appropriate values for society, the maintenance of a cultural heritage and a general level of culture and civility in the polity, and finally, equality of opportunity. Jack smiled: 'So', he said, 'who's going to fund those types of educational opportunities? Eh? Here we have social benefits, externalities, which I don't think you'll be able to wiggle away from so quickly without recourse to the state!' He wrote on the flip chart: 'Social benefits = state funding'. We raised our reservations to this. For we had been very careful in our discussions to note that all of these educational opportunities could be gained, and were presumably best gained, in a multitude of settings, which in combination permeated the whole of society. Democracy was best learnt through observing the political process, through discussions with peers and elders, through reading the Press and watching other media, and eventually through participating in the democratic process. Social cohesion required that

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everyone had respect and meaning and value in their lives, which did require universal literacy and numeracy, for sure, but these were already arising out of our earlier considerations of preparation for vocations and careers. But its other aspects didn't require funding as such, but only that there were places in society where people could feel valued and respected - places such as the family, the church or mosque, the local pub. Similarly, economic growth surely arose as an epiphenomenon of people pursuing their careers, and inventors and entrepreneurs having the freedom to pursue ideas where they led. The maintenance of a cultural heritage would seem very likely to arise from those whose love was art, music, literature, history and philosophy pursuing these things - either in their own time, or by offering their services on the market to those who wished to pay to partake of them - and sharing their passions to the whole of humanity. To speak of funding of any of these would be like speaking of the funding of the whole of society itself. And that was a concept which I'm afraid was completely foreign to us. Jack stood in front of us, silent for a moment. And then: 'What about equality of opportunity?'

COMMENTARY That's exactly where we were before we rejoined the focus group. Equality of opportunity we said then demanded that all children have access to highquality educational opportunities, which were not negatively influenced by their parents' wealth or social standing.This required two things, we said then: first, high-quality education on offer, and second, funding available for all. The high-quality education, we suggested, could be guaranteed, at least in terms of things like schools, Centres of Learning or Places Apart, by competing brand names in an educational market - if such could be found. But on funding we deferred judgement. Thus far, our deliberations may have justified state funding for all, or state funding for a targeted minority; we couldn't say. We are now in a position to return to that question, of what level of state funding would be justified to ensure educational equality of opportunity, in the light of the focus group's discussion. Again, we make it clear that we don't have to be committed to the particulars of the focus group's discussion - so if peripatetic philosophers and concerts funded by sponsors aren't your cup of tea, then substitute your own preferred solutions. But I suggest we do have to be committed to the principles which inform their solutions. And these principles are, again, a recognition that education is much more than schooling, that educational opportunities occur across the whole of society. Because of this, there is a whole host of educational opportunities with a huge variety of potential funders, sponsors and supporters in the real world. All of these factors mean that educational opportunities may not be very expensive, and not as expensive as schools are today.

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So where would funds come from? From behind the veil of ignorance purged of our current conceptions about what role the state has in education, and about how it works in other areas of welfare, it is apparent that it would be a long way down the road before anyone started to think that state funding was justified - in targeted ways, let alone universally - as a way of satisfying equality of opportunity. For there are so many other steps that would need to be exhausted before that stage was reached. It would be very much a last resort, turned to only if the other steps failed to achieve what they were geared to achieve. And I don't think there is any available evidence that would suggest that these steps would fail to achieve what we were after. This was as true for further and higher education as it was for the earlier stages. First, we would need to know that the great majority of families couldn't fund the majority of educational expenses. Extrapolating from the historical evidence from England and Wales and the USA suggests that that assumption would be very hard to make. In this regard, we can point out (and I know that this won't be well received by some readers, but it has to be said) that if the will is there - if the norms of society promoted it - then the great majority of families could fund educational opportunities today, even without the further incentives that a lower tax regime (given no state schooling) would bring. We note, for instance, that families currently spend annually nearly £42 billion on alcohol and tobacco in the UK and £41 billion on restaurants and hotels (Office for National Statistics 1998, p. 98). That is, families currently spend about £5,000 per year on alcohol and tobacco for every school-age pupil in the country, and £10,000 per year on these luxuries plus eating out and staying out. This is more than enough to afford the most expensive private schools for every pupil in the country! Adjusting these figures to take into account those families without children will only slightly reduce the figures. The point is that, even in the unlikely event that funds can't be found from other sources, more than ample sums to pay for education are already being spent by families on other luxuries, and could be spent on education if people's priorities were to change. If people behaved more as they did in Victorian England, where education was an essential for working families, then there would be no problem finding resources in society. Second, we would need to know that there wouldn't be entrepreneurs - in business and industry, in banks, and in new education companies - who wouldn't be able to devise some solutions, given the freedom to do so, in terms of loans, or cross-subsidization, or whatever. Evidence for this assertion we will defer until the next chapter. Third, we'd also have to assume that there wouldn't also be entrepreneurs in the liberal arts who could provide cost-effective ways of ensuring that all could gain access to liberal education. I think it would be very hard to support such an assertion even within the context of today's society - where, for example, numerous high-quality arts programmes are available on television and radio (and I'm not just thinking of the BBC here, in case readers think I am smuggling in state funding by the back door, or in this case, the licence fee), funded either through ticket sales, or advertising, or commercial sponsorship.

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The fact that young people don't necessarily tune in to these opportunities but would rather listen to or watch 'youth ghetto' radio or television programmes is not the point now - it only reveals more about the way state schooling creates these youth ghettos in the first place, as mentioned in Session 1, rather than having to do with the intrinsic unattractiveness of liberal education to young people. In our closed way of thinking about education, we tend to ignore such obvious educational resources as television and radio - which have an extremely high penetration rate into even the poorest households. We dismiss them because we know that people currently watch programmes which are of questionable educational value. But all advertisers are concerned about is that people watch programmes in large numbers. By and large, advertisers will not be interested in what particular programmes people watch: if millions of people were to watch educational rather than non-educational programmes, advertisers would still put their resources into television and radio. In a study I conducted for the think-tank Education 2000,1 estimated that, in 1992-93, nearly £7 billion of advertising revenue could be seen as being potentially there to fund education in the UK, if the tastes and desires of the public were different (Tooley 1995c). Fourth, we would need to know that philanthropy couldn't provide for children who wouldn't be included in funding from the above sources. Evidence to support the notion that philanthropy could support such children would first come from the focus group's discussion of the relatively easy and inconspicuous ways in which it could be accomplished within education settings themselves - the cross-subsidization of places being one way. We'll come across evidence to show that this actually happens in certain contexts in the next Session. Then there is the general evidence about the huge sums of money and time that people give even now to educational charities. I estimated that, in 1992, individuals and businesses in the UK gave, in donations, £0.9 billion to educational charities.13 But there is also time given, through volunteering as school governors, and voluntary teaching and training for the disadvantaged, which I costed, very conservatively it seems now, at a further £4.1 billion.14 That is, £5 billion was the charitable commitment to education, compared with a figure of £14 billion which central and local government then spent on schools. That is, over one-third of what government spends on education is already being matched by philanthropy. In different circumstances, in the context of a lower tax regime and so more disposable income, for example, and where people were more aware of educational need, then this figure would likely be much, much greater. There are also 'private voucher' schemes currently in operation, to enable the children of disadvantaged families to attend the private schools of their choice, which would also provide evidence of the ways in which philanthropy can step in to provide for educational needs. The first of these schemes was developed in August 1991 by J. Patrick Rooney, Chief Executive Officer of the Golden Rule Insurance Company, after the defeat of a public voucher proposal in the Indiana state legislature. Instead of giving up in frustration, Rooney established the Educational Choice Charitable Trust, with the specific

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aim of providing financial assistance to low-income families. The 'Golden Rule' model embodied four basic principles. Vouchers would be for half of the private school tuition fee (thus ensuring parents became financial stakeholders in their children's education). Only low-income families would be eligible (but low-income families who had already made the sacrifice and commitment necessary to get their children into private schools would not be penalized). Vouchers would be eligible for use at any private school of the parents' choice (certainly not penalizing religious schools, as the state would seek to do). Lowincome families would be granted vouchers on a first-come, first-served basis (so there would be no requirement to satisfy academic or other selection tests, as there were for the UK government's Assisted Places Scheme). Inspired by the success of the Indianapolis scheme, there has been a burgeoning growth of similar schemes, with, in 1996, 30 schemes operating in cities across the USA, funding 10,000 students. These schemes range in size from Detroit and Little Rock, with fewer than twenty students funded, to the Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE) project in Milwaukee, funding nearly 3,000 students per annum. All the programmes have been overwhelmed by applicants from eligible families - sometimes to the tune of 100 applicants for each place. Finally, more specifically for higher education, we would have to know that, in addition to all the above factors, individuals wouldn't also consider it within their own interests to pursue higher educational possibilities within their own time, funding them through working in another field. But there is plenty of evidence around to suggest that they will. The for-profit university chain, the Apollo Group, for example, has 80,000 students on its courses, all pursuing higher education courses in the evenings or at weekends, while they work during the day. There are other similar universities in North America. Some might think that this just illustrates that people may be able to pursue such courses if they are vocationally relevant, but that this then leads to an impoverished view of what higher education is, neglecting the liberal arts. But of course, the Open University in Britain has had a hugely successful 30-odd years teaching mainly liberal arts bachelor's and master's degrees to adults in their own time and through distance courses with face-to-face tutorials and summer schools. And finally, the same notion of pursuing the intellectual life for the love of it, rather than because one is employed professionally to do so, can also be applied to 'academics' themselves. Many of my colleagues in the universities complain that they only get time to write papers and books in their long vacations, because of the pressures of administration loaded on to them during term time. Well, Bob Morrell should be an example to them all. He is employed full-time as the caretaker (janitor) at Arkwright Primary School in Nottingham. But in his spare time he is a respected historian, having published 40 learned papers and books (more than many academics manage during a full-time academic career) on the life of Thomas Paine. Mr Morrell lives a double life, 'by day the unassuming blue-collar worker then, in his own time, the sharply-honed intellectual who has enjoyed discussing his interests with the late Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and Tony Benn, the Labour MP'.

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Few who meet him as an intellectual know of his day job. Morrell says: Tm a member of a number of societies but I don't tell them I'm a caretaker - and they don't tend to ask' ('The secret academic life of Bob, the school caretaker', Daily Telegraph, 14 July 1999, p. 11). In combination, these types of evidence suggest very strongly that the various justifications for state funding to provide equality of educational opportunities would not easily be met. Indeed, I think it is highly unlikely that the combination of the family, entrepreneurs with freedom to find innovative solutions and philanthropy couldn't meet all that is required of equality of educational opportunity. There would be no justification for the state to intervene in terms of funding, it would seem. Some readers might wonder, even if there is not any justification for state funding, would there be any harm in it? Readers with 'tidy minds', who object to the 'ad hoc' nature of the solutions offered might be particularly impressed by such a route. I cannot stress enough that the 'tidy mind' solution does not lead to a tidy outcome: as we noted earlier, legally bringing in universal state schooling does not even deliver all children into schools, let alone deliver the benefits of universal education. So our solution is no more untidy than that. And readers tempted by the tidy solution will have to remind themselves of the shortcomings of going the state route, as noted in the writings of our 'Millennial Four', and from other dangers which are emerging as we progress through the book. In any case, we are looking to see if state intervention - in terms of provision, regulation and funding - can be justified in ethical terms. If something is not needed for desired ends, then it is not justified. One final point about equity, which probably won't be well received by some egalitarians, is nonetheless worth at least stating. Many technological innovations have prospered and become cheap because of the possibility of charging high prices for them initially. Colour TVs, VCRs, computers, mobile phones, etc., have all been just the playthings of the rich at first. But after the market got established, then prices were able to be drastically reduced, so much so that now mobile phones 'which were initially sold for . . . sometimes thousands of dollars, are now being given away free' (Coulson 1999, p. 344). But suppose that the manufacturers of all these luxury goods had been told that, for the sake of equity, they couldn't sell any product unless it was at a price which all could afford. It seems highly unlikely that any of the manufacturers would have ever got off the ground with these products which we now take for granted. The companies 'would have taken one glance at their R&D budgets, another at the prices they would be allowed to charge for their new products, and would have quickly decided that pursuing their bright ideas would lead to a financial meltdown' (Coulson 1999, p. 344). The same argument may be applicable to educational innovation too. If we want all eventually to be able to enjoy the fruits of technological and pedagogical innovation, it may be the case that some innovations will initially only be accessible to the rich, and only after a development period, subsidized as it were by the luxury purchases of the wealthy, would they become accessible to all.

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We'll leave that to one side. All the earlier discussion, however, depended on the existence of education companies, to ensure high and consistent quality for all. As was remarked earlier, where are they? In the next session we first turn to look at this pressing question, before moving on to look at choice and the information problem - other key justifications for state intervention in the regulation of education. NOTES 1 'Reform of Public Education: Lessons from the Developed and Developing World', CfBT Education Services Annual Debate, The Royal Commonwealth Society, London, 14 June 1999. 2 Throughout this book, recall, we use this phrase as a shorthand for markets in education, together with other agencies of civil society, including the family and philanthropy. 3 Just as in our discussion of education, we won't be getting too deeply engaged with philosophical debates about equity and equality of opportunity. We will make do with some simple working definitions. For a good introduction to further debates, see Flew (1981), Berlin (1969), Joseph and Sumption (1979) and Lucas (1971). 4 In the United Kingdom there are three education systems: in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. 5 Universal compulsion did not come until 1880, with attendance up to age 11 made compulsory in 1893, and raised to 12 in 1899. Elementary school fees were completely abolished only in 1918. 6 The 1833 figures are based in part on Lord Kerry's 1833 Report. The Manchester Statistical Society reported that these figures somewhat underestimated the provision of education. The Kerry figures were for 1,276,947 day school scholars which West corrects upwards, bearing in mind the Manchester Statistical Society's report, to between 1,596,184 and 1,915,420. He then notes the average weekly school fee of 81A d for boys, 10/4 d for girls and, for dame schools, 4d, and assumes a 34-week school year and 80 per cent attendance rates (given 1851 lower estimates on this). Hence annual cost of 34 weeks x 9d (weighted average fee) = £15s 6d. With the estimates of pupil numbers from the Kerry Report, this would amount to somewhere in the range of £2,040,000 to £2,422,500. West then includes Sunday Schools and raises the total to between £2.45m to £2.9m. Finally, educational provision in factories gives a figure of about £3m. With gross national income in England in 1833 estimated at £310m, this gives the figure of approximately 1 per cent. 7 Note that the school leaving age was not even raised to 12 until 1899. 8 For full details of this argument see Seville and Tooley 1997; for the original sources see Committee on Higher Education (1963a, b). 9 Readers interested in further details on these and other countries could begin with Andrew Coulson's excellent introduction Market Education (Coulson 1999) and follow up the comprehensive sources in his references. For a similar picture with regard to Australia see West (1992). 10 Figures are for 5-17-year-olds, and are from the US Bureau of the Census (1975) p. 368. 11 The argument here concerns the quality of service and goods, about which there is no dispute. At the current time there is some debate about whether or not UK

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supermarkets charge higher prices than those in America or Europe. However, the facts are that for one typical chain, 40 per cent of its prices are currently competitive with those in America. Once the high cost of government taxation on fuel (petrol is at least three times more expensive in the UK than in the USA) and excessive planning regulations (which rule out the building of cost-effective sites) are taken into account, the supposed pricing differential all but disappears. ('In Business', BBC Radio 4,27th September 1999). 12 In an increasingly mobile and fragmented society, 'brand names' work as local reputation works in a more static, homogenous setting. The argument of this and the next session, therefore, can be translated to apply to firms which operate in a relatively static community - where they can ensure high quality because their reputation and hence their business is at stake if they do not. 13 The total charitable expenditure in 1992 was £16bn. It is estimated that about onethird of this is from individual and corporate sources (see Pharoah and Smerdon 1998). Hence, total non-government giving is about £5.3 billion.The Charities Aid Foundation reports that 17 per cent of total grant funding for charities goes on education and closely related projects. Sources: Key Note (1993); Charities Aid Foundation (1993). 14 In the UK in 1992, there were approximately 350,000 school governors. Rough estimates of the amount of time worked are: 35,000 work on average, taking a 52week year, 3 hours per week; 315,000 work on average for 1 hour per week. We'll take an average figure of £5 per hour for payment of this voluntary work - roughly the average hourly pay, after National Insurance and tax have been deducted, for a single person. This gives a total of £109,200,000 for School Governors (Source: Department for Education, 1992). Next, Matheson's (1990) figures show 23 per cent of the over-16 population doing voluntary work, and 24 per cent of these doing voluntary teaching and training. (Others are also likely to do work which could be defined as educational, so this is likely to be a conservative estimate.) That is, about 2.5 million people do voluntary educational work (23 per cent of 46,183,000 - UK population over 16 - is 10,622,090; 24 per cent of this is 2,549,302). Matheson found that about half of these spend at least, on average, taking a 52-week year, 10 hours a week on this work, the rest a mean of about 2 hours per week. Again, we'll take an average figure of £5 per hour to cost this. This gives totals of approx. £3.25 billion per year (for the 10-hour per week group) and £650 million per year (for the 2-hour per week group), a total of roughly £4bn per year.

Session 3 Choice

PROLOGUE The global education industry When I began a study for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private finance arm of the World Bank, looking at opportunities for investment in private education in developing countries, I must admit that I wasn't sure that we would find much of relevance for them. A few elitist private schools and universities, maybe, and some small, poor-quality 'shack" and 'store-front' schools of the type that I'd seen in South Africa the year before President Mandela was elected, but hardly anything worth investing in.That's not to say that such shack schools weren't of interest; on the contrary, I found them fascinating. They arose as an entrepreneurial response to the poor quality of 'Bantu education' under apartheid, but were still flourishing as apartheid ended. Often run on a shoe-string by a single business person, many small-scale operations emerged, patronized by eager parents who wanted to get out of the state system but for reasons of access or poverty were unable to obtain places at more mainstream alternatives. In the rural areas such schools were based in simple mud huts, hence the name 'shack school' - a generic term which did not adequately describe the accommodation used by the burgeoning market in the cities and townships. Perhaps the most extreme example was of the booming business in Johannesburg, where over 2,000 children were accommodated in a disused warehouse. Older children were taught in small groups, relaying this to larger groups of younger children just like the Lancastrian schools in Victorian England. Other examples abounded. The First National College of South Africa, in a disused office block between Soweto and Johannesburg, catered for boarders, had strict discipline, and expected the highest standards. In the townships numerous schools took place in people's homes. In the Winterveld area of Bophuthatswana, there was an explosion of schools in makeshift accommo-

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dation in response to the government's decision to end teaching in English. Interestingly, although I was teaching at one university, and giving papers at several others, in South Africa, and although my interest in private education was apparent, none of my colleagues volunteered any information about these schools. To them, it turned out, the 'shack schools' were a dirty secret, just examples of 'businessmen exploiting the poor'. I only found out about them through Eustace Davie, a director of the Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg, who introduced me to these examples. So they were fascinating to me. But I didn't suppose they would qualify over-much as suitable 'investment opportunities' for the IFC. Nor did I think that there would be private education opportunities in developing countries which would move forward my ideas about 'the private alternative'. Findings would reinforce the lessons of Victorian England, that poor parents were hungry for education for their children - which was a useful reinforcement, but nothing more. But then, as I spent my first few days on the project touring the World Bank, speaking to anyone and everyone with any knowledge of education in any of the dozen developing countries chosen for the research,1 there emerged little hints that there may be more to private education than that. I felt a bit like an innocent talking to adventurers returning from foreign parts, latching on to puzzling tales about . . . in my case, chains of schools. I remember vividly the first time I heard this word mentioned, concerning the Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers, who apparently, I was told, ran '60 rural schools', heavily subsidized by the companies, as a perk to their workers (the figure turned out to be over 5,000 schools!).This interested me greatly, for it seemed to fit with all my previous ideas about the way industry could work to provide for this 'public good' of education, and again seemed reminiscent of the Livery Societies in Victorian England, which also ran schools in part as a perk to their workers, and to educate future workers. Again, notice, I thought even this would at best only reinforce lessons from Victorian England. But if that was all I thought the project was going to reveal, then I was in for a surprise. And the surprise I received is the second jolt that I want to give to readers, about the nature and extent of private education in developing countries. This made me completely reformulate all my ideas about the potential for private education. I thought I would have to wait for the emergence of free markets in Britain or America before I could gain a sense of how it all could happen. Instead, I found my evidence in developing countries. Far from making me think of Victorian England, it made me think about the future. Return to the equity problem Where did we get to in Session 2? We nearly showed that equity did not require state intervention but could be satisfied by the private alternative. Needed for the argument - why we only 'nearly' showed this - was discussion of the missing piece in the jigsaw, education companies. For many the notion that there could be competing education companies with strong brand names operating in

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much the same way, in terms of quality, as competing chains of, say, supermarkets and hotels was completely implausible. They are certainly not a familiar part of the educational landscape. But to complete our argument about equity, they were absolutely essential. For if there were such chains of schools, then we could be reassured that the poor and disadvantaged need never have to attend inferior, or 'sink' schools, because the education companies could guarantee that quality was uniformly high throughout all their schools. The existence of such education chains would satisfy doubters that disadvantaged children did not need the state to ensure that they were not consigned to inferior schools. Moreover, it would further help the argument for equity if we could also furnish some concrete examples of education companies finding ways of funding the poor, through scholarships, subsidies or loans, in the ways envisaged by the focus group. Together, these would put to bed once and for all the argument for state intervention on the grounds of equity. Such education companies do exist. They are thriving in many countries around the world, and becoming increasingly global in perspective. In this section, I give a snapshot of nine of the companies found in the IFC research (Tooley 1999b) in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, outlining some of the features which make them completely unlike the private education schools with which we are familiar in Britain and America. To begin, I summarize the origins of each company, showing how they have grown and developed. I then sketch out the factors which make these companies so interesting for our purposes here, which make them behave like some of the most innovative and creative service industries around. First, I'll highlight the importance of brand name, highly desirable if these companies are to be able to guarantee uniformly high quality. Strong brand names imply companies seeking expansion, so second, we will look at the ways companies have expanded to ensure economies of scale (important for funding research and development). But large companies with strong brand names will not succeed in guaranteeing quality unless they are heavily involved in quality control, our third topic. Fourth, if the education companies are to be able to continually ensure high quality at reasonable costs, then they would have to be involved in innovation and research and development - for otherwise they would not be able to guarantee high quality into the future, even if things are excellent at present. Finally, we focus on the ways in which these companies are providing funding for the less-advantaged, illustrating the ways in which the private alternative is able to create opportunities for the poor. A snapshot of nine education companies Brazil- UNIP/Objetivo In Brazil I learnt some of the most interesting lessons about educational franchising. I saw the way companies could expand both in terms of numbers of centres, and in terms of the range of educational opportunities offered (including radio and television). For there are several chains of private schools

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and universities operating in Brazil, each with a fascinating story of its own. The largest is Objetivo/UNIP, with headquarters in Sao Paulo. (Objetivo is the school chain, UNIP the university.) Many of the chains have similar, humble beginnings, all stories of individual educational entrepreneurs finding a small market niche, and growing their companies through their own effort, not helped by commercial banks or government. Objetivo emerged in the early 1960s, when Mr Joao Carlos Di Genio started a coaching class for university entrance with about twenty private students. Finding considerable demand for his teaching methods, he founded an intensive cramming course in 1965 with three friends, for students to get into university. They called this course 'Objetivo'. In 1967, they utilized internal television broadcasting for their lessons - a revolutionary development at the time. Three years later they added a school, from primary to Second Grade, extended in 1974 to offer courses up to university entrance. In 1988 they were granted the title of University for their upper levels - after what they saw as a fourteen-year struggle to get such recognition. Since then, they have continued to expand, so that now they have approximately 500,000 students in centres and 450 franchises across Brazil, with annual turnover approximately US$400 million. School students range from pre-school and primary, through 1st Grade (age 11-14 years), 2nd Grade (15-17 years), to prep (university entrance, 18 years). The university offers courses including business administration, teacher training, engineering, dentistry and veterinary science. One of the franchisees of Objetivo is a Dr Chaim Zaher. But he also owns his own company, our second Brazilian chain, COC. Brazil -COC COC is currently perhaps the most technologically innovative of the chains of schools in Brazil. Based in Ribeirao Preto, Dr Chaim Zaher, the Director, jointly owns the company with his wife. COC has three wholly-owned schools, catering to children from kindergarten to university entrance examination, and over 70 franchises, with the aim to increase this to 200 by year 2001. In all, there are roughly 30,000 students in COC schools. The turnover of the company in 1997 was US$30 million. It is currently seeking to expand by opening a new university in Ribeirao Preto, introducing its technological innovation at this level to cater for a growing market. First Dr Zaher opened a cramming college for the 'vestibular' - the Brazilian university entrance examination - in Aragatuba in 1970. This was named THATHI College (an acronym of the first initials of his daughters' names). He expanded this to open a high school five years later. Meanwhile, in 1963, a group of students from one of the best medical schools in Brazil, based in Ribeirao Preto, set up a similar cramming course. They named the course after a famous Brazilian scientist, creating the Colegio Oswaldo Cruz (COC). In 1972, following the success of the cramming college, a high school was added, followed in 1979 by the primary and junior high schools. In 1985,

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spurred on by the success of his own school, Dr Zaher bought COC from the original founders. The COC schools are most distinctive for incorporating the most up-todate technology within their schools. In the Ribeirania Unit in RP, all classrooms are gradually being replaced by the 'classroom of the future', where all desks have their specially designed computer terminal, connected to CDROM and the Internet, and to the teacher's smartboard, as well as to a high brilliance projector. The electronic desks can fold away to be also used as traditional desks. Classes which do not yet have these facilities do, however, all come equipped with a computer and a 29-inch TV to support the teacher's activities. There is also the main amphitheatre, which seats 200 students for larger lectures. Here each seat is connected to a computer and to the Intranet, which allows for complex tutor-student and student-student interaction. It also has VCR and laserdisc equipment. Finally, there is a virtual reality classroom, which students can use for one period a week. Brazil - Pitdgoras Group Look through some of the archive material for Pitagoras, and you'll find a photograph of five young, bearded, long-haired teachers in the late 1960s. These five are the original founders, three of whom are still with the company in executive positions. Evando Neiva, now the president of Pitagoras, was the physics teacher. In April 1966, in a Catholic college in Belo Horizonte, these teachers held a pre-university crammer class for 35 students. The fact that 33 of the 35 students passed the university entrance examination seems to have been noticed, for they were able to more than quadruple the number for their next course, and within three years the number had grown to 1,200. In 1970, Pitagoras formed an alliance with three of the big Catholic colleges in Belo Horizonte, taking responsibility for the teaching of their university entrance courses. Inspired by their initial success here, Pitagoras decided to diversify further, and opened their own 1st and 2nd grade schools in late 1971. To do this, they invested their own funds in the construction of a purpose-built school, Colegio Pitagoras, in a prime area of Belo Horizonte. To distinguish themselves from other schools in Minas Gerais, the company designed a new curriculum and teaching model. By this time, 5,000 young people between 11 and 18 were enrolled with Pitagoras, doing pre-vestibular, 1st and 2nd grade, and also free week-long courses as part of the company's social responsibility programme. In 1973 they added professional technical education to this list. In 1994, the Network Pitagoras (Rede Pitdgoras) was established, linking other schools within their quality control programme. In less than a year the network moved up to 106 schools, and the figure now stands at 120 schools, with 80,000 students, with the expectation that this will reach 400 by the year 2000.

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India - Delhi Public Schools (DPS) The Delhi Public School Society is a highly successful chain of private schools in India, with annual turnover of approximately US$4 million. It prides itself on excellent academic results and comparatively low fees. It has exhibited dynamic growth, particularly over the past six years, with each of the Society's Core Schools posting reasonable surpluses every year. DPS owes its existence to a group of Indians displaced after Partition. Their first school, DPS-Mathura Road, was established in tents in 1949. As the fledgling school grew, the tents gave way to a permanent building, and then to the establishment of other 'core' schools in and around Delhi, and then in partnerships with state governments elsewhere. Today, there are 42 schools, with a total student population of around 50,000, and DPS is seeking 150 schools by 2001. There are four types of schools, including five Core Schools, wholly owned by the Society; 32 Satellite Schools, located in eleven States, which have been set up and are owned by respective Public Sector (Government) Undertakings (PSUs), run on their behalf by the Society; three Village Schools, located in Mewat, a backward area not far from New Delhi, subsidized using surplus resources of the larger Core schools; and two Overseas Schools. In addition to its schools the DPS runs other ventures funded from Core School surpluses. These include: an educational think-tank and R&D centre, set up in 1993, to undertake educational research on the development of innovative teaching techniques, contemporary teaching-learning aids and courseware; and a Teachers' Training College, located in Delhi, offering initial and in-service teacher training - for teachers inside and outside the DPS system. India-NUT Perhaps some of the most fascinating insights about the possibilities and potential for private education companies I gleaned from NUT This is the largest provider of computer education and training in India, with a market share of 37 per cent, annual turnover of US$73 million, and profits of US$13 million. The company has more than 400 centres in India, and has recently expanded into overseas markets. It also provides training and software consultancy for companies, and has its own educational multimedia software production facility, with 550 personnel employed making it the largest in the world. With a history stretching back eighteen years, NUT boasts 500,000 alumni, and a corporate network of over 1,000 companies. But these simple facts don't reveal the full strength of NIIT's achievements, as we shall see in the pages that follow. NUT was conceived in 1979 by Rajendra S. Pawar, now Vice Chairman and Managing Director, then a development officer for a computer company in Bombay. He was aware both of the need for trained computer staff and of the unsatisfactory nature of the computer education in Indian universities. With two colleagues he set up a company, which opened its first Computer

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Education Centre in a leased room in an office building in downtown Mumbai (Bombay), in 1982. In the same year it opened a second centre in Delhi. Having achieved significant growth, in 1993 the company was listed on the Mumbai and Delhi (National) Stock Exchanges. In February 1996, they opened their first education centre outside India, in Kathmandu, Nepal. There are now four strands to NIIT's business, the most important part being the CEG - the Career Education Group. 60 per cent of NIIT's Education and Training turnover comes from this. The majority - 80 per cent of students on this course are already 'full-time' students at an Indian university. Many students and employers find Indian university computer courses unsatisfactory, because they use out-of-date technology and methods, and are undemanding for students. Hence NUT works 'in tandem' with the formal sector, and offers a four-semester (two-year) course to students already enrolled in a state university. Allowing time for revising for exams for both courses, at the end of three years students can become graduates of an Indian university, and have an NUT Professional Diploma in Network-Centred Computing. The great majority also go on to the one-year NUT Professional Practice option. This is a placement whereby students are given a mentor in NUT and a supervisor in the company where they are employed, and paid a stipend for their full-time work. This stipend is calculated to cover all the fees for the two-year NUT course. This is an extremely successful model, with over 1,000 companies taking part, and in the great majority of cases students find full-time employment with their placement company. At the end of this process, provided they have satisfied their supervisor and mentor, they become a 'GNIIT, a Graduate of NUT. The second key part of the education and training business is the ETG Executive Training Group, which has seven ETCs (Executive Training Centres). These are Authorised Technical Education Centres, in partnership with Microsoft, at which companies can book courses. There are also about 100 CLCs (Computer Learning Centres), which are set up as turnkey operations for particular companies. Third, there are the LFCs - Leda Family Clubs. I visited several of these centres in the suburbs of Mumbai. Here a family becomes the franchise holder, using a room in the family home as the learning centre. These focus on learning through NIIT's brandname software, LEDA - Learning through Exploration, Discovery and Adventure. In this way children (and adults) learn mathematics, English, computing, geography and science through multimedia learning packages. LFCs are also being opened in schools, where the franchise holder contracts to provide all the computer tuition within the school. This is offered at fairly low cost to the school in return for free rental of the premises, which can then be used to generate revenue out of school hours. A key part of the marketing for LEDA is the research which has been conducted by NIIT's R&D department (see below), which shows that children who learn through multimedia do better in the classroom at the subjects than those who learn through conventional tuition methods. Fourth, there is IEG - the International Education Group. There are over

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twenty countries now, with centres in China, five centres in Malaysia, two centres in Zimbabwe, and three in Indonesia. NUT has also recently moved into distance learning, with 'NetVarsity', run from a server located in their American concern (because it was too difficult to obtain an Indian connection from the government quango, and also illegal to charge fees), but using all the software developed in India. Initially, this was a free venture, but the first fees were due to be charged from January 1998. Finally, providing an interesting twist in the story of global capitalist imperialism, NUT has recently opened centres in the USA and UK, and will shortly be listed on NASDAQ.

Peru-TECSUP TECSUP is a private, not-for-profit technological institute, set at the non-university 'superior' level in the Peruvian education system, with an annual turnover of approximately US$7 million. It gives young people training as applied engineers, and also offers short courses for people already working in industry. Its first centre, in Lima, opened in 1984, and the second centre, in Arequipa, opened in 1993. Luis Hochschild, a successful Peruvian businessman, came up with the idea behind TECSUP in 1980, with aid from the German State of Baden-Wiirttemberg - which donated machinery and expertise. Two major types of courses offered at TECSUP are: the core programme, for the training of technicians, aimed at school-leavers with a high level of schooling; and the continuous education programme which offers short courses for people already in employment, to bring them up to date with the latest technology and to develop their management skills. The three year core programme leads to the 'Technical Professional Diploma' - a government diploma. In the continuous education programme, short courses cater for the range of technical and managerial needs of employees already in employment. Half of the short-course programme is taught in the companies. As an additional part of this programme, TECSUP is now offering a distance-learning modular MBA, in conjunction with the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain. TECSUP is also going into new and profitable areas for their short-course programme, including distance education, and long-distance video-conferencing and education, and satellite courses. Finally, the Arequipa site runs university supplementary courses. These are based on the premise that the two university engineering courses in Arequipa are far too theoretical, and don't offer any practical work for the students. So weekend courses are offered. Interestingly, the private university pays students' fees - almost subcontracting out this aspect of their work - although the public university does not. Students get a TECSUP certificate, and this they find enhances their later employment prospects. South Africa - Educor One of the first education companies I studied was the extremely innovative

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Education Investment Corporation Limited (Educor), the largest private education group in Africa. It has a combined enrolment of over 300,000 students on 127 campuses, plus large numbers in distance education, and with an estimated 100,000 students graduating in 1997. Its annual turnover that year was approximately US$26 million, with profits of US$6 million. Its education business covers the range from Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET), through primary, secondary and tertiary education, to post-graduate and corporate training. The Educor group comprises six main education subsidiaries, Damelin Education Group, Midrand Campus, Eden College, The Graduate Institute of Management and Technology, INTEC, the Charter Group, and two recruitment and placement divisions, Renwick Group, and PAG Placements. The oldest of these, and the core on which the fortunes of the company has been built, is Damelin - itself a group of companies, and with its own fascinating history. Damelin College - a 'cramming' college for white students - was founded in 1943 by Dr Benjamin Damelin. Johann Brummer joined as a teacher in 1951, became a partner in 1952, and was until 1998 Executive Chairman of Educor. A key step in the development of the brand name was in 1952, when Johann Brummer started developing distance learning materials, which became Damelin Correspondence College, founded in 1955. Brummer was aware that the majority of African teachers in rural areas had not graduated from high school, and he sought to improve their conditions with a programme of high-school graduation through distance learning. He also saw an untapped and potentially lucrative market -showing how the profit motive led to improved opportunities for the most disadvantaged in society. In the early 1960s, Damelin started offering evening classes from the Johannesburg site - this was the start of the Damelin Campus, which now offers business and degree courses. Next, in 1968, came the Damelin Management School, offering specific training for adults, towards Damelin certificates endorsed by the professional institutes. Finally, in the early 1980s, Damelin Computer School was started, initially only offering part-time courses. All these divisions still operated from the same building in Johannesburg City Centre, on a site leased to the company; eventually, in 1993, the company moved to a purpose-built leased site a couple of miles north of the City Centre, in Braamfontein, because the old site in the city centre was becoming unsafe. In June 1996, Educor was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and began further acquisitions. It first acquired Eden College, a competitor, which by this time was running two high schools in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Next, it acquired 60 per cent of GIMT - the Graduate Institute of Management and Technology. Looking for further 'synergy' with their operations, Educor next acquired the recruitment companies, the Renwick Group the CEO of Renwick, Charles Rowlinson is now the CEO of Educor - and PAG Placements, then further distance education companies. Again, Educor has recently gone on global expansion, acquiring an 80 per cent share of Toronto-based International Business Schools.

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Romania - CODECS From one of the oldest and largest education companies to one of the newest and smallest: CODECS - the Centre for Open Distance Education for Civil Society. This is a remarkably innovative distance education company, based in Bucharest, with twelve regional centres throughout Romania. It provides the UK's Open University Business School courses in business management, as well as specialized consultancy and short courses. It has been in business for five years, and now has over 2,500 students on its books. In 1992, Adrian lonescu was a student of the UK's Open University Business School (OUBS). His MBA dissertation business plan looked at the potential for a for-profit distance education company in Romania. Instead of leaving it to gather dust on his shelves, with 23 other students he created CODECS, with an initial capital of only US$325. lonescu is now CEO of the company. It is a for-profit company, even though the law stipulates that private education must be organized and function on non-profit principles. However, the same law allows institutions, including commercial companies, to deliver professional training programmes for adults through distance learning. CODECS is functioning on a licence contract with the British Open University. Formally the students are considered to be Romanian students enrolled in a foreign university. The Romanian government refuses to endorse CODECS diplomas, because it is a for-profit company, and for-profit education is an oxymoron still in Romania. 'Never mind', says Adrian lonescu, 'the market endorses them, and that is enough for me.' Zimbabwe - Speciss College When Professor Michael Barber - head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit at the UK's DfEE - was a teacher in Zimbabwe, he supplemented his meagre salary in a government school by moonlighting at the private Speciss College. Speciss is the largest, most diverse and most comprehensive provider of quality training and education in Zimbabwe, providing high school and professional training, tertiary education, job-related training and remedial education for people with educational or learning problems. It has approximately 30,000 students across five campuses. In 1965, the young George Laverdos, travelling home from South Africa to Greece via Rhodesia, met David Sutherland, the principal of the International Correspondence College in Salisbury. Laverdos had once taught a 'How to Study' course in Greece and Sutherland asked him to spend two weeks writing a similar course for the Rhodesian market. When the course was written, it was suggested that George should stay behind and teach the course; after leafleting outside several of the major city schools, they had applicants enough for six classes of twelve students. Buoyed by this success, they set up a cramming college, the National Coaching Academy (NCA), modelled explicitly on Damelin High School (see above). Internal disagreements prompted Laverdos to move to Bulawayo, where he started a 'How-to-study' course,

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which evolved into Speciss College in Bulawayo - 'SPECISS' being the acronym of Laverdos' study method, State, Preview, Explore, Comprehend, Involve, Systematize, Summarize. After four years, Laverdos brought his concept to Salisbury, and the NCA and Speciss merged. They then bought two colleges in the African townships - Lobengula college (in a township of Bulawayo) and Magaba College (in the township of Harare). Laverdos' motivation for taking over the African colleges was quite explicit: he was driven by business opportunism, to address a market - black and lower income level which was not being catered for. But, again, this motivation provided a new clientele with high-quality opportunities for advancement which they would not otherwise have had - a lesson we'll take further in Session 5. Key factors Each of these is a fascinating example of private education companies. Their individual stories certainly inspired and motivated me to think in different ways about the potential for private education to reach a huge audience, and to satisfy demand that was not being met by governments anywhere. For the argument here, they have key factors which show how they respond to their market like any other high-quality, innovative service industry. First, this is in terms of the importance of brand name. 1. Brand name It challenged most of my preconceptions about education to discover the importance of brand name, and the significance its promotion had to many of the educational companies. For example, any visitor to South Africa cannot fail to be struck by the ubiquity of advertisements for courses offered by Damelin and other Educor subsidiaries - covering high school, university courses and vocational and professional courses; a visitor to Brazil will soon come across billboard advertising for UNIP-Objetivo, COC or Pitagoras - for the full range from kindergarten to university; in India, the brand name of NUT is everywhere on television, radio and in print - advertising computer courses for undergraduates, professional training and, increasingly, computer literacy courses in schools and at home. For companies concerned to promote brand name, the following general comments can be made: • Brand promotion could amount to about 10 per cent of turnover. • Companies have full-time marketing staff and management to develop and strengthen brand name, who use a variety of methods and promotions. • Companies can successfully pursue a 'dual-brand' strategy. • Independent market research shows the brand-name promotion to have been successful for many companies.

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Some examples illustrate these themes. EDUCOR, SOUTH AFRICA

Educor does direct selling in private and government schools. Other brandpromoting events include careers evenings and roadshows and Softball and volleyball tournaments. SPECISS COLLEGE, ZIMBABWE

The most dramatic range of activities to promote brand name were found in Speciss College, Zimbabwe. These include: the sponsoring of a basketball team and two national athletes; careers days at all state and private high schools; running of film premieres under the Speciss banner; an elaborate graduation each year with a high media profile; giving away courses as prizes in charity raffles; and high-profile Mr Speciss Personality and Miss Speciss contests. It seems clear that this promotion of the brand name has succeeded. Recent market research shows Speciss the leader when respondents were asked, unprompted, for their knowledge of tertiary education institutions. It was the highest rated for blacks and Asians/mixed race, although it came third for whites. Combined ratings for spontaneous and prompted awareness put Speciss in third place, after the University of Zimbabwe and the Polytechnic. NUT, INDIA

NUT pursues aggressive newspaper advertising, but also successfully ran its own radio show, now replaced by an equally successful television show 'BOOT IT'. This is in a commercial slot, financed by selling advertising space at the beginning, middle and end of the programme, which aims to introduce people to the world of computing - and also acts as a marketing conduit to further NUT courses. It is advertised as a free computer literacy programme for the masses, and is a 24-episode series broadcast on metro and national channels. It is also broadcast in Pakistan and Mauritius. This TV show was launched in July 1997, although it had been ready for broadcasting for the previous eighteen months, but had been held up by government regulation. Again, NIIT's brand-building seems to be highly successful: recent Gallup research shows that, just as people use 'making a Xerox' as synonymous with 'making a photocopy', so 'doing an NUT' is synonymous with 'studying a computer course'. Some employers are now advertising that they are seeking someone 'with an Indian University Master's degree, or GNIIT', that is, 'Graduate of NUT'. COC, BRAZIL

COC has its own publicity department - PubliCOC - which plans and implements its media strategies, develops advertisements and supports other developments of its brand name. Marketing techniques include advertising in newspapers, magazines, on radio, and television. They also sponsor a nationally renowned basketball team - PoltiCOC - which takes part in the highest-

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level competitions in Brazil. Also having their own TV and radio stations, used for general broadcasting (not just educational material), helps promote their brand name all year round. PITAGORAS, BRAZIL Pitagoras does use normal marketing routes, such as media advertising. However, a key aspect of the promotion of its brand name comes from its social responsibility programme: the Trojeto Pitagoras-JB' involves the distribution of a free newspaper, in partnership with the Jornal do Brasil, eventually aiming to reach every school in Brazil each week. Pitagoras' name appears unobtrusively on every page. 2. Expansion The desire for strong brand names is closely linked with the desire to reach a larger audience. Expansion (through 'integration' in the economist's terminology) has been a preoccupation of many of the education companies studied. Some have expanded their operations through 'horizontal' integration, taking over other schools or companies; others have integrated 'laterally', diversifying into other levels of educational delivery, or related trades such as recruitment; a few firms have integrated 'vertically', by taking over the educational publishing process, including multimedia development. HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION: TAKING OVER OTHER SCHOOLS

The three Brazilian chains (Objetivo/UNIP, COC and Pitagoras) began life as pre-university cramming classes, and then developed in all three cases by expanding 'downwards' into high school, elementary school and finally kindergarten. Sometimes this was accomplished by taking over existing schools, although other times by opening new schools. In southern Africa, Educor, South Africa and Speciss College, Zimbabwe, both started as 'cramming' colleges too, and have since taken over other colleges. VERTICAL INTEGRATION: MOVING INTO NEW LEVELS OF EDUCATION

Many of the companies studied have moved into new levels of education. Some examples are: •

Objetivo/UNIP, Brazil, opened a university chain, while COC and Pitagoras are seeking to do the same. • Educor, South Africa and Speciss, Zimbabwe, have moved into all areas from high school, through vocational and technical education, to universities. • NUT, India, has moved from computer training to managing 'edutainment' opportunities for children and parents in schools and neighbourhood centres.

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LATERAL INTEGRATION: SYNERGY BETWEEN EDUCATION AND RECRUITMENT Many education companies have found 'synergy' between education and recruitment, both as a marketing tool and as a way of enhancing the educational experience offered. •

In NUT, India, each centre has a RIIC (Regional Industry Collaboration Cell), whose task is to keep continually in touch with company IT and recruitment personnel, both in order to get a feel for what is needed in the market, and to help place students. They keep a detailed database of all students, and match individuals to the recruitment needs of particular companies. • TECSUP, Peru, has a small but specialized department which keeps in constant contact with a huge number of companies, and with students placed within those companies. • The connection between recruitment and education has been realized by education companies buying recruitment agencies (Educor, South Africa), or by recruitment agencies buying education companies (ADvTECH - not one of the case studies - in South Africa).

LATERAL AND VERTICAL INTEGRATION: TELEVISION AND RADIO Three of the Brazilian chains studied, COC, Pitagoras, and Objetivo-UNIP, have moved into radio and television, and other media, initially as a way of extending their control over educational media (vertical integration), but also as a way of diversifying their portfolio. The most dramatic example is COC, and its Sistema COC de Educa^ao e Comunicagao. COC prides itself on being a combined system of education and communication. To this end it has a movie theatre, to supplement the cultural activities of its students, and TV and radio stations. COC Cinema is based in Ribeirao Preto, and provides film viewings for its students (and employees) free of charge, 'to reinforce the classroom experience'. These include foreign and literary movies which otherwise would be hard for students to find. Its place in the city centre also ensures the continued promotion of the COC brand name. COC also has two TV stations. One is a commercial television station, broadcasting programmes to a region of over five million people, the second is totally dedicated to education. It works jointly with Funda^ao Roquete Pinto (an educational foundation), to broadcast programmes made by TV Educativa do Rio de Janeiro (one of the two educational TV stations in Brazil). VERTICAL INTEGRATION: PUBLISHING AND MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT

Many companies have moved into educational publishing and multimedia development as a way of having control over the educational process: •

COC, Brazil, runs its own publishing house, Editora COC, which publishes educational books, workbooks, supporting charts and CD-ROMs.

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Objetivo has a similar publishing house and multimedia development centre. • CODECS, Romania, has a publishing house, translating and printing business books in Romania, in co-operation with foreign publishers such as Amacom, Gower, Kogan Page, Crisp, Pitman. • NUT has the largest educational software development centre anywhere in the world, developing multimedia CD-ROM and Internet course materials. • Educor (Damelin), South Africa and Speciss College, Zimbabwe publish study guides and curriculum materials, both for their own students and for others. •

OTHER EXPANSION

It is also noteworthy the way in which many educational companies have expanded throughout their respective countries, with many expanding internationally. Notable international expansion includes: • NUT has now more than 400 centres around India, and operates in twenty countries worldwide, including Indonesia, Singapore, China, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and the USA. • Educor has more than 127 centres and franchises around South Africa, and has expanded into Namibia, Botswana, Malawi and Lesotho and North America, with expansion into Zimbabwe and Mauritius imminent. RAISING CAPITAL

How have the education companies financed their expansion? Surprisingly, most of the companies surveyed had never borrowed, but had started as 'shoe string' operations, and had financed all their expansion through internal investment. Examples of companies following this route were the Brazilian chains of COC, Objetivo-UNIP, Pitagoras and CODECS in Romania. In other cases we found companies which had also started on a shoe string, which had financed all their initial expansion through internal investment, but which later were able to finance expansion through rights issues. Examples here were Educor and ADvTECH in South Africa, and NUT in India. FRANCHISING

For many education companies surveyed, franchising was a very important strategy for expansion. In vocational education NUT franchised computer centres, as did Educor (Damelin); in school education, all the Brazilian chains had franchises - sometimes as many as 450 (Objetivo). Interestingly, Objetivo only franchised at the school, not university, level, feeling that quality control would be too tricky at the latter level. Two distinct ways of franchising were discovered: 1. The franchisee pays a percentage of income to the mother company in return for use of the brand name, training and use of materials. This was

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found in Educor and ADvTECH in South Africa and NUT in India. 2. The franchise buys the curriculum materials from the mother company (or its publishing arm). Along with the materials comes the package of quality control mechanisms that make the school entitled to use the brand name. This was the case in the Brazilian chains (COC, Objetivo, and Pitagoras). Income received from franchises as a percentage of total income varied considerably. NUT received 20 per cent of its total income in 1996 from franchise royalties, whereas Educor received only 3 per cent. 3. Quality control We are particularly interested in large, growing education companies with strong brand names because of the impact we think this will have on quality. What formal mechanisms do these companies have to ensure uniformly high quality across all their centres? How do the various head offices keep control over their disparate sites? NUT

NUT, India, exercises tight control over its 400-odd franchises and 30 branches. Since January 1995, it has implemented CCQMS (Crosby's Complete Quality Management System). Each member of staff undergoes the same initial and in-service training at head office or a regional centre, and all management must also have been NUT teachers. Each course tutor is given a batch file, which describes in meticulous detail all the courses to be taught, the sub-units, the material to be covered, and the time to be taken on each section • this even prescribes how long must be taken over each overhead transparency! To complement this, each tutor follows a standardized quality control procedure, monitored initially within the branch, then by quality control visits from central or regional management. This procedure uses the following indicators: • Aggregated mean student marks, as taken on NUT standardized twice-asemester tests (marked by someone other than the faculty). If students are doing badly on these objective tests, this is seen to reflect badly on the faculty member. • Student feedback questionnaire, completed three times a semester, on which students rate the faculty, the NUT and their own learning. Importantly, one of the questions asks for the student's own grasp of the knowledge. If the student gives a low assessment here, this reflects badly on the individual faculty member. • Student upgrades. If students are initially only registered for one semester (as about 50 per cent are), then if they re-register for another course, this is taken as a point in the faculty member's favour. • Student defaulters. If students default on payment or drop out of a course, this is taken as a negative indicator of the faculty member.

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EDUCOR (DAMELIN), SOUTH AFRICA All branches and franchises are subject to identical quality control procedures. They run exactly the same courses, with teachers following identical course materials, using centrally-agreed assignments and assessments, in classrooms laid out to identical minimum specifications, and so on. There are detailed specifications about who can be employed, and all lecturers are evaluated three times a year, using a standardized Lecturer Evaluation Questionnaire, filled out by students. To oversee all these quality control procedures, there is a specialized department, the 'National Support Office', headed by the 'National Director of Studies', and a team of full-time administrators. Additional quality control procedures are used in particular branches of Educor. Damelin Management School, for instance, employs a total of sixteen full-time 'Consultants', plus two full-time administrators. A key responsibility is to conduct telephone interviews of a 10 per cent random sample of students three times during each course, to evaluate teaching and course materials. If any student expresses dissatisfaction, this student is followed through the remaining interviews, otherwise a different random selection is made. Any negative feedback is reported to the Director of Studies, who then interviews the teacher concerned and makes appropriate recommendations. OBJETIVO, BRAZIL A key aspect of Objetivo's quality control is based on the course materials. It is prescribed that these are used in exactly the same way throughout the country. All teachers have to finish the same syllabus by the end of each month. If they do not cover all the lessons, then they have to give extra lessons during the month until they do. (Teachers do not see this as restricting their professional autonomy - they see themselves as presenters of material, rather than adjudicators of what that material should be: 'It is part of what it means to be a teacher, to be a performer'.) PITAGORAS, BRAZIL All Pitagoras schools have to follow common quality control procedures, involving their version of 'Total Quality Management' (TQM) utilizing standardized tests and surveys of parents. Pitagoras's Total Quality Management workshops have been attended by over 4,000 professionals from all over Brazil, and, with the help of the Juran Institute, USA, have been exported to the USA. The Total Quality Office has now become a separate wholly-owned Group company, the Pitagoras TEC; this is involved in: preparation of consultants for the implementation of TQM in education; benchmarking in schools, and problem-solving for continuous improvement. 4. Innovation and research and development If the education companies are to be able to maintain high quality, and not stagnate and acquiesce in technological obsolescence, as is a major criticism of state education, then they will need to be engaged in innovation and research

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and development (R&D). Again, many of the education companies in the IFC study were already doing this. The most notable example of R&D was found in NUT - although other companies were not far behind. NUT has two research and development departments. The first is a pure research unit, with about twenty people, many with PhDs, employed under Dr Mitra, whose brief is simply to pursue any interesting ideas in education and the cognitive sciences, without any need to look for commercial application. 0.7 per cent of turnover is spent on this pure R&D - i.e. about $1 million. In part these funds are justified in terms of brand promotion - in the 1980s, NUT was always thought of as a coaching class, and one solution was that NUT should be seen to generate knowledge. Just as in a university department, these academics' performance indicators are simply numbers of publications in learned journals and conference papers. The second R&D department - STRIDE (Strategic Research In Development Education) - is application-focused, and employs 40 researchers. It has a generic brief from senior management to look for more efficient ways of teaching, learning and course development: 'If we can teach (or a competitor can teach) this course in an hour, how can we teach it in half an hour?' Or, 'If it takes us one month to develop this course, how can we develop it in half a month?' This uses about 5 per cent of turnover. Other companies have R&D departments concerned with, first, curriculum development. •

COC, Brazil. The curriculum is rewritten every year, and supplemented where appropriate with new multimedia materials, etc. Fifty personnel including teachers and technical experts - are employed full-time in the development of these curriculum materials, to ensure that they are linked in with pedagogical and technological developments. • TECSUP, Peru. In most specialities, there are annual adjustments to the curriculum, with major changes every three to five years, depending on the specialities. In information technology, however, major changes are made every year. The curriculum development process involves technical committees, with representatives from relevant industry and commerce, and annual meetings with ex-students from each specialism, who give their opinions on the relevance of the course for their work-place, and what techniques and technology are in the work-place now which need to be addressed.

Second, the education companies were attempting to keep at the forefront of technological innovation. This imperative was important to maintain market share, and/or to attract new customers. Education companies and institutions were extremely aware that if they were unable to innovate in this way, their customers would, other things being equal, take their business elsewhere. Examples include: • TECSUP, Peru, is innovating into satellite courses, to keep and enhance its

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share of the company training market. The target market for the satellite courses are the mining companies outside of Lima. The programme uses teachers based in Lima, in a classroom studio linked up to video, and computers linked to the Internet. Students are connected to video facilities and to computers linked to the Internet, so the link-up is fully interactive. • Pitagoras prides itself on being at the forefront of technological innovation. It has the following ongoing projects which promote the use of telematics in the classroom: - Project Multimedia Class - a consultancy service which is available to all Pitagoras schools, which advises on pedagogical aspects of the introduction of multimedia, and provides educational software, training for the use of software and all equipment. - Project Multimedia Library - provides orientation on how to construct multimedia settings, indicating suitable educational software, etc. - Project Improvement of Information Technology in the School Community. - Project Internet - links schools to the Internet, provides consultancy about pedagogical uses of the Internet, and establishes on-line communication between school and family. • Objetivo, Brazil, had the first school in Brazil to use interactive video for teaching, and teaching through telephone and FM radio. It was the first to introduce computers into the classroom, and the first to use CD-ROM multimedia for classroom instruction. The Tarefa Net (i.e. 'Homework' Net) allows students to do homework exercises in an interactive form on the Internet. The student can access solutions to problems in a step-by-step manner, and have hypertext links to related problems and ideas. Objetivo also makes use of the 'Disque-professor', a service whereby any student who has difficulties solving problems in the published curriculum materials, or tests, can telephone the central computing office, code in the relevant number, and receive a commentary on questions, 24 hours a day. • DPS, India, is presently in talks with ISRO (the Indian Space Research Organisation) for the leasing of satellite time and the creation of VSAT links, which will lead to satellite and Internet-based distance education programmes. It is anticipated that this will be funded through donations, grants and soft loans from the corporate sector, as well as through subscriptions from the member schools. Moreover, some companies are aware that through technological innovation they were able to cut costs - 'process' innovation. For example: • TECSUP, Peru, is setting up a 'virtual university'. It is aimed to give 50 per cent of third-year courses through the virtual university, so that the two campuses can use the same teacher and materials. (Over time, this will considerably reduce costs.) There is also a potentially very profitable market catering for distance-learning students outside of Lima. But there is not a 'critical mass' of students to make it viable to give courses in particular

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centres, as students are more dispersed. However, TECSUP realizes that they can transpose the courses that they are now putting on for 30 people in Lima on to the Virtual University, and be the only provider in the rural areas. • CODECS, Romania, is acquiring a satellite tele-conference system, in order to transfer its British MBA programme from the UK at considerably lower costs. Tutors will still be from the UK, but the tele-conference system will eliminate the significant travel costs currently incurred bringing them to Romania. EFFICIENCY Finally in this context it is worth noting how many of the companies are acutely aware of the importance of keeping costs low, by using resources space, technology and teacher time - efficiently. For example, NUT goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all resources are used productively from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. A key part of the NUT philosophy is in the pursuit of teaching innovation and efficiency. Because of the economic imperatives - of shortage of trained teachers, of the expense of teachers, and the shortage of space - NUT from the very beginning had to be conscious of rationing space and teacher contact time. To this end, they have used their R&D departments to develop teaching methods which reduce contact time and carefully utilize space. They have developed an educational model which utilizes three types of room classroom, mindroom, and machine room - enabling a centre with only 30 computers to accommodate 1,260 students per day. Others, for example, Educor, South Africa, Speciss College, Zimbabwe, and the Brazilian chains, use classrooms for high school in the morning, then the same classrooms for further and/or higher education once high school has finished. Many, including the above, operate shifts for their classes. 5. Funding mechanisms Finally, the education companies are of particular importance to the argument being developed throughout this book because they exhibit ways in which a concern for the poor and commercial considerations can go hand in hand. Companies have developed student loan schemes, and have established viable mechanisms for cross-subsidization of places, to assist the poor in having access to high-quality educational opportunities. COMPANY STUDENT LOANS

The company student loan schemes examined had the great advantage over government student loan schemes that they were able to capitalize on an 'honour system' which virtually eliminates default and prevents the need for collateral. Students get the loan directly from their school or centre. They feel indebted to the company, and would not wish to cheat it - or a future tranche of students - out of rightful funds. Peer pressure also works to that end. The loan schemes examined are also potentially or actually self-financing,

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and hence provide a model for a viable commercial possibility in themselves one day, we may see a global student loan company being created, itself generating a profit and providing desired opportunities for the poor in many countries. Two of the examples included TECSUP's student credit, and NIIT's Total Freedom Scholarship. Most of the TECSUP core programme students come from low or middle-low income levels of Peruvian society. 54 per cent have family income below US$500 per month, 38 per cent have income between US$500 and US$1,000 and only 8 per cent have family income over US$1,000 per month. This is clearly facilitated by the presence of the loan scheme, by which anyone who passes the entrance examination is guaranteed a place on the course. All those who pass the exam are asked for details of parental income. Those who are too poor to pay the lowest rate of fee, after further checks and parental interviews, are offered credits varying from 25 per cent to 100 per cent of fees, depending on income. There are detailed regulations issued by TECSUP, running to eight pages, for deciding on the level of credit to be awarded. The credit is given by public deed, and two guarantors sign. In the event of non-payment, these guarantors would be approached, and legal action would ultimately be taken. But this has never yet occurred, because of the way the loans are structured, and the 'honour' system which emerges because of it: instead of interest on repayments, the amount to be repaid is linked to the level of student fees currently charged. Suppose course fees are $200 per month when the student studies, but when the time comes to repay, the same course fee is $260 per month. Then $260 per month is the amount owing. The principle is that students have been given the opportunity to study for one month, so now they can give someone else that same opportunity. If they don't repay their loan, they can see very practically that they are depriving someone else of the same opportunities which they had been given by the company. This fact, which will have been stressed to the recipients of loans throughout their course, prevents loan defaulters. After students finish their three-year course, they are allowed six months before they start paying back their loan. Clearly, if inflation is high, then the effective interest rate is high, and vice versa. In fact, fees have increased in the last few years by about 10 per cent per year to keep abreast of inflation. Students are expected to have paid 42 per cent of the payment by the time six years has passed. Two people manage the loan scheme, including the Administrative Director. The costs for the scheme are absorbed in general administration, so these are not accounted for separately. Although the loan scheme started with a donation of $400,000 from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the account is now in surplus, and the management argue that had this instead been a loan, rather than a donation, it would have been possible to pay back the loan and still have the system viable. Secondly, NUT have recently introduced what they call the Total Freedom Scholarship', to celebrate India's 50th Anniversary, in collaboration with

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Citibank, India. Each year they have funded scholarships for bright students from poor backgrounds. This scheme, however, they hope will be transformed into something more. The intention is to demonstrate to other companies a working model of a student loan system which could be replicated - and perhaps for some other company to take it over and extend its application. Students are selected using aptitude tests and two interviews, to find capable but poor applicants. They are then given a loan for tuition for a one-year compressed course (instead of taking the normal two years), followed by a oneyear placement with an IT company (the personnel officer of which was normally one of the original interviewers). While working on the placement, the company, in addition to paying a small stipend to the student, pays back the loan to NUT in full, including interest at current bank rates. CROSS-SUBSIDIZATION

A second way in which the education companies contributed to the education of the disadvantaged included the practice of'cross-subsidization'. In the Brazilian chains of schools (Pitagoras, COC, Objetivo), for example, and in TECSUP (Peru), it is normal practice for there to be a cheaper course offered in an afternoon and/or evening shift. All on the morning course would pay full fees. But the facilities and tuition were avowedly the same in all three shifts, and hence it was apparent that the morning shift was to a certain extent subsidizing the later shifts. TECSUP's short course programme - aimed at employees and executives already in work, usuallyfinancedby companies - also charges fees which create a large surplus. This is then used in part to subsidize the 'core' programme; that is, young people taking their diplomas which will lead to work. The Varkey Group, based in the United Arab Emirates, provides education to 26,000 school-age students from the Indian sub-continent, whose parents in the main are guest workers in the Emirates, where state education is not available to non-citizens. The Varkey schools charge fees ranging from $50 per month to sums in excess of ten times that amount. This means that virtually all the guest worker parents can afford an education for their children, the poorest being subsidized by the better-off. Another model of cross-subsidy was offered by DPS, India, with their Village Schools in deprived areas. These are run at a loss by the company, using surplus from their Core and Satellite schools. In addition, when upgrading facilities at the Core and Satellite schools, old equipment is passed on to the Village Schools. For example, computer education facilities such as XTs and 386 machines had become obsolete in the city schools, but are far ahead of anything yet available in the rural areas. Education companies solve the equity problem Around the world in developing countries, there are education companies which provide us with our required solution to the equity problem. Educational entrepreneurs have created companies which have strong brand names,

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are expanding rapidly and have powerful quality control mechanisms in place. The companies are concerned with innovation and research and development, both to ensure economies of scale and efficiency, and to maintain their high-quality delivery. In each of these ways, we can see that educational opportunities - from primary school through academic and vocational studies to university - can be delivered through companies which behave much as other high-performance service industry businesses. They have the added twist that they are also concerned to find funding opportunities for the poor. Taken as a whole, the education companies show us how the equity problem can be solved. With competing education companies in the market, we do not need state intervention to ensure equity. From competing companies to choice This is the second of our jolts and the equity issue resolved. But there are other justifications for state intervention in education waiting in the wings, and our focus group is waiting to get its teeth into one of them - the issue of choice. For in all discussion thus far, we have implicitly been accepting that choice in education should be allowed. There's not much point having competing education companies if parents and students don't get to choose. But this implicit acceptance will anger many opponents of markets in education, for it is precisely one of their objections that choice in education is a bad thing, itself undermining of equity and other values. Professor Tim Brighouse, Chief Education Officer for Birmingham LEA, couldn't have put it more graphically. In the foreword to the story of Hackney Downs, a school in North London closed by the government because it was perceived to be 'failing', Brighouse writes that the explanation for the whole debacle 'lies in the market virus, of which parental preference is the most insidious ingredient' (Brighouse 1999). 'Unbridled rein to parental preference' - i.e., allowing parental choice - 'contributes to the chaos within which Hackney Downs operated'. Presumably what Brighouse2 would want is some state regulation preventing parental choice from having this impact. In his antagonism to educational choice, he is in very good company. Just four of the many recent books on the subject include Devolution and Choice in Education (Whitty et al. 1998), the edited collection Choice and Diversity in Schooling (Glatter et al. 1997), a book by the same authors School Choice and Competition: Markets in the public interest? (1998) and Geoffrey Walford's Choice and Equity in Education (1994). What each has in common is the word 'choice' in its title, and a general opposition to its implications for education. Much of this antagonism comes because choice, with its association with recent government reforms in many countries, seems to exacerbate inequality. We have to stress again that these recent reforms are not the same as our markets in education, so the particulars of their criticisms will not apply. However, there does seem to be an underlying suspicion of choice within each of these books which may transcend its connection with these particular

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reforms and hence have implications for our discussion here about genuine markets. Choice in education seems too much tied up with a discredited ideology, with unpalatable implications for education. (The fact that a Conservative Government White Paper was entitled Choice and Diversity doesn't seem to have much helped in this regard.) Many assume too that parental choice can only be justified in terms of parental rights - and this then creates further opposition to it. For example, my reading of Andrew Coulson's Market Education (1999) is that his defence of markets is largely in terms of parental rights - see, for instance, the section in Chapter 1 entitled 'What Parents Want for Their Own Children' (pp. 8-22), which would only make sense if parents have a right to get what they want for their children. Some philosophers and educationalists are unhappy to cede these rights to parents. For example, the philosopher of education Pat White (1988) argues that parental choice will 'tend to sharpen the differences between people at the expense of attention to society's internal cohesiveness and the need to develop common bonds between its citizens' (p. 197). Her argument against parental choice rests on democratic considerations and also whether parents are qualified to make the sorts of choices necessary. For whatever reasons, she doesn't think that an argument for parental rights can be made. One could approach arguments like this by trying to show why parental rights in education are a good thing. I think such a route may expose fundamental differences in values, so might not be such a good way of winning converts to the cause. Instead, I intend to do what I did (or at least, attempted to do) in Session 2, take the values of the critics as read, and see if an argument can be constructed which doesn't assume anything other than their values. In other words, let's see if we can find a defence of choice in education which doesn't presume such things as parental rights, and which will be powerful enough to persuade sceptics of whatever political and ideological persuasion. To make the task even harder for me, consider this. Cambridge education Professor David Hargreaves has recently written: 'If it is a matter of choice or no choice, diversity or uniformity, people will favour choice and diversity, other things being equal' (Hargreaves 1996a, p. 11). But the philosopher Gerald Dworkin, in a provocative essay entitled 'Is more choice always better than less?' suggests that this isn't true at all: The proliferation of products, services, and so forth, hailed with much enthusiasm as the chief virtue of competitive markets, brings with it the need to know more and more in order to make intelligent choices. (Dworkin 1988, p. 66) This need for information is often burdensome, a significant personal cost (i.e. over and above any social costs) to be weighed against any purported benefits. So the making of choices 'is not a costless activity, and the assessment of whether one's welfare is improved by having a wider range of choices is often dependent upon an assessment of the costs involved in having to make these choices' (p. 66).

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The problem is, I largely agree with Dworkin's sentiments. I hate choice in the marketplace much of the time. I loathe shopping for shoes or clothes. I went into a downward spiral when I had to go to the housing market. And choosing goods such as computers or cameras leaves me in a cold sweat. Shopping for presents is even worse. Am I making the right choice? Am I being ripped off? Could I find a better deal somewhere else? Will the recipient of my gift like my choice? Is it the right colour, shape, size? And so on. Choice in the market-place for me does seem to come with numerous costs attached. So it would seem to make it a rather uphill struggle to seek to defend choice, particularly without recourse to parental rights. Nonetheless, given its importance in the private alternative, I'll try. For such a mammoth task, I'll need the focus group. The significant personal costs of choice involve the following: •

Costs in time and money of acquiring information to make reasonable choices. • Costs in time and effort in making the judgement after appropriate information has been acquired. • 'Psychic' costs, of accepting responsibility for whether the right decision has really been made. Moreover, it would seem to be true, that these costs seem particularly relevant in the case of choice of education. Part of the issue is that the informational requirements to make choices seem huge, and so many life options seem to depend on getting choices right. We'll come to particular issues connected with the 'information problem' in a moment. In general, some education commentators have argued that it is precisely because of these sorts of costs that parents might be tempted to cede authority in education to a professional elite (Krashinsky 1994, p. 123). Much of the evidence of researchers like Professor Stephen Ball and his colleagues seems to support this notion, where many parents describe how choice is puzzling and confusing (see Gewirtz et al. 1993). All of this might support the suggestion that the demand for choice is not a demand for choice per se, but rather a demand for better educational opportunities. If these could be obtained without the distressing realities of choice, so much the better. Ceteris paribus? if choice in selecting educational opportunities could be avoided, then perhaps it would not be wholly undesirable? But actually, things are not otherwise equal, as we shall see. The focus group is sure to have some insights into this matter. Let's step back behind the veil of ignorance to see if they can help.

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FOCUS GROUP In which we discuss the virtues of choice even when choice is not desired, and discover that this has surprising relevance to the educational enterprise. The second day of the focus group. After breakfast, I'd popped outside, in the hope of seeing where we were, but the building was blanketed in impenetrable fog. It was a relief to get back inside into the warm. There were two sessions scheduled for the morning, followed by a lunch break and free time until tea, when the final session was set to lead up to our conference dinner. I got to the meeting room early. An abstract painting had appeared on one wall, no doubt part of the plan to make the room seem a little bit more comfortable. Jack's two colleagues - his 'bodyguards' we called them - werefiddlingwith Arthur the computer to make it project onto a large video screen. Jack then arrived and his colleagues showed him how to work the video, and left. He then starting writing on the flip-chart notes for today's session. On the first sheet he wrote: 'Choice and Diversity'. He continued writing, while I pretended not to be observing, on four separate sheets: 'Choice undermines equity.' 'Why should parents have rights to choose?' 'Choice creates "sink" schools.' 'Choice undermines teacher professionalism.' Perhaps this session was going to be even more /flcfc-focused than the last. By the time we were all gathered together, he had covered over his writings. He began: 'I valued your contributions yesterday very much. Some of what you said was predictable, some of it less so. But all of it was valuable to us. Much of what you came up with yesterday has particular implications, however, and I want you to be aware of these. Everything you've said assumes that parents have a right to choose. But many back in the real world don't agree with you. I want to know what you make of their arguments. So I want us all to sit back and relax while I show you some video footage of the negative effects that choice has, in terms of inequity, in terms of undermining teacher professionalism, in changing the whole ethos of schools . . . Centres of Learning... in negative ways. Will you still think that choice is a good thing?' Jack moved over to Arthur, and pressed the appropriate function keys on the computer. Overhead on the large video screen appeared the legend: An exceptional fault has occurred... Jack swore audibly and murmured 'I knew we shouldn't have loaded Windows 2000 until the bugs had been ironed out.' He then fiddled around for a bit, and asked us if we had any ideas on how to get it working again. And the boys fiddled around for a bit too, but to no avail. 'Look, I'm really sorry, but I'll have to go and get my technicians to work

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on this. Do you mind just waiting here for a bit while I go and get them back?' We shrugged our assent, and he was gone. We metaphorically kicked our heels for a bit. Joel did see whether he could get the computer working again, but it was beyond him. He eventually sat back down and said: 'So I wonder what's so bad about choice?' Winston volunteered: 'I don't really like making choices. Well, not about shopping and things. You know, buying shoes and stuff. I always worry that I'm getting the wrong pair, and will look ... silly.' Fatima said: 'I think choice is great. I love shopping.' And she showed us the shoes she had recently bought, which we admired. After a pause, Joel continued: 'But Winston, would you really be happier without choice? In shoes, for example?' He said that he thought he would. Nothing would make him happier than having no shoe shops (as we were focused on shoes for now) to choose from, and no different shoes within them to choose from. Then he needn't worry what he looked like, because everyone else would be in the same boat. Joel said: 'But suppose there was a monopoly supplier of shoes. How could you respond if the shoes were not up to scratch? Or what if their price jumps suddenly, or if the quality of sales service is poor, or if you have any other complaint? What would you do then?' We got talking about this, and came to realize something rather interesting about choice. With a monopoly supplier we realized that we could do very little about any of these things. For without choice, any power to influence the supplier would be very limited. As consumers, we'd have nowhere else to go for those shoes. The supplier would know this, and so could abuse his position. But would having choice really change anything? Joel flicked over the pages on the flip-chart (thoughtfully eyeing each of Jack's statements as he did so) and then, on a blank sheet of paper drew the letters A and B, to which he referred while he was talking. I enjoyed watching him stand there, blue eyes sparkling. I was not alone - we all listened attentively: 'If we have competition between suppliers and manufacturers, then everything changes, doesn't it? If I buy shoes from supplier A, and am not satisfied, I can go to supplier B next time. It is in supplier As interest, then, to ensure that I don't go to B; hence there are pressures on her to ensure that my shoes are up to scratch in every way. It is not that I have to go to A, feel dissatisfied, and then go on to B: the suppliers themselves conduct this hypothetical reasoning, and strive to keep me as a customer.' That all seemed eminently reasonable. Competition between manufacturers, Joel mused, could ensure that the quality of the good is kept high, and that technological innovations are introduced (for example, by bringing new materials and processes into production, to lower prices and improve quality, to keep up with other manufacturers). And then competition between suppliers would help keep prices low (provided that the monopoly manufacturer didn't set the price too high) and improve service (through 'relationship marketing', loyalty cards, special ancillary offers, and so on). In consumer goods, we realized, choice is desirable, even if not desired, in

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order to protect the customer from complacent and corrupt monopoly suppliers and manufacturers. Moreover, Joel continued, diversity is likely to arise inevitably, given that we have a range of human tastes and preferences. He mused how the supplier and manufacturer who first provided a range of sizes, styles and colours for the customer would be likely to be patronized more, since what we knew about human diversity seems to point to the likely demand for a range of sizes, styles, etc. Such suppliers and manufacturers would also be likely to be imitated by other suppliers, anxious to maintain their market position. But, interestingly, diversity of goods would not necessarily imply a diversity of kinds of outlets. Indeed, Joel thought aloud, the majority of suppliers could all become rather uniform, as they sought to imitate the most innovative. Diversity is made apparent in catering for the range of human tastes and preferences, but not necessarily in the type of institutions which supply them. 'So Winston', Joel said, Tm afraid you've got to lump choice and diversity in shoes, even though you hate it. It's choice which keeps shoe suppliers on their toes, so to speak.' Now Joel continued, really getting into his stride: 'There's another reason why choice and diversity might be good too, isn't there? Think about newspapers and magazines, or radio and television.' We thought through the dangerous possibility of choice in these media being progressively taken away by a government. It soon became apparent why choice was desirable. Without it, it would be much more difficult to gain an opportunity to hear alternative viewpoints about current affairs, and to have the opportunity to weigh different arguments against one another. With a monopoly in the media, it would be hard to avoid propaganda. Similar considerations would apply to not having choice in book publishers, or film-makers, and so on; in the realm of ideas, consumer choice was obviously an important foundation for the avoidance of indoctrination. I had a question for Winston. 'You really don't like choice. If you were going to buy a new computer, you wouldn't be the sort of person who bothered to read through consumer magazines, and find out which one was best? You wouldn't go around and try out a lot of different models first?' He agreed that he wouldn't do any of those things. 'But then', I said to Joel, 'the supplier can still take advantage of him, and rip him off, even if they don't rip off other customers who do bother to check on their facts.' After further discussion, however, we realized that this wasn't the case after all. For as long as there were a significant number who are discriminating choosers, the suppliers and producers cannot take the risk that Winston is not one of them. He might buy from a particular supplier just because he is lazy, or frightened of choice, but the supplier and producer cannot assume this about him. So good service and good quality goods must be ensured, in case he is one of the discerning buyers. In a sense, the 'irresponsible' can 'free ride' on the responsibility of others. Joel then interjected: 'Another nice thing about choice', he said, 'is that it creates competition. And competition can be pretty ruthless. That's good for us -' he said, flicking over the flip-chart sheets until he came across Jack's

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statement: Choice creates 'sink' schools '- but not so good for the suppliers. Does choice create "sink" shoe shops? No, competition is too ruthless to allow businesses to limp along for long. Competition puts them right out of their misery straight away. Failing businesses go out of business, or get taken over by a competitor. With choice you don't get "sink" businesses. I wonder why choice would lead to "sink" schools?' At this moment, Jack returned, with his bodyguards. 'Sorry, so sorry', he said brightly, as Joel returned to his seat. For the next hour or so we watched his videos and Joel got his answer.

COMMENTARY Professor Michael Barber,Tony Blair's right-hand man in the Department for Education and Employment, writes a monthly column for the Times Educational Supplement. Shortly after his The Learning Game appeared, he gave avid readers an example of why he didn't think choice in the market was worth quite as much as some of us - me included - thought it was ('Last Word', 31 January 1997). Apparently, on New Year's Eve, the Barber household had been plagued with plumbing problems. He'd phoned around for ages to get someone to help, only to be rebuffed at every stage ('It's New Year's Eve!'). Finally, he'd managed to get one company, which he called 'Deadcert' plumbers, to come out and visit. You can imagine: not only did they fail to solve the problem, they made the whole situation much worse, and then had the cheek to charge the earth for their visit anyway. The moral of the story: choice in the market often fails. I wonder whether he drew that conclusion too quickly? Suppose that instead of the market in plumbing, there was only a state monopoly. Suppose too, as is not beyond the bounds of the imagination, that this also provided an inadequate service. Next time Barber has a plumbing problem, he would still have to use the same state service, even though he knows what service he is likely to get from it. This is where choice comes in: in the market, he does not have to use Deadcert plumbers ever again. And the likelihood is that Deadcert plumbers will soon be out of business, because he will not be alone in thinking this way.4 However, one must agree that whatever satisfaction it might give Barber not to have to use that company ever again, it would have been far better not to have to use, in our previous terminology, such a 'sink' plumber, if you'll excuse the pun. This brings us back to our earlier discussion about the virtues of larger, competing brand names. Indeed, I think there is a tremendous market opportunity for some entrepreneur to form a big household maintenance and building chain. Many people complain about small firms, along the lines of Barber's complaint about Deadcert plumbers. And likewise builders are notorious for taking on far too many jobs, and so take ages to complete any one of them. (I've got builders in at the moment, and they arrive every day at 6 p.m., and stay for an hour or two. At this rate the job will take until next New Year's Eve!) This big chain could, as we saw in the previous chapter,guarantee

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to provide excellent services at all times, with jobs completed in a fixed period, and so on. It could slowly take over many of the existing small firms, provide all staff with the necessary training - particularly in customer relations - and provide the security of a strong brand name, the kind with which we are familiar in other areas of our lives. I don't know the area well enough to know why such companies haven't formed - perhaps they have for all I know. I predict they will soon, in any case. And then Michael Barber's plumbing problem will be well and truly solved. Now, what has all this got to do with education? And what has the focus group's brief chat while Jack was away got to do with education too? I think it has got everything to do with the delivery of educational opportunities, and the misgivings some have about choice in education. Just as in choice of shoes, or choice of plumbers, the desirability of having a choice of suppliers of educational opportunities must also be abundantly clear. For all the dangers of a monopoly supplier in terms of other consumer goods and services apply even more strongly to something as important as education. Of course we would want to avoid a monopoly supplier in education who could be complacent and corrupt; insensitive to individual differences in needs, interests, abilities, aptitudes and aspirations; not responsive to community pressures; and disregarding of appropriate technological innovation. Moreover, because education is at least in part concerned with the communication of ideas, similar considerations to those discussed under the newspaper example apply: if there was a danger of propaganda corrupting us, undermining our critical thinking, and so on, then absolutely the last thing we should want would be a monopoly supplier. And of course, the desirability of having diversity in educational opportunities should be apparent too. For individual and cultural differences which emerge in our preferences for different types of consumer goods and services would apply, a fortiori,5 to education, where differences in learning aptitude and interests are so clear. We can also note that this diversity in education -just as Joel noted about shoes - would not necessarily be expressed in terms of a diversity of institutions, but may well arise as a diversity of experiences offered within rather similar institutions. Indeed, again, we would note that the institutions might well become rather similar to each other, as they sought to emulate best practice which had become attractive to customers within them. We'll take this discussion further in Session 5. This is a defence of choice in education without recourse to parental rights. Nothing to do with parents, but simply to do with the 'peculiar power' of choice. Choice protects us from the corruption and complacency of monopoly suppliers, and from the danger of indoctrination. Choice is a way of ensuring that all suppliers of educational goods are mercilessly subject to the needs and desires of the people, and not able to dictate to them what their interests and aspirations should be. Moreover, there is another very powerful implication of this discussion, which ties in with the argument made earlier about equity. Again as Joel

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noted, genuine competition and choice when there are strong brand names operating does not lead to poor-quality suppliers limping along. It does not lead to 'sink' supermarkets or computer suppliers. For they are quickly and easily forced out of business, and the consumer does not suffer as a result of failure. Even in disadvantaged areas there are usually competing suppliers of goods available, offering products from competing manufacturers. But if one of the suppliers or producers should start to go into decline, it is either quickly replaced by another (often the new business will take over the same premises, and indeed, one might not even realize that the business has changed hands), or other businesses quickly expand to take demand away from it. It is not that there are no failing restaurants, say; simply that they cannot exist as failing restaurants for very long: the market is too unkind to let them. As Milton and Rose Friedman point out: 'Are the supermarkets available to different economic groups anything like so divergent in quality as the schools?' They're not. And if we had choice in a market setting with competing brand names, to paraphrase the Friedmans, this 'would improve the quality of education available to the rich hardly at all; to the middle-class, moderately; to the lower-income class, enormously' (1980, p. 169). Choice is desirable, even when not desired, in education for precisely the same reasons that it is desirable in other areas of our lives. The information problem and the need for regulation However, for some this will be all too quick, because we haven't addressed the fundamental problem connected with choice, the 'information problem' noted earlier. One of our 'Millennial Four' authors, George Walden, sets the scene here for us particularly well. When looking at what he terms one of the 'bogus solutions' to the problems in education, Walden looks at voucher systems which he misleadingly labels the 'free market in education' (1996, p. 54). In any case, his criticisms are ones that could be used against real markets, so neatly highlight the 'information problem' for us. The problem with thinking of 'education' as a 'product', he says, is that this 'ignores the objection that not all parents - in some places perhaps not even the majority of parents - have the information or educational background to make sensible choices' (p. 54). He goes on: It is neither 'elitist' nor 'paternalist', but simply commonsensical to wonder whether for example the five million readers of our popular press can be relied upon to select the best school for their children, or whether an abandoned and perhaps severely undereducated mother is in a position to make the optimum 'life choices' for a child whose best interests she may or may not have at heart, (p. 54) I would think that was precisely paternalism at its most commendable, although Walden presumably wants to avoid what he feels are derogatory

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epithets for political reasons. In any case, he definitely doesn't want such parents to have choice, or at least not unconstrained choice, because it will be harmful to their children. A leading thinker sharing these ideas is the economist Dr Nicholas Barr, of the London School of Economics. Indeed, he argues that the case for state intervention in education rests largely on the information problem (linking it in with the equity issue, as we noted in Session 2 above): . . . private consumption decisions [in education] are likely to be efficient and equitable only if families have sufficient information, and if they use it in the child's best interest... Some parents, maybe disproportionately in the higher socioeconomic groups, are capable of more informed decisions than the state; others make poorer decisions. If the quality of parental choice is systematically related to socioeconomic status and the effect is strong, then private allocation can be argued to be less equitable than state allocation, irrespective of the balance of argument about efficiency. (1993, p. 349) Barr puts the matter in the form of a morally perplexing question: ... if the quality of parental choice varies systematically with socioeconomic status, how do we weigh the relative claims of middle-class children and their parents to be allowed private choice, against those of children in lower socioeconomic groups, whose interests might be served better by the state? (p. 349) Surely, Barr argues, there will be, even if only in a small minority, parents who will not be able to make sensible, well-informed decisions about their children's education? (Interestingly, because this is a problem for parents as choosers for their children, he agrees that this is not an argument justifying any state intervention in higher education, although it certainly establishes itself very firmly as a justification for intervention at primary and secondary levels.) The same difficulty is also raised by Brown (1997), who points to the 'inability of students and their families to judge output quantity and quality.. . there is a serious problem for parents . . . being able to judge the effects of schools on learning' (p. 87). Now, what level of state intervention would the information problem - if it is a serious objection to the private alternative - necessitate? George Walden's argument is in the context of objecting to vouchers in education and in the context of his solution (as we shall see later in the final chapter) of breaking down the private-public split by incorporating the private schools into the state sector. Hence, he presumably thinks that the information problem leads to the need for universal funding, provision and regulation of schooling. Dr Barr also believes that the information problem leads to the requirement of regulation and funding.

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However, if we were to come at this problem from the perspectives explored thus far in the book, we would not see it leading to so comprehensive an intervention requirement. First we would agree that it would require some safety-net funding for the poor - but we have already suggested that that might come from a combination of companies finding innovative ways of creating subsidized opportunities for the poor and other philanthropy, as noted in Session 2 above. Second, it would also require some safety-net to ensure that all those from less fortunate families were able to take part in the educational opportunities on offer. Some might suppose (as Dr Barr does), that this would require compulsory attendance - but we have already suggested in Session 1 that this would only be as a last resort, that we should exhaust the possibility of persuasion and motivation before looking to state compulsion, with all its likely negative impacts. What is left, however, would be the need to regulate the educational settings, presumably through instituting some sort of national curriculum (Barr 1993, p. 346). Now, for all concerned, this is fundamentally an empirical question, of whether 'parents on average make better or worse decisions than the state about their children's education?' (p. 349). Barr's and Walden's reading of the evidence - anecdotal and scientific - is that the quality of parental decisions will be inversely proportional to their socio-economic status, and hence that governments will need to intervene in education to overcome this deficiency. For Walden, Barr and Brown the information problem rests on two fundamental issues. The first fundamental issue concerns the qualitative difference between decisions on schooling and any other areas of consumer decision-making. This point is neatly enunciated by George Walden, when he concludes 'What may be true of the automobile market may be less true of education' (p. 57). Brown (1997) spells out this position in more detail: In buying schooling, parents have little experience and transactions tend to be infrequent. Because each child has his or her own specific abilities, interests and early training, choosing the best educational option is a unique problem. Schooling decisions are usually made annually, for a 'school year', and no school year is contracted for more than once for each child. School choices are 'lumpy' and fraught with uncertainty.. .There is a sense in which schooling is a once in a lifetime purchase. [Primary and secondary] participation... is bought only once for each child. And each level of schooling is different from every other. Education is near the extreme in this aspect of consumption, (pp. 86-7) Brown spells out some of the specific problems here: While making the mistake of enrolling one's child in a bad school is certainly more consequential than buying a loaf of stale bread, it is probably not on the order of choosing an incompetent surgeon for a

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serious operation. Mistakes can be overcome through repeating a grade in another school, or employing a private tutor. Yet changing to another school can be inconvenient, costly, and perhaps disruptive to the social life of the student, (p. 87) However, readers who have come this far with me may well see major difficulties with this. For it assumes that, if education was served under market conditions, it would exhibit all the same characteristics of the predominantly state schooling sector now. This is not an assumption which we have been able to carry through this book at all. It ignores the likelihood that different arrangements may well emerge in a market, sometimes based on emerging technological possibilities, and in looking at education more broadly in society, rather than attempting to include everything in schools. So, for example, choices about many educational opportunities, unlike choices about schooling, may well not be infrequent, and they may well be extremely flexible, easily rectifiable - as easily changeable, for example, as buying a CD or book. We are already in a strong position to see how, within education companies which utilize information and communications technology, these kinds of solutions are possible which could render this kind of objection largely irrelevant. Walden is thinking along similar lines to Brown when he writes that in a market-type situation, 'the monopoly element' of supplier - that is, the available choice of schools being of only one type - 'would remain in attenuated form, if only because schools cannot be opened and closed like Chinese restaurants' (p. 55). We suggest that educational opportunities when competing companies come into the market could precisely be of this form, thus solving this first issue. The second fundamental issue is concerned with the inequity of allowing all parents to choose for their children, because some will be worse off than others, both in terms of the quality of schools6 they can choose from, but also in choices of what is on offer within the schools themselves. For as Walden notes, educational choices could be made for the educational equivalent of 'a plate of chips and sausages or for something more healthy and nutritious. If people prefer the chips, who are we to condemn them?' (Walden 1996, p. 54). Similarly, 'There will always be a market for chips, and in socially deprived areas the educational choice might even shrink. Parents in their wisdom might decide that they were not interested in sustaining a market for foreign languages, literature or the classics, any more than they might patronize a local cinema dedicated to foreign films, or watch opera on TV (p. 55). We have partly addressed this problem already. In our discussion of equity, we noted that the quality of education would be guaranteed to be of a high quality for the disadvantaged if they were able (either through philanthropic or state aid) to go to the same schools as the more advantaged - that is, if there were competing chains of schools in the market. However, Walden's point would be that this is certainly not enough. Within each school, parents can choose educational options for their children and so the disadvantaged will likely go for a range of less educationally nutritious

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goods (the sausages and chips equivalent), and ignore the healthier educational fare on offer. I accept that this might be a reasonable misgiving. After all, if we are going to encourage philanthropy in order to help solve the problems of the disadvantaged, it wouldn't be much good having funding squandered simply because the parents haven't got the good sense to choose what is actually desirable. So, taking this objection seriously, would it then confirm the need for state regulation of the curriculum on offer? Surely not. First, we have already noted that several of the education companies prescribe the required educational content of each course, for precisely the reason that this will prevent parents or students having to make choices which may be beyond their appreciation at the time. But this is not so strange in other areas of our lives too: if I sign on to use the local gym, for example, I am required to go through their induction course - a 'national curriculum' shared with others in the chain - so that I can most usefully spend my time within the resources available and my own personal ambitions and limitations. So it may well be that private education companies will themselves recognize that what they offer is something more complex than the choice between sausages and chips and, say, quiche salads or similar, and will take the necessary steps to ensure that their customers don't flounder within the choices available. Second, we must be clear that the major risk Walden is talking about concerns those children who will have parents who are poorly equipped to make educational choices. These are the children who are, in our private alternative, most likely to be in receipt of some subsidy or philanthropy. But then it will be very much in the interests of the private voucher companies, individual philanthropists, or the companies themselves to be sure that their funds are not squandered by parents in schools or on courses within schools which do not satisfy certain educational requirements. This would then solve the problem. Those whom we least trust to be able to make decisions in the 'unregulated' (i.e. state unregulated) market will be guided towards the most beneficial offerings available within that market. Interestingly, it may well be in the interests of private providers and philanthropists to ensure that choice is in some sense restricted for those who are deemed too irresponsible to manage it for the best interests of their children. But, Walden might complain, this is assuming that 'standards' and 'quality' are value-free terms in education, when patently they are not. In education, it is these terms themselves which bring in our values about society, about what is desirable and valued, about what the good life is even. The sausages and chips might still be of high quality, as far as sausages and chips go, but this does not mean that they will be nutritionally valuable to the children. Any fare offered within an 'educational' setting could be of as high standards as are imaginable, but might still not qualify as being of educational value. So how can we trust these education companies or philanthropists to create standards which take into account these values? But herein lies a major dilemma for Walden and all who think like him. If it is not the parent, or the company, or the philanthropic agency deciding

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on educational standards, then who should decide about the nature and extent of a child's education 'in the child's best interests'? The assumed alternative is that it is the state which will do this. And this would require the state finding answers to questions such as: • • • • •

What is education? What educational opportunities need to be delivered in schools? What should standards be in education? How are educational opportunities best delivered? How effective is any particular school?

Perhaps Walden thinks that answers to these questions are easy to find? That certainly seems to be the position he adopts in his own little thought experiment behind the veil of ignorance. On Day One, we find the seven wise men and women challenging the 'reigning philosophy of education', creating an alternative which is simply a reversal of that held in the teacher-training institutions, once the 'opaque theorising and tortuousness of expression' had been removed (1996, p. 107). One can admire Walden's concise wit here, but not be impressed by his ignorance of the reality that philosophies of education are contentious. For answers to questions about the nature of education are known to be contestable - so what role could a liberal state have in adjudicating between them, based as they are on fundamental values about the nature of the good life? The answers to all of the other questions depend upon an answer to the first, most contentious one. Moreover, the last question is extremely difficult to answer, not only because it brings in the very major measurement problem of what a school is adding to the child's achievement, but, more fundamentally, because it again raises the conceptual question of what is to count as 'achievement', and what as 'effectiveness'. Again, such philosophical questions have contestable answers, again based in competing conceptions of the good life, and it is not clear that the state can viably adjudicate here. The information problem does not present a strong argument justifying state intervention in education - not in terms of regulation, nor funding or provision either. And this session has also put the final nail in the coffin of equity as a justification for state intervention too. With this, we can argue that choice in education is fully justified and completely desirable, even when not individually desired. But those in favour of state intervention in education have another arrow in their quiver. Education needs to promote certain values in society, and these values won't be there in the private alternative. In particular we need education to promote democracy and democratic values. The private alternative can't live up to our expectations about education and democracy, can it? We'll turn to this in the next session.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6

The countries were: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,Turkey, Jordan, Russia, Romania, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Cote d'lvoire and South Africa. This Brighouse is the father of the previous Brighouse encountered in Session 2. A neat academic's way of saying 'other things being equal'. As it happened, on the same New Year's Eve I was travelling on a (privately-run) Adirondack Trailways bus from New York to Montreal: at Albany, halfway there, the driver disappeared. The passengers waited in ignorance for an hour and a half, before the bus manager appeared, apologized for the disappearance of the driver ('It's New Year's Eve'!), and said he would drive us to Montreal himself, adding that this was particularly opportune for him as he'd never been there before! I vowed I would never complain about (pre-privatization) British Railways again. But also vowed that I would never travel by Adirondack Trailways again, which is the relevant point. (Actually, that story did have a happy ending: Adirondack Trailways refunded my ticket fare in full, sending the cheque 4,000 miles to me: they can't have considered I was likely to be a regular customer, but still thought it worthwhile keeping this customer happy.) A neat academic phrase conveying 'even more strongly'. Using 'schools' to make the discussion flow more easily. But think of 'schools' as being any type of educational setting.

Session 4 Democracy

PROLOGUE Everyone is in favour of democracy. Counting heads is better than breaking heads. As a way of ensuring peaceful political succession, it is unrivalled. But many in favour of democracy see it as more than that. They also assume that it has special and close ties with education. They argue that this is a further, unbeatable justification for governments to intervene in education. In this chapter we will examine whether democracy provides a justification for state intervention - that is, whether, and in what ways, it might undermine the moves towards the private alternative. Funnily enough, in recent times it is probably the 'New Right', 'monetarist'1 economist Milton Friedman - whose influence was felt through Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on either side of the Atlantic - who has had the most influence in suggesting that democracy is a good reason for governments to intervene in education. For in putting forward his argument for vouchers in education (which we'll come to in the final chapter), he pointed out, under the heading 'General Education for Citizenship', that 'A stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread acceptance of some common set of values' (Friedman 1962,p. 86). And then in a classic statement of the 'neighbourhood effects' - externalities - of education, he noted, as education can contribute to both of these, 'the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but also to other members of the society. The education of my child contributes to your welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society' (p. 86). Given this, argued Friedman, there was an obvious 'kind of government action' which was 'justified' by this particular effect: 'to require that each child receive a minimum amount of schooling of a specified kind' (p. 86). But as parents couldn't simply 'divest' themselves of children, as an owner of an automobile could if he couldn't afford to meet government regulations, this then led to the

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need for this minimum education for democracy also to be subsidized by government (p. 88). These comments have been quoted at me several times by opponents of markets in education, pointing out that even an arch-supporter saw the need for state intervention for democracy. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that Milton Friedman later retracted these ideas - in his 1980 book written with his wife Rose, Free to Choose (p. 162 and fn 15). Why did he change his mind? Because he had read the works of E. G. West - whom we encountered in Session 2 - and realized that government compulsion certainly wasn't necessary in order to ensure universal attendance. We've followed those arguments and agree that the state wouldn't be necessary to ensure these rather minimal levels of education for democracy. However, those opposing markets in education have in mind something much grander than this minimal universal provision. Indeed, there are two distinct kinds of project which the proponents of closer links between education and democracy have in mind. (And it is fair to say that some of those who want one don't necessarily want the other.) Some argue that for democracy to function we need 'education for citizenship'; others argue that, because of the importance of both democracy and education, there should be democratic control of education. As it happens, both of these approaches object to markets in education and the private alternative. It is not usually spelled out explicitly, but both approaches assume that what is required is, at least, very particular state regulation of education, in terms of the curriculum of schools and their ethos and organization. In this session, we'll start with education for citizenship to see where these arguments take us. Importantly, we'll suggest that the arguments raised here have wider applicability, and can be used to argue against any kind of state intervention which seeks to impose higher-order values on educational settings. Education for citizenship Arguments for 'education for citizenship' go back a long way. The philosophers Aristotle, David Hume, John Locke and John Stuart Mill all wrote of the need for citizens to have not only 'knowledge through political action but also "factual" knowledge in order to participate in a democracy' (Parry 1978, pp. 37-8). In more recent years, we can start with the genial British philosopher Professor Bernard Crick. In the 1970s he was very concerned about the lack of an explicit education for democracy, writing, for example, with the educationalist Alex Porter that political literacy was required to make democracy work well, and that 'politically literate persons would possess, among other things, a knowledge of those concepts minimally necessary to construct simple conceptual and analytical frameworks' (Crick and Porter 1978, p. 47); this would require, among other things, the development of oral and written language skills, an understanding of number and statistics, the scientific interpretation of data, and ethical understanding. All these aspects should be taught explic-

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itly in schools under the rubric of 'education for citizenship' (p. 255). The American philosopher Amy Gutmann added her weight to these ideas, pointing out that the content needed for participation in democracy would include reading, writing and arithmetic, developing 'capacities for criticism, rational argument and decision-making . . . how to think logically, to argue coherently and fairly, and to consider the relevant alternatives before coming to conclusions' (Gutmann 1987, p. 50). Then there were the detailed curriculum proposals of the philosopher John White, writing when he hoped to influence the (unfulfilled) promise of an earlier Labour Government, which included knowledge and understanding of maths and sciences, practical competences, experience of the arts, understanding of the social community, as well as prescriptions about the organization and ethos of the school; all of this will enable the individual to be a participant in the democratic community (O'Hear and White 1991, pp. 19-22). After the Labour Government was finally elected, following proposals laid out in its first White Paper Excellence in Schools, Secretary of State for Education David Blunkett pledged 'to strengthen education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools' (DfEE 1997). And to this end he set up an 'Advisory Group on Citizenship'. And here we can come back full circle to Professor Crick, who was appointed to chair this committee. It reported in 1998 and its recommendations are feeding into the current National Curriculum review. It seems likely that these proposals - for up to 5 per cent of curriculum time being devoted to education for democracy - will be endorsed in full. When it reported, the Advisory Group's concerns cannot have been more forthright. The very first paragraph of its report reads: We unanimously advise the Secretary of State that citizenship and the teaching of democracy... is so important both for schools and the life of the nation that there must be a statutory requirement on schools to ensure that it is part of the entitlement of all pupils. It can no longer sensibly be left as unco-ordinated local initiatives which vary greatly in number, content and method. This is an inadequate basis for animating the idea of a common citizenship with democratic values. (QCA 1998, p. 7, my emphasis) This paragraph is extremely significant. It reveals clearly all the elements of something which has been emerging slowly throughout the book thus far - the fear of the ad hoc nature of life without state intervention and the putting forward of a 'neat-and-tidy' proposal to combat that. The general lessons to be learnt from this are so important that we'll return to this paragraph in a moment, to explore all its general ramifications for the argument here. But first, we need to look at the particular proposals the group put forward, for their particularities as well as general lessons revealed for the argument of this book. The aim of this section, then, is twofold. On one level, we want to look at the particular ideas put forward by the group, to see if they, or ideas similar,

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could provide justification for state intervention in the curriculum, organization and ethos of schools (or other educational settings). On another level, we want to look at the ideas put forward to see what general lessons can be learnt about this type of'neat-and-tidy' solution to the ad hoc problem. The Advisory Group gives full details of the kind of curriculum needed for democracy. The whole project is set out as a beautifully constructed edifice of ideas. One can sense the pride and achievement at creating something so neat and tidy, definitely not a victim of that terrible disease of 'ad /zoc'-ness; no f s are left uncrossed, no /'s undotted. The project involves creating, among other things, 'increased clarity for teachers about what they should teach and how they might teach it; specified learning outcomes for pupils; a firmer basis for the assessment of pupils' learning and of the progression in their learning' (p. 35). That is, the group is clear that what they are proposing can not only be taught, but that the outcomes can be measured. They start with three strands 'which make up effective citizenship', namely: 1. Social and moral responsibility (an 'essential pre-condition for citizenship'). 2. Community involvement. 3. Political literacy, (p. 40) In their turn these three strands are to be taught through 'four essential elements' (p. 41, emphasis added): 1. 2. 3. 4.

Concepts. Values and dispositions. Skills and aptitudes. Knowledge and understanding.

For our own purposes later we also note comments such as 'Certain values and dispositions' and 'Certain skills and aptitudes' are 'appropriate to citizenship education' and 'Pupils should acquire basic knowledge and understanding of particular aspects of society with which citizenship education is concerned' (p. 41). Knowledge and understanding includes aspects of the following: • • • •

Social. Moral. Political, including issues relating to government, law and constitution. Economic (public and personal) including issues relating to public services, taxation, public expenditure and employment. • Environmental and sustainable development, (p. 42) Moreover, also required is 'basic knowledge and understanding of these aspects of society through the topical and contemporary issues, events and activities which are the lifeblood of citizenship education' (p. 42).

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In a table labelled the 'essential elements to be reached by the end of compulsory schooling' (p. 44, emphasis added), they give us a taste of what all this will mean in practice. For instance, some of the 'Values and dispositions' include: • • • • • •

Concern for the common good. Belief in human dignity and equality. Concern to resolve conflicts. Commitment to equal opportunities and gender equality. Concern for human rights. Concern for the environment.

And the 'Knowledge and understanding' includes things such as: • The nature of diversity, dissent and social conflict. • Human rights charters and issues. • And, (of course, the ubiquitous) sustainable development and environmental issues. Finally, the committee helpfully lays out the 'learning outcomes' by which, recall, it will be measured whether or not pupils have successfully taken in the curriculum for democracy. These are extensive, covering six full pages. Again it is worth setting out a few of their more specific ideas, to give a more particular flavour of the kind of things they have in mind, as well as to illustrate some of the general problems with this kind of 'neat-and-tidy' solution. The learning outcomes include (among many others) things such as: At Key Stage 1 (up to age 9) Pupils should be able to (for example): • Express and justify orally a personal opinion relevant to an issue. • Use imagination when considering the experience of others. • Understand different kinds of behaviour using moral categories such as kind or unkind, good or bad, right or wrong', know about the consequences of antisocial or egocentric behaviour and attitudes, for individuals and communities; also understand that many problems can be tackled as a community. • Know about differences and similarities between people in terms of their needs, rights, responsibilities, wants, likes, values and beliefs, (pp. 46-7) At Key Stage 2 (up to age 11) Pupils should be able to: •

Express and justify orally and/or in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue.

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Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to reflect and hypothesize - the 'What if scenario - on issues of social, moral and political concern in response to stories, drama or 'real life' incidents. • Know about the world as a global community, and that people around the world live in communities as we do; understand that there are similarities and differences between communities in terms of social, economic, cultural, political and environmental circumstances; also understand the meaning of terms such as poverty, famine, disease, charity, aid, human rights. (pp. 47-8) •

At Key Stage 3 (up to age 14) Pupils should be able to: • Express and justify, orally and in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue. • Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to role-play, express plausibly and reflect on viewpoints contrary to their own. • Understand the rights and responsibilities underpinning a democratic society, with particular reference to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); be aware of issues surrounding rights such as freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest; know about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and why it was developed; also understand the meaning of terms such as prejudice, xenophobia, discrimination, pluralism. • Know about the world as a global community and understand the political, economic and social disparities that exist; also understand the meaning of terms such as overseas aid, development, sustainable development, international trade, charity, human rights, (pp. 49-50) At Key Stage 4 (up to age 16) Pupils should be able to: • Express and justify, orally and in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue. • Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to role-play and express plausibly viewpoints contrary to their own, and to reflect on and critically evaluate such viewpoints. • Understand the world as a global community, including issues such as sustainable development, economic interdependence, heavily indebted countries, and the work of United Nations organisations and major nongovernmental organisations; understand the meaning of terms such as stewardship, interdependence, ethical trading, peace-making and peacekeeping, (pp. 51-2)

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Now my point in laying these out is not to try to unravel them and begin a detailed critique - although for another occasion that might be fun indeed, albeit fun tempered with the knowledge that this is a report which the government is taking seriously indeed. But there are general as well as particular lessons to be learnt from this summary. First, there is the general lesson emerging of the politicization of this kind of process. Inevitably, one would assume, a committee set up by government in this way to look at a controversial issue (and for reasons mentioned in the previous session, of the contestability of education, almost all of education will feature controversial issues) will end up with some politicization of its outcomes - this would seem impossible to avoid, given the way political considerations impinge in all sorts of ways on controversial issues. This Advisory Group is no exception. It is pretty easy to spot a tad of political bias creeping into the report at every stage. After all,'. . . ethical trading, peace-making and peacekeeping' and'poverty, famine, disease, charity, aid, human rights', all seem to be recognizably the building blocks of a discernible political creed, one focused on the problems of underdevelopment, the evils of global capitalism and how the United Nations can put it all right. Meanwhile 'prejudice, xenophobia, discrimination, pluralism', and 'commitment to equal opportunities and gender equality' likewise could be (perhaps less exclusively) the building blocks of another left-wing political creed, this time one focused on the institutionally racist and sexist (and no doubt homophobic) society we live in. Similarly, there is the pervasive and ubiquitous 'concern for the environment' and 'sustainable development' anti-capitalist agendas. There is nothing wrong with holding such political creeds, of course, only one worries about how teachers will be able to teach such controversial issues without bias creeping in. If one wasn't aware of the inevitable politicization of these types of processes, one might also worry that the members of the committee either weren't self-reflective enough to realize their particular political creed was exploding through on every page, or that they were, and didn't care anyway. Second, there is the general lesson of specifying measurable outcomes for many educational processes, especially, but not exclusively, controversial educational processes. Any 'neat-and-tidy' solution will require neat-and-tidy specified and measurable outcomes. For without these, where would lie its advantages vis-a-vis the 'ad-hoc' solution? But this group's deliberations give us many opportunities to see how difficult this is to achieve in practice. Indeed, were it not for the seriousness with which this report is being received, we could have some fun following through some of these difficulties. For a start, we can wonder at the development of particular strands of skills and aptitudes, knowledge and understanding, trying to work out how on earth the group came to its conclusions with regard to its various progressions. For convenience, here's one of them put together in a list: • •

Use imagination when considering the experience of others (Key Stage 1). Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to

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reflect and hypothesize - the 'What if scenario - on issues of social, moral and political concern in response to stories, drama or 'real life' incidents (Key Stage 2). • Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to role-play, express plausibly and reflect on viewpoints contrary to their own (Key Stage 3). • Use imagination when considering the experience of others and be able to role-play and express plausibly viewpoints contrary to their own, and to reflect on and critically evaluate such viewpoints (Key Stage 4). How did the Group conclude that each ensuing statement represented achievement that was to be, on average, two years more advanced than the previous one? And why? And why is it at a more advanced level to be able to 'reflect on and critically evaluate [contrary] viewpoints' than it is simply to 'reflect on viewpoints contrary to their own'? And how would a teacher seeking to assess at what level a student was achieving possibly know whether a student was simply reflecting on these contrary viewpoints or reflecting and critically evaluating them? Is it possible in any case to 'reflect on' without 'critically evaluating'? Indeed, this puzzle about assessment worms its way through each and every one of these statements. I look forward to primary schoolteachers ticking the relevant boxes after peering into the imagination of their young charges, for instance. Or how about another of the progressions? Consider this: • Express and justify orally a personal opinion relevant to an issue (Key Stage 1). • Express and justify orally and/or in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue (Key Stage 2). • Express and justify, orally and in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue (Key Stage 3). • Express and justify, orally and in writing, a personal opinion relevant to an issue (Key Stage 4). One could at least make here a more plausible case for why each of these cases is slightly harder than the other (except for the difference between Key Stages 3 and 4, of course). But here is it simply any personal opinion that will do, and any issue? My opinion on the price of eggs at Safebury's is that they are too expensive; I justify this by pointing out that they are cheaper if you purchase them from Tes-mart. Have I passed, Miss? These are particular difficulties, but they illustrate graphically the general problem of specifying these outcomes. Readers might think that they could have come up with better outcome statements themselves, and so the difficulties I'm illustrating are just difficulties with this particular group's deliberations, not with the process itself. I'm not so sure. For this group really was made up of the good and the great in education, with many practical educationalists as well as academic experts like Professor Crick bringing the benefits of their

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greater wisdom. I suspect that the difficulties they've obviously had arriving at sensible statements are a product of the ways in which any such committee would have to work. Any such committee has to reach consensus. It has to make sure that there are no loopholes left uncovered. It has to be sure that it is adequately prescribing everything that needs to be prescribed. It has to work to a timetable, and not get bogged down. In short, it can't leave r's uncrossed and f s undotted. And it is these imperatives which have led this group, and which will lead any such group, to arrive at the kind of difficulties we are spelling out here. These general lessons are important and will, I suggest, apply to any attempt to bring higher-order values into the curriculum through government edict. Similar fun and games, for instance, could also be had with the proposals from the UK government's National Forum on Values in Education and the Community (see SCAA 1996, QCA, 1998) - a similar attempt at a 'neat-andtidy' solution to an 'ad hoc' problem. While in this chapter we're focusing on proposals for education for citizenship, we must be aware that the critique we are developing here could apply more generally. But now let's move on to the particulars of the proposals. We'll ask whether this advisory group has actually come up with genuine justifications for seeking to bring in government intervention in education, and whether there are likely to be any such justifications from any other advisory group in the light of our comments. With this in mind, let us return to the opening paragraph of the report, and in particular the italicized sections. I'll print it again below for convenience: We unanimously advise the Secretary of State that citizenship and the teaching of democracy... is so important both for schools and the life of the nation that there must be a statutory requirement on schools to ensure that it is part of the entitlement of all pupils. It can no longer sensibly be left as unco-ordinated local initiatives which vary greatly in number, content and method. This is an inadequate basis for animating the idea of a common citizenship with democratic values. (QCA 1998, p. 7, my emphasis) Now, there would seem to be a five-fold argument unfolding, either explicitly or implicitly in this paragraph (and throughout the report): 1. Education for citizenship is highly important. 2. 'Unco-ordinated local initiatives' are not enough to provide it. 3. Therefore, government must impose a national curriculum for citizenship on all students. 4. Such a curriculum is best learnt in schools. 5. Such government intervention will be more effective at creating effective citizens than without it.

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I suggest that this argument would be substantially the same as any such advisory group would come up with. Its logical form is similar to that contained in all the literature noted above, and it is hard to imagine an argument for government-sponsored education for citizenship which didn't contain these five steps. Now, let's assume the first proposition is true, that education for citizenship is important. The second point is then in part an explicit statement of the objection to the 'ad hoc". I say 'in part' because by using the terminology of 'initiatives' it is clear that they have simply missed out a whole gamut of local, national and international activities - as noted by our focus group in Session 1 - through which education for democracy might also be conveyed, viz., all the newspapers, magazines, television and radio and Internet input into political commentary. We'll include those in our definition too. So what do they actually mean by their point that these 'initiatives' provide an 'inadequate basis' for education for democracy? Presumably they mean that the various 'uncoordinated' attempts are not working at preparing all young people for democracy? I say 'presumably' - and this is absolutely crucial - because this is not explicitly spelled out. But it would seem essential for us to know whether or not these unco-ordinated attempts are working, before we would turn to the might of the state to impose an additional curriculum burden on young people and their teachers.To be fair, they do consider some evidence to this effect. But it is hardly conclusive, indeed it is contradictory, and moreover they don't have any counterfactual evidence to show whether or not having a compulsory education for democracy would make it any better. Indeed, there are some indications that it might not, even within the evidence they present. On one hand they try to paint a picture of a very serious problem regarding citizenship - creating their own little 'crisis' to which only they can provide the solution. We are told that young adults in the 18-24 age group are politically 'apathetic', showing 'the highest abstention rate among all age groups': 25 per cent said they would not vote in the 1992 General Election, while 32 per cent abstained in the 1997 election (p. 15). Similarly, they note the work of DEMOS think-tank authors Helen Wilkinson and Geoff Mulgan - now a key policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair. These pointed out a large degree of youth alienation and presented 'a powerful case that there should be a legal obligation to teach civic education alongside personal and social education' (p. 16). Interestingly, two of the statistics given are that only minorities of young people have 'trust in society's core institutions' such as national and local government, and that this therefore shows the need for their political education. I think that I would also be included in the number (not of young people, of course) who don't necessarily trust these institutions of government. However, I'd like to think that this doesn't show that I particularly need any 'political education', unless it is of the Pol Pot variety, I suppose. But such considerations aside, how can one possibly make the assumption that this lack of desire to vote, encapsulated as it is in general youth 'alienation and cynicism', has anything to do with a lack of compulsory education for

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democracy? They note that this youth alienation is also embodied in such things as Truancy, vandalism, random violence, premeditated crime and habitual drug-taking' (p. 15). But we noted in Session 1 above that youth alienation has been linked to the rise of youth culture, which in itself has been blamed on the form which compulsory schooling takes (using Rutter and Smith 1995, and Hargreaves 1994 for this argument). So adding to the burden within compulsory schooling, as this Advisory Group propose to do, could simply make matters worse, not better - undermining the fifth proposition above that government intervention will make things better, not worse. In any case, even on this point their evidence is muddled. For they note that research conducted by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence in 1997 found that 'a majority of its sample had been involved in some form of political or community action the previous year' (p. 15) - suggesting that perhaps the picture wasn't as bleak as their initial suggestions, and that, in fact, the 'uncoordinated local initiatives' may well have been having at least some impact. Similarly they note that a 1996 Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) survey commissioned by Barnardo's also warned caution about some of the doom and gloom headline figures: 'The survey data are ambiguous ... young people ... do seem one way or another to have secured some basic but important political facts' (quoted p. 15). Such basic facts about the constitution and political parties were indeed known by the majority of young people in the survey. They conclude: 'These may be simple propositions, but the accuracy of the response suggests basic information does get ingested, whatever the source' (quoted p. 15, my emphasis). (We'll return to the italicized comments in a moment.) Again, the report notes that there is some more cautionary advice proffered by another social report, this time by Roger Jowell and Alison Park. These authors questioned whether 'teenage and younger generation alienation' in terms of political participation at least, had got any worse. It was this aspect of the lecture which Crick's report focused on. But there was also the eminently sensible question: why is it surprising that younger people are less interested in politics than older people? For the researchers found the less than baffling but very important fact that 'as people got older, concerned with taxes, mortgages and family, they began to inform themselves better and show more concern for public policy' (p. 16, my emphasis). (Again, we'll return to this italicized comment shortly.) However, this wisdom cuts no ice with the committee. They agree it's not clear whether things are getting worse or not, but do say (on the basis only of this very scant evidence) that things are 'inexcusably and damagingly bad, and could and should be remedied' (p. 16). And the remedy is that 'Schools should have a coherent and sequential programme of citizenship education' (p. 16). Again, standing back from the particulars of their approach, I suggest that it would be awfully difficult for any such advisory group to do better than this. How could anyone adequately operationalize the issue of whether or not the 'unco-ordinated', 'ad hoc' solutions are enough to provide education for citizenship? There would seem to be so many possible sources for this education

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(local initiatives, national and local press, radio, television, Internet, political meetings and debates, conversation in the pub, etc.), and so many confounding variables (such as the one about youth alienation, and its possible relationship with compulsory schooling) that it would seem impossible to devise a model which could adequately demonstrate that the ad hoc was not good enough. It would seem that any such advisory group would have to move to the third proposition on the basis of prejudice and faith, rather than adequate evidence. The Advisory Group arrives at the third proposition, that 'government must impose a national curriculum for citizenship on all students'. As I've said, I don't think they have done anywhere enough to show that government intervention could possibly do anything to solve the problem, or that it is necessary. But crucially, from here on, they don't even attempt to provide evidence or argument for the fourth and fifth propositions. Having got this far with some argument, the status quo commonsense assumptions allow them to take for granted that 'Such a curriculum is best learnt in schools', and that 'Such government intervention will be more effective at creating effective citizens than without it'. In the context of this book, this is not good enough. But could these assumptions be justified - in general, by this or any other advisory group? We italicized two comments above which are relevant here. Young people, it was noted, clearly had learnt aspects of politics from 'whatever the source'. Moreover, young people when they acquired the accoutrements of adult life would be likely 'to inform themselves' of necessary details of the political process. The Crick committee clearly assumes that the only way that young people can acquire the conditions required for citizenship is through schooling, and it all has to be accomplished by the time they reach age 16. But why do they make these assumptions? At one point they do mention that 'many of the key concepts, values and dispositions, and, to a much lesser extent, skills, aptitudes, knowledge and understanding already are or can be developed and applied within other parts of the curriculum' (p. 43); in other words, in other parts of the school curriculum. But it doesn't occur to this committee, apparently totally wedded to this conflation of schooling and education, that they might also better be acquired outside of the context of schooling. This is illustrated at the extreme level when they note that part of the 'knowledge and understanding' required at Key Stage 1 is that young children must 'Understand different kinds of behaviour using moral categories such as kind or unkind, good or bad, right or wrong; know about the consequences of anti-social or egocentric behaviour and attitudes, for individuals and communities; also understand that many problems can be tackled as a community.' By inserting this in their curriculum in this way the impression must be given that this is something for schools to be teaching at this level - even if this wasn't the intention of the committee it can - and will - be read in this way. But surely these are things which are the duty of parents to be teaching from a very young age. Perhaps this is an extreme example. But, as we noted in Session 1 above, and have touched on now, there is absolutely no reason to believe that all the aspects of citizenship education enumerated in this report could not

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better be learnt under some other environment than the school. Indeed, paradoxically, there seems to be one glimmer of hope in the report, in an appendix, which points out how 'New information and communications technologies' can impact on Education for Citizenship. The appendix, written by Dr Stephen Coleman,2 Director of Studies at the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, seeks to demonstrate that: • New information and communication technologies (ICTs), specifically the Internet, are growing fast as an educational tool, particularly amongst young people. • Many opportunities to become better informed about citizenship and to participate in democratic discussion exist on the Internet. • The interactive character of the Internet provides opportunities for invigorating citizenship education, although some notes of caution need to be considered, (p. 67) Some of the key features of interest for educationalists include that 'the technologies are interactive: users are not expected to simply imbibe information, but are usually able to add to it or contest it'; that 'on-line discussions offer people a sense of not simply hearing about or being spectators of civic affairs, but becoming involved as deliberating participants'; that this can lead to global awareness, and that 'on-line discussion allows citizens to become familiar with the rules . . . of democratic debate' (p. 69). All are very positive aspects of the new technology, one would agree, for education for democracy. Now in the context of the discussion in Session 1, we would be noting, and no doubt the focus group would be thinking along these lines too, that these wonderful opportunities are available in the world outside of schooling. Also that if there is a problem with universal access (which is one of the report's key 'notes of caution') then ways to overcome this should be sought, perhaps by the provision of subsidized or philanthropic networked computers in community centres or student cafes, or whatever solution seems plausible. But the key point would be that all these new technological opportunities can go a long way to overcoming the problem (if such exists) of political apathy among young people. And, very positively, we would note that young people have much greater facility with these kinds of technology and so will probably have a much greater edge when it comes to the new form of education for democracy. But you've guessed it. The report doesn't draw these obvious conclusions. It notes, 'Overall a strong case can be made for the use of ICTs as an integral part of education for citizenship. However, at present, there are few signs that schools and colleges are realising or have the resources to realise the full potential of this important link with the curriculum' (p. 71, emphasis added). And if that isn't shattering of our dreams and visions enough, it continues: 'Much of the potential is dependent on the competence and confidence of teachers using ICTs as a teaching and learning tool as a resource' (p. 71, emphasis added). A more dramatic example of the conflation of schooling and

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education, and an assumption that young people only learn when there are teachers around, would be harder to find - and in a context too which simply begs for an alternative explanation. The key point being made here is that perhaps this is not simply a shortcoming of this particular Advisory Group, that it couldn't see beyond its rather myopic shared assumptions. For once the wider vista is surveyed it is hard to see how, in general, any advisory group could arrive at propositions (4) and (5) above (p. 147). I suppose Professor Crick and his Advisory Group wouldn't have much sympathy with these kinds of objections for one major reason. It is to do with the untidiness of the alternative. I suggested above that 'there is absolutely no reason to believe that all the aspects of citizenship education enumerated in this report could not better be learnt under some other environment other than the school'. Except then, the Advisory Group could point out, outside of the school, government wouldn't be able to control it. And it is government control that is the key here. For if it is not statutory - that is, if it is not compulsory - then what guarantees have we got that all would receive their entitlement? I get so frustrated with this kind of argument - which I hear often in this and other contexts. The arguments in Session 2 above propose that it is simply impossible to get these tidy solutions, even with government compulsion. To remind readers, you can create compulsory schooling, but this doesn't mean all are going to have schooling. And even for those who do follow the legal mandate, they won't all get educated. It's just another version of the old saw that 'You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink' - except it's even worse than that, because in this case it is 'You can take a horse to water, but you can't even be sure that he will really get there, let alone that he will drink if he does.' But for some reason, such stories seem to have cut no ice with the neatand-tidy brigade. For some reason they seem to think that government compulsion will ensure more young people get a certain type of education than without. I don't know how they can possibly make that assumption. But, as always in this book, I want to go along with their assumption for a moment, bending over backwards to try to accommodate them. Let me try and adopt their neat-and-tidy approach and see what follows. The reason for the neat-and-tidy solution is because all children have an entitlement to an education for democracy. This is because only with that entitlement will they have the 'values and dispositions', 'skills and aptitudes' and 'knowledge and understanding' which are 'appropriate' for citizenship (p. 41), as I highlighted earlier. The curriculum provides 'essential elements' (p. 44) for citizenship. Or, as others have put it, they provide the elements of an 'education adequate for participation in democracy' (Gutmann 1987, p. 287). In other words, the neat and tidy solution is required because, unless all young people are brought up to be good citizens in this way, then democracy will suffer, and we'll all suffer as a result. But a question bothers me about this neat-and-tidy solution. If it is so

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essential to democracy to have all young people educated for citizenship, so much so that government can intervene to make it compulsory, then what should happen to those who don't master this education when it is compulsory? Or rather it is a question which is not so much bothering me, but Joel in the focus group, as he argues with Jack and others.

FOCUS GROUP In which we reflect on some paradoxes and pitfalls of education for democracy. After a fairly short coffee break, Jack reconvened the group for our fourth and penultimate session. After our video session, we'd had some rather inconclusive discussion about the pros and cons of choice - although I felt that the most interesting discussion was while Jack had been away. On the flip-chart Jack had written the topic for the session: Education for citizenship. To 'set the scene' he showed us some video clips (the computer worked without a hitch) of some very important people talking about the 'crisis of citizenship', and how we needed government to intervene in the school curriculum to make things better for us all. Jack summarized the presentation: 'To exercise their rights as citizens, children need to know about the nature of democracy, how it works, and the duties, rights and responsibilities which come with it. Some people are becoming increasingly concerned that young people don't know all these things. It is "a blot on the landscape of public life". The teaching of citizenship and democracy is so important for the life of the nation that there should be a statutory requirement to teach it. This means that your Centres of Learning would have to be directed in certain ways. What do you think?' It seemed that Ruth, Fatima, Winston and Sanjay had been each rather impressed with the arguments given in the presentation. Ruth said: 'I think I can see why it would be a good idea. After all, it is so important that everyone receives their entitlement. And unless you make it compulsory in some place like a Centre of Learning, then not everyone will get it.' Joel looked puzzled. 'But yesterday I thought we all agreed that there were loads of ways in which citizens access "education for democracy": through lectures, sermons, newspapers, television,films,articles in magazines, pamphlets, comics, books, all that sort of thing. All of these are outside our Centres of Learning. It is in the whole of society that young people learn about citizenship, and you can't have a compulsory curriculum for the whole of society!' Fatima said, 'Perhaps we weren't thinking too carefully yesterday. I think these people know what they're talking about.There is a big problem in society.

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Young people are apathetic. It could be us. We'd need to be taught, not allowed to be indifferent. It's only fair that we all get our entitlement.' Ruth added: 'If democracy is to function, everyone should receive their education for citizenship. You can't guarantee that without making it compulsory. It's obvious!' Joel didn't think so. He suggested that even if there was a compulsory curriculum, then this wouldn't mean that all children would 'receive' it. The prescribed curriculum, he said, may not be followed to the letter in 'schools'. Children might truant or bunk off'citizenship lessons'. Or they might not be in the mood to absorb it when it comes around, or might not get on with the teacher. Or they might not understand some of the harder concepts. So even with a compulsory curriculum for democracy, he said, there would be every likelihood that not all will receive it, and that not all of those who receive it would receive all of it. The others didn't want to accept this, returning all the time to what the people on the video had said. Jack said: 'I think you're in a minority of one, Joel, on this one. Perhaps you've just got to accept that you're not going to win this argument.' Joel hesitated. Then said, 'Okay . . . I agree. Without state intervention, it would just be too untidy. And that wouldn't do, because then democracy would suffer. And we can't have democracy suffering, so we have to impose this curriculum on all children.' Jack said: 'I want you to be serious.' Joel said: 'I am being serious.' Jack said:'Okay.' Joel said: 'Okay.' Jack said: 'So we'll now move on to our next question . . . on democratic control of education.' Joel said: 'I haven't finished with this train of thought yet.' So Jack put down his flip-chart marker pen, sat down, and said: 'Fine, let's follow your train of thought then. Your -' (signalling to all of us, not just Joel) '- views matter to us.' Joel stood in front of us. He pointed out that we had two premises now, which he wrote on the flip-chart: 1. All citizens need an 'education for democracy' to be able to effectively participate in democracy. 2. A compulsory curriculum is needed to ensure that all 'receive' the required education. We agreed that this was the extent of our conversation thus far. 'Now', Joel asked, 'if education for democracy is so important for democracy that we need the state to make it compulsory, what will happen to those who don't obtain their education for democracy?' Jack raised his eyebrows in a 'Come off it'-type expression. Ruth said: 'What do you mean?' Joel continued: 'I mean if it is so important, should those people who - for

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whatever reason - don't get their education for democracy be allowed to vote, or otherwise participate, in the democracy?' Fatima said: 'Don't be silly, of course they should. If we don't let them vote, then we haven't got a democracy.' 'I'm not so sure', said Joel. 'Democracy means rule (kratos) of the people (demos)' (he wrote these words on the chart). 'But the people is never all the people. We rule out children, for example. Why? - because we think that they are not old enough to vote. They are not wise enough to have considered all the relevant issues. If we can rule out children on these grounds, why not rule out adults who have not acquired their education for democracy? Isn't it the same as when we say that certain skills and knowledge are necessary for driving on public roads, so we need a compulsory driving licence? In this case, certain skills and knowledge (and values and dispositions) are necessary for participation in a democracy - that's your argument - so we need a compulsory democracy licence. Why not?' Winston said: 'It would be pretty difficult to check whether someone had got their education for citizenship. That's why we wouldn't go there.' Joel said, 'The whole point of the "learning outcomes" laid out by the old professor on the video is that they are outcomes which can be assessed. So that can't be the reason. We can list all those learning outcomes and say that they make up a "Political Proficiency Certificate'" (he writes the letters PPC on the chart). 'Your argument is that all citizens need to be adequately prepared for participation in a democracy. In other words, all citizens need to have passed their PPC. So my question is: what should we do with PPC failures?' Ruth didn't want to engage with this discussion any further, saying it just wasn't a serious issue. Joel thought it was very serious indeed. He pointed out that 'the old professor' on the video had said that many people have not got the 'essentials' of citizenship. But then we are allowing them to vote on issues which would concern us all. Joel continued: 'If PPC failures are permitted to vote in a democracy, doesn't this impact on us all? Look, in the world beyond the Veil of Ignorance, there are really important political decisions to be made which, if they go the wrong way, might impact on some of us adversely in terms of education. It could be you, Ruth. You wouldn't want such a vote to be taken by those who, in your own terms, weren't primed to take such decisions. That would be madness! If it is important that all receive education for democracy - so important that you want to bring in state compulsion to ensure it - then it is surely as important that only those who have actually received and understood the curriculum should be allowed to vote. Otherwise, why bother for that tidy solution? It makes no sense.' He wrote up on the flip-chart a third proposition underneath the other two, 3. Democracy should employ 'fitness tests' to determine membership of the voting'demos', and sat down.

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Jack waited a while before taking the floor. 'Thank you Joel for that playful interlude. Now who can fill in the obvious objections to this argument, before we move on to democratic control of education?' We didn't come up with them immediately, it must be said. Jack suggested that all of us gathered around the computer, to find the arguments that would put this one to rest. After some searching for justifications for democracy, we first found the argument from political equality. (We found there were two broad types of justification for democracy, those which were founded on ideas about human rights and interests - the philosophers called these 'deontological' justifications, which was puzzling because although the term was almost identical to 'ontological', apparently it meant something completely different - and ones which were based on the consequences - more sensibly labelled 'consequentialist' justifications. The argument from political equality was of the first type.) This argument justified democracy - according to Arthur, calling up ideas from various philosophers - in the following three steps: 1. Equals should be treated equally. 2. All people are equal in one fundamental way. 3. This way is 'precisely that necessary to justify democracy'.3 We saw how the first step would not be enough to justify democracy, since it needed to be supplemented by an argument showing that the members of that community were equal in the necessary relevant sense. Step 2 tries to do this. The significant equality is that of human dignity, possessed by all in the community. But then if we all possess human dignity, going back beyond the Veil, we would all want a right to a say in the affairs of our society. Hence democracy. Joel pooh-poohed this. 'You don't really want to go back beyond the Veil and have people voting on matters of great concern to you if they are not politically competent. You've said so yourselves, that's the only reason why you want a compulsory curriculum for democracy!' Jack said, 'Yes, but in a democracy we are bound to act on the presumption that each person is entitled to equal treatment with regard to participation in the affairs of the community - unless you can show relevant inequalities.' Joel said, 'But the PPC does show "relevant inequalities".' Jack said: 'It's about respecting the human dignity in everyone.' Joel said: 'I can't see how that respects dignity at all.' He asked us to take one interest 'shared equally by all' - to live in a relatively unpolluted environment. A decision is to be taken about controlling local pollution. If one of us say Ruth - knows a lot about the causes of the pollution, and if the rest of us are ignorant about them, then clearly, he said, it will be in all our interests if Ruth's voice is heard rather than the rest of ours. He gave an example. A vote takes place on clearing up a factory's emissions. Ruth knows (correctly) that this could best be combated by particular measures, whereas the rest have no idea about the pollution let alone the appropriate measures. Isn't it absurd, on

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the grounds of our common interests in a clean environment, to give all our votes equal weight? Joel concluded: 'I don't see what this has got to do with human dignity at all.' Winston had found on the computer a little quote by the English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill which he thought would be relevant here. He read it out: No one but a fool, and only a fool of a particular description feels offended by the acknowledgement that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.4 Joel flashed a smile. 'Exactly', he said. Jack said: Tm glad we've found John Stuart Mill. I think he can help us here.' And he introduced us to the next justification - a consequentialist one the educative function of democracy. Democracy is justified because of its important 'educative function', said John Stuart Mill.5 Arthur found us writings where Mill was deliberating about the issue of extending the franchise in the United Kingdom. Indeed, Jack did seem to be right, for it all seemed conclusive to begin with. Mill argued against anything resembling Joel's PPC: it would not be expedient to limit the franchise on grounds of education of the intelligence and of the sentiments, he wrote, because voting is in itself an educative experience: the 'exercise of political franchises by manual labourers' is 'a potent instrument of mental improvement'.6 So it seemed that Mill would be against any notion of competency testing - for sound reasons. Jack said:'Satisfied?' Joel was not. He scrolled down through John Stuart Mill's work. And as we followed Mill's views, qualifications (literally!) soon emerged to modify this position. First we found that he regarded 'it as wholly inadmissible that any person should participate in the suffrage without being able to read, write and . . . perform the common operations of arithmetic'.7 Joel asked us why we would want to stop at literacy and numeracy? And it turned out that Mill stopped at prescribing other curriculum content because he thought it would be impossible to assess these things! For he accepted that his argument could be extended further to other types of knowledge necessary to the suffrage: 'some knowledge of the conformation of the earth, its natural and political division, the elements of general history, and of the history and institutions of their own country', he had written. But: 'these kinds of knowledge, however indispensable to all intelligent use of the suffrage, are not... accessible to the whole people; nor does there exist any trustworthy machinery for ascertaining whether they have been acquired or not'.8 So Joel pointed out that, obviously, if John Stuart Mill had been aware that universal education of a high standard was possible, and that 'the trustworthy machinery' for assessment was available (through the 'learning outcomes' we'd seen on the video), then even John Stuart Mill would be in favour of

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restricting the franchise: 'If there existed such a thing as a really national education or a trustworthy system of general examination, education might be tested directly'.9 It was only because these possibilities were not available to him that he proposed other tests - including of employment. So if it would be practical to create a PPC, said Joel, then John Stuart Mill would accept it as a logical extension of his argument in favour of literacy and numeracy tests! And so it went on. We came up with the justification from the promotion of an individual's interests, another in the deontological camp. 'Each individual human being has interests which they can express and which they have a right to pursue'.10 Why this led to democracy was summed up in the phrase 'only the individual can know where the shoe pinches'.11 But Joel wouldn't buy this, because it seemed pertinent to ask how we can really know that individuals do really 'know where the shoe pincheth' in political terms, and a PPC would be an obvious tool in this regard. 'In making political decisions, a sensible person would sometimes question their own ability to make the right decision. But if he knew that he had passed the test deemed necessary for being able to make such decisions, then he could relax a bit', Joel said. If not the promotion of individual's interests, what about the promotion of the general interestl This was a consequentialist approach. Democracy was valued because whereas the 'rule of the few will produce government in the interests of the few, the rule of the many will produce government in the general interest'.12 But again, the connection between majority voting and the promotion of the general interest would be reinforced - we didn't need Joel to point this out - not undermined, if it were known that those voting had competence in relevant knowledge and skills for the issues being voted on, in other words had passed their PPC. Finally, we came to the promotion of liberty. Once we got started on this, Jack said something along the lines of 'I'm glad you got to this one at last', implying all along that he had known it was the strongest case. Democracy is valuable because it best promotes liberty. But Joel's PPC would clearly have the opposite effect, of countering certain people's liberties, to vote for instance, so would be undesirable and ruled out. Joel put up some defence for a while, claiming a difference between positive and negative liberty. In negative liberty, he said, the role of government is to ensure that civil liberties - freedom of speech, thought, assembly and so on - are protected from intervention by other humans or agencies, and that is all. The 'positive' view, however, says that there are many social and physical conditions which people need in order to live and to thrive as autonomous agents; moreover, it is the role of governments to ensure that these conditions are met. Joel said: 'If someone believed in positive liberty, then I think they'd want a PPC, as a way of ensuring that all citizens had the preconditions to live as autonomous agents. But, damn', he continued, 'I believe in negative liberty.' He stopped and said: 'You win.' Jack said, 'Good, fine', and getting up to stand by the flip-chart, 'so let's move on to our next topic, democratic control of the curriculum -'. Joel interrupted: 'You win', and continued: 'I agree with you. There is a

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greater value than our desire to have such a tidy solution. I embraced your tidy solution. I agreed that we wanted to know that everyone who was participating in democracy, through voting or whatever, had the skills, knowledge, values and dispositions to be able to do so. But you've convinced me: it would offend political liberty to do so. So we're all agreed then, we won't go for the tidy solution, because it is offensive to liberty?' Jack said, 'That's what we've agreed, shall we move on?' 'But hang on. A moment ago you were saying education for democracy was so important that it couldn't be left to all the untidy mechanisms we outlined yesterday. It was too untidy to allow education for democracy to take place through the newspapers, television, radio, the Internet, reading groups, debating societies, all that stuff. So I suggested a mechanism which could provide you with certainty, that allowed only those people who had received their education for democracy to participate in democracy. But you backed down from that, saying you don't need certainty after all, because it clashed with other democratic values. But if you don't need certainty, then why bother to go that route of a compulsory curriculum for democracy? You've conceded that knowing that everyone has received the education for democracy isn't, after all, the most important value. But that's what I was saying all along. We should try as hard as we can to ensure that as many people do get their education for citizenship, through all the diverse routes available. This won't achieve certainty, of course. But certainty is only possible if you go the whole hog and have a PPC. And certainty is something you don't want after all.'

COMMENTARY The neat-and-tidy solution doesn't work I find Joel's argument rather persuasive. Why bother to pursue the 'neat-andtidy' solution? It can't even guarantee a neat-and-tidy outcome as far as citizenship education is concerned (because some young people will inevitably fall though the net, just as they do for compulsory schooling itself, as we spelled out in Session 2). But, most importantly, it certainly cannot guarantee what is surely the underlying motivation for it, that all citizens behave with the values and dispositions, skills and aptitudes, and knowledge and understanding which are 'appropriate' and 'essential' (to use the words of the Crick report) for democracy to work. We could go the 'whole hog' to ensure this is the case, and make it really neat and tidy, but that would offend political liberty, so we won't.13 But if the neat-and-tidy solution ends up being so unruly-and-untidy, then why bother with it in the first place? Why not allow for all the forces within civil society to work together, spontaneously and chaotically, no doubt, truly 'unco-ordinated', but arriving at a place where all young people do have

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access to an education for democracy - particularly when all the technological possibilities as noted in Appendix B to Crick's report are brought to bear and the great majority partake of it willingly? The argument that education for democracy can be used to show why the private alternative won't work in education, and that government needs to intervene, does not hold water. The case for the private alternative continues to remain robust. And, because of the way we saw how the Advisory Group's discussions brought out general difficulties and problems, I suggest that the private alternative would remain robust against any similar objections which invoked a 'neat-and-tidy' solution to an 'ad hoc' problem. But we're not done with democracy yet.There is still the other aspect, that democratic control of education is required, and this too brings in the requirement for state regulation of educational institutions. I think this is easier to rebut. Democratic control of education Some of those arguing most ardently for this in recent years have been the philosophers of education Professors John White and Wilfred Carr writing with the education historian Anthony Hartnett. Let's take Carr and Hartnett's arguments14 and see why they don't provide serious objections to the private alternative. The authors evidently think that their position does demolish the case for the private alternative. They argue that 'any vision of education that takes democracy seriously cannot but be at odds with educational reforms which espouse the language and values of market forces and treat education as a commodity to be purchased and consumed' (Carr and Hartnett 1996, p. 192). Nor are Carr and Hartnett alone in this position.15 They could not be less unequivocal. Democratic education is opposed to markets in education. Their argument goes like this: it rests on a series of dichotomies between an individualist and a deliberative perspective on society. These bring differences in the way democracy and hence democratic education are conceived. The individualist view stresses that people are 'emphatically not social or political animals' (p. 47); hence, it endorses a view of autonomy as a 'commitment to developing the capacity of individuals to ... determine and pursue their own version of the "good life" for themselves, free from ... external pressure and constraints' (p. 47). In contrast, the deliberative perspective, influenced by Dewey, specifies a view of autonomy 'recast' in the 'public sphere' (p. 186). This 'democratic' autonomy requires a commitment of individuals to 'a form of practical reasoning that requires collective deliberation aimed at realizing the common good' (p. 65). Considering democracy, Carr and Hartnett (1996) distinguish the 'contemporary' and 'classical' interpretations, the former linked with my individualist, and the latter the deliberative, perspective. The former assumes that people only form social relationships to satisfy personal needs, and thus there is 'no obligation to participate in political decision-making' (p. 43).The latter, on the

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other hand, assumes that people are 'essentially political and social animals who fulfil themselves by sharing in the common life of their community' (p. 41).Three important features about Carr and Hartnett's favoured conception of democracy is that it allows deliberation in the public sphere, ensuring accountability, and that it endorses equality, ensuring that all are able to partake in these deliberations. These different conceptions furthermore 'entail' different conceptions of education: fitting in with the individualist conception is an education 'that prepares ... the mass of ordinary individuals for their primary social roles as producers, workers and consumers in a modern market economy' (p. 44); the deliberative conception, however, endorses 'democratic education', which 'seeks to empower its future members to participate collectively in the processes through which their society is being shaped and reproduced' (p. 43). While I could challenge much in these categories as ideal types - and I have already mentioned in the Introduction why markets in education are not the same as education for the 'modern market economy' - this is not my quarrel with these authors now. My disagreement is with the authors' classification of markets in education as necessarily belonging in the individualist, as opposed to the deliberative category. It's a simple-minded objection. Putting markets in that first category fails to take into account the three ways in which governments can intervene in education. Governments can provide, fund or regulate. So markets in education can be regulated, if that is what is desired. But this means that the supposed incompatibility between markets in education and democratic education disappears. For in a democracy, deliberation and accountability could be exercised in deciding upon the regulation of the educational market. Although often stated, the supposed incompatibility between markets in education and democratic education cannot be found here. What seemed counterintuitive has simply disappeared in a puff of conceptual clarification. Because the bare bones of supply and demand mechanisms can be regulated, and because the state can step in if necessary to provide a funding and regulatory safety-net, markets in education are completely compatible with 'classical' democracy, with the 'deliberative' notion of autonomy, and with the educative learning society. I take some comfort in the fact that Professor John White seems to have arrived at a similar stance recently, although not known for his affection towards markets, and as one who would endorse something like the 'deliberative' notion of autonomy (White 1990). He writes: 'I can see no reason of principle why the State must own and run its own schools .. .The crucial thing . . . is not who owns a school, but whether the school conforms to certain criteria of adequacy -... for instance ... as regards aims and curricula' (White 1994, p. 122). Readers might guess that I am not going to be satisfied with only getting this far. However, it is worth standing back from the argument and realizing that getting to here is in itself no small achievement. Those who have come this far with me should accept that markets in education are compatible with democratic education. That's something.

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But let's not stop here. So markets in education can be regulated, to ensure that they respond to democracy. But this will bring in a whole gamut of regulation on the curriculum, the ethos of the school and no doubt more. But, as has become increasingly clear throughout this argument, I really don't think these are a good idea. Joel's line,'Give the state an inch and she'll think she's a Ruler' has resonances here. If we allow government in to regulate, then before we know it, there will be more regulations, then desires to fund and provide too. So although compatible with markets in education, I don't want to endorse these regulations. Can we create a stronger argument than that? Is it possible that a 'deliberative' democracy might actually favour markets in education rather than democratically controlled state funded and provided schooling? I think three cases can be made - all of which are found within Carr and Hartnett's own writings - which would support this argument. I think the case can be made that markets in education should be preferred over state education if our goal is democratic education. The historical case We have already noted in Session 2 how state intervention in education may have crowded out the private alternative. Carr and Hartnett (1996) also look back at history for their own purposes. However, I think the evidence they survey can be used to support our ends here. Firstly, they do agree that state schooling had inauspicious origins in the 'absolutist monarchies of eighteenth-century Europe', used there as 'a powerful instrument for promoting political loyalty amongst the people and for creating a cohesive national culture after the image of the ruling class' (p. 77). Similarly, they argue that in England and Wales state involvement in schooling was explicitly for reasons of 'social control', to inculcate in 'workingclass children their social duties; a modicum of useful knowledge; a respect for authority; and a belief in religion' (p. 80). Thus far, it would seem, they are in ample agreement with our own historical excursions in Session 2 above. They also note - and decry - the prejudices against working-class education of those seeking to introduce state education. Curiously, however, they do not seem to be able to move away from taking these harmful prejudices at face value. So, for example, they apparently endorse the social reformer Tawney's 'observation' that in the nineteenth century Britain was one of 'the most illiterate and under-educated' nations of western Europe (p. 75); similarly, they uncritically accept the conclusions of the Taunton Report of 1868, which condemned 'the majority of private and grammar schools' for employing 'untrained teachers' and for 'poor' pedagogy (p. 88). But are either of these sources true, or simply a statement or later reiteration of the prejudices that led to state intervention in the first place? For they also note that Gardner (1984) shows that working-class private schools were a 'ubiquitous presence, both in town and country at least up to the 1870s' (Carr and Hartnett 1996, p. 83) and that this gave working-class parents some 'degree of power and

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control over both the content and organisation of education, which was entirely absent in the publicly provided alternative' (p. 83). Moreover, they mention the Newcastle Commission report of 1861, but curiously ignore its findings that we have already noted that the vast majority of young people were in schooling before the state got involved for an average of 5.7 years. They cite the arguments of Andy Green but omit to mention that, pace Tawney, he argued that England's relative position in the mid-nineteenth century was better than France's as regards the percentage of the population receiving schooling (Green 1990, p. 15) and with regard to adult literacy (p. 25). And of course, noticeable by its absence is any discussion of the arguments of E. G. West that we've already come across, as he thoroughly catalogued the extent of working-class education without the state and how the state intervened to eliminate it. The point is that if governments got involved in education not for benign reasons but for reasons of social control, as they argue, then in order to do this it seems likely that they had to undermine both the efforts of working-class people themselves and of outside philanthropy (see, e.g. Green 1993, Whelan 1996). But Carr and Hartnett (1996), in apparent agreement with these concerns, note that one of the impediments of 'the development of a national system of education' in the nineteenth century was 'the belief that stateprovided education would undermine the moral responsibility of individual parents for the education of their children and so replace self-reliance by state dependency' (p. 80). However, in their view such 'self-reliance' conjures up negative images of 'excessive individualism' (p. 80), and is, it turns out, directly counter to their favoured notions of deliberative autonomy and democracy. I don't think they are right about this. If this 'self-reliance' was at least in part 'community self-help' - which seems plausible - and if it was supplemented from outside the poorer communities by philanthropy, as our sources suggest, then it is clear that state intervention historically would have had the effect of displacing activity which was desirable on democratic grounds. We can note in this connection how Samuel Smiles regretted the title of his best-selling book Self-Help because this led to it being judged as 'a eulogy of selfishness', but that this was the 'very opposite of what... the author intended it to be ... the duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbours' (Smiles 1866, p. xii). This historical case suggests that state provision and funding could have undermined desirable aspects of a democracy. Hence we argue that moving to the private alternative could actually enhance democracy, and not undermine it. The superiority of private schools case Carr and Hartnett draw upon Professor Amy Gutmann's work, as we note below. But we can use her work to raise further questions about their argument. Her case is simple. She points out that, by implication, a necessary condition for schools to bring democratic education to young people is that

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they are able to perform adequately, with adequate resources, and so on. She notes that many state schools clearly do not reach these adequate standards at present, and that there is a 'seductive logic' about the argument that market incentives could make them improve to the standards of better private schools: The idea of empowering all parents to choose among schools for their children is in this sense democratic: it increases the incentive for schools to respond to the market choices of middle-class and poor as well as rich parents. (Gutmann 1987, p. 65) She takes this argument no further, having dismissed the arguments for even 'so-called' markets on what seem to be rather weak grounds, which we might assume would apply even more strongly to real markets and the private alternative.16 However, again it is at least a possibility that markets in education could be democratically preferable to state schools if they simply perform a better educational job. In which case, even the purely 'selfish' choices of parents for these private educational settings would better fit democratic impulses, if these were better able to deliver the democratic curriculum! To support this case, we could review evidence showing the superiority of private over public schools, or of the way competition between state schools improves standards (suggesting that competition in the marketplace might be even better). I am rather cautious about making too much of the existing evidence, for all the reasons that were stressed in the Introduction to this book. For I am not convinced that high achievement on government examinations and low truancy rates are necessarily indicators of high education quality. And of course at best the evidence can only show how the private sector is doing currently, as it competes with a huge near-monopoly state sector, with all the disincentives that brings for parents to have their children in private schools. These reasons are why, I'll repeat, I would rather make a philosophical case for a private alternative which doesn't exist anywhere as yet. However, given these caveats, there is still plenty of evidence which does point to the superiority of private schools - in developing as well as developed countries. Let's look at some of the evidence from the developing world.17 First, there is the important work by World Bank economist Emmanuel Jimenez and sociologist Marlaine E. Lockheed, and other colleagues.18 Writing about the case in Thailand, the researchers conduct detailed quantitative analysis using longitudinal data (i.e., data taken over a period of time) and looking for the 'value added' by the school, whether private or public. 'They note that 'An individual's status as a public or private school student is a choice made by student and parent. If this choice is systematically correlated with personal characteristics, there may be sample selection bias' (Jimenez et al 1988, p. 140). So they use advanced statistical techniques to control for this potential bias. When all factors are taken into account, and when social background is controlled for, eliminating this as a possible bias, the researchers conclude that the private schools are, in general, 'more effective and less

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costly' than their public counterparts at improving the mathematical performance of students. Taking their methods on to a broader canvas, the researchers showed that, based on studies comparing private and public education in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines,Tanzania and Thailand, and looking now at mathematics and language, the private school students again, in general, outperformed the public school students. This result, again, held true even when controlling for the potential bias of social class. And again, there was 'preliminary evidence' to suggest that the unit costs in private schools were lower than in the public schools (Jimenez et al 1991, p. 205). In terms of higher education, the economist Estelle James (1991) - previously of the State University of New York, and now at the World Bank - shows that in the Philippines (where 80 per cent of all college and university students are in the private sector) again the private sector 'operates at much lower cost . . . per student than does the public sector', and there is some suggestive evidence to show that this lower cost comes along with higher quality and efficiency. James also makes interesting comments about the superiority of the for-profit universities and colleges compared with their not-for-profit counterparts, which we will take further in Session 5 below. Finally, in terms of public and private schools operating under a statefunded voucher scheme - in the only country where such a voucher scheme was, for a short time at least, given almost free reign - the evidence from Chile is unequivocal. Chile brought in a system of vouchers in 1980, which allowed for these subsidies to be spent at private schools or at the local municipal schools. The evidence shows that the subsidized private schools were more efficient than the municipal schools - employing fewer teachers per pupil and having lower unit costs. Yet they achieved higher test results in mathematics and Spanish.This result holds even when the test scores are adjusted to control for socio-economic status (Larranaga 1997). Rather than Gutmann's acquiescence in the status quo of state education, we suggest that there is considerable evidence (with our usual caveats) to suggest that private education may well be superior to public education in promoting the democratic good of an educated population. .

The 'lurching steamroller' case There is a third case which can be made for the superiority of markets in education to support democracy, a case again which is found in embryo in the writings of Carr and Hartnett. For consider the following very simple-minded argument. Suppose we have a democracy where blacks or gays, say, were in a minority. Would we allow the majority to decide that blacks or gays were not allowed to be educated at all, or only to a low level? It turns out that precisely this sort of scenario does trouble Carr and Hartnett. They note that unlimited democratic control of education could lead to education which was not favourable to democratic expression. Their response is to propose a 'specifically democratic response' to it

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(p. 187).They argue that democratic decision-making must be limited 'in order to prevent educational decisions from being made which would prevent the next generation of citizens from acquiring the knowledge, virtues and dispositions that their participation in the [democracy] requires' (p. 190). They find for their purposes the limits to democratic decision-making that an earlier philosopher, Professor Amy Gutmann (1987) had created. These were her principles of'non-repression' and'non-discrimination'. Non-repression prevents the use of education 'to restrict rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society' (Gutmann 1987, p. 44). Non-discrimination means that 'all educable children must be educated' (p. 45), and in particular, that no child who is 'educable' may be excluded from an education adequate for participation in the democracy. Together, Gutmann argues, these principles 'are necessary and sufficient for establishing an ideal of democratic education' (p. 93). Carr and Hartnett (1996) unreservedly endorse these principles (p. 193). Hence democratic education is protected from the arbitrariness of democratic control by two principled limits on decision-making. But once you have accepted that there are reasons why we might want to limit democratic decision-making, then this has really let the cat out of the bag. For why stop with these two principles only? Enter Friedrich Hayek. This is the first time we have explicitly met Hayek in this book, although, for those who know his writings, he has clearly been a key influence on almost every sentence. He is the 'pro-marketeer' par excellence, who was a major intellectual influence on the market reforms of Thatcherism in the UK and by extension Reaganism in the USA. Indeed, when objectors to markets in education are writing, he and Milton Friedman are thrown together as their two key bete noire figures. In his monumental three-volume work, Law, Legislation and Liberty, (1982) Hayek argues that, although democracy is 'an ideal worth fighting for ... one of the most important safeguards of freedom' (Vol. Ill, p. 5), this does not imply that the democracy should have unlimited power. For it is illegitimate to move from accepting that 'only what is approved by the majority should be binding for all' (p. 6), to argue that everything that is approved by the majority should also be binding for all. It may seem an insignificant step, yet it signals: the transition from one conception of government to an altogether different one... from a system in which through recognized procedures we decide how certain common affairs are to be arranged, to a system in which one group of people may declare anything they like as a matter of common concern and on this ground subject it to these procedures, (pp. 6-7) So Hayek would certainly be happy that Carr and Hartnett have proposed some limits to democratic decision-making, but wonder whether the principles proposed were in fact enough.

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He has three main arguments to suggest that more limits are required. The first points to technical problems with voting, for it is little known that 'different but equally justifiable procedures for arriving at a democratic decision may produce very different results' (p. 35), and voting procedures can sometimes produce results which 'are in fact not desired by a majority, and which may even be disapproved by a majority of the people' (p. 6). It might be worthwhile just giving a taste of the sort of problems which arise here, for until one has encountered them, it might be assumed that these are misgivings of some pedant, not to be taken too seriously if we are concerned with democracy. To illustrate the kinds of problems, let's focus on a small-scale democratic venture, for even in these areas we find graphic examples of things going seriously awry. Suppose that some 'citizen panel' is deliberating on, say, a curriculum for schools in its area. The panel of seven people has reviewed four curriculum proposals put forward by the community. It now moves to the vote. Suppose the preferences of the panel before voting are (most preferred first): A B C D E ¥ G

a b c d a b c d a b c d b c d a b c d a c d a b c d a b

They use a voting method which is a favourite for committees, namely the Borda count method. For the first choice, they award 3 points, second place, 2 points, and so on, down to 0 points for last place. This gives the following positions: c with 13 points. b with 12 points. a with 11 points. d with 6 points. So c is the preferred curriculum for the community. But is it? As it happens, just before they are about to vote, the promoters of d withdraw their proposal. The panellists simply delete d from their list of preferences, and proceed with the vote. So their preferences (just deleting d) are now: A a b c "Babe C a b c "D b c a E b c a ¥ c a b G c a b

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Now, if we do the Borda count process again, we get a completely different result! This time the positions are: a with 8 points b with 7 points c with 6 points That is, c, which was the previous winner is now the least preferred option! There has been a complete reversal of results, although the preferences of those making the decision have not changed in the least. I get two sorts of reactions to this kind of example. First is a disappointment that democracy could be so arbitrary. We thought that voting systems could be relied upon to sensibly aggregate preferences. Now we see the same voting procedure, with the same voters' preferences, producing two completely conflicting results. A second reaction is: so you can contrive examples like this. Big deal! In real life, things are not going to be like this. Actually it is estimated that the simplest form of voting anomaly, the cycle of preferences,19 occurs in genuine political situations about 10 per cent of the time with three options, increasing to 25 per cent of the time with five options, and nearly 40 per cent with seven options (Riker 1982, p. 122).That is, in a national election, cycles of preferences might occur in, say, up to a quarter of all votes. Added together with all the other voting anomalies, and it all seems to become a rather major problem for democracy - if the underlying basis for it can't even be trusted to get at the 'will of the people'. In fact it is even worse than that. In our 'contrived example' above, if we were to investigate why curriculum d was withdrawn, we might find that it was the proposers of curriculum a who had persuaded them. Why would they do that? If they were sophisticated, adroit political people and were aware of the likely preferences of the panel, then it would have been entirely in their interest. For they would be aware that their preferred curriculum a would have come in in third place had d been put forward; with d withdrawn, a is the winner. The voting system is not only arbitrary, it is also open to deliberate and calculating manipulation. On both these counts, the voting system appears unfair. These types of problem have been generalized in Arrow's theorem, which suggests that no voting system can simultaneously satisfy five conditions which would rule out possibilities of similar unfairness occurring. That is, any voting system whatsoever will fall foul of similar difficulties to those observed above. Taking into account these sorts of problems might lead us to be less optimistic about the potential of democracy. (For further details on these issues see Tooley 1995b, Ch. 5.) Secondly, Hayek points to the dangers of 'log-rolling', the Til scratch your back, if you'll scratch mine' process in political bargaining (see Tullock 1976). This process is bound to happen within all political voting circumstances. When it happens, it totally distorts the will of the people. Any person in a democracy, or each organized group, will be prepared to consent even to

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proposals which they think are wrong, if this is the condition needed for the consent of the others. Hayek describes it thus: Each group will be prepared to consent even to iniquitous benefits for other groups out of the common purse if this is the condition for the consent of the others . . . The result of this process will correspond to nobody's opinion of what is right, and to no principles; it will not be based on a judgement of merit but on political expediency. (Hayek 1982, Vol. Ill, p. 9) Log-rolling distorts the political process, to arrive at outcomes which are not necessarily desirable and can be exceedingly harmful to the democracy at large. Finally, Hayek gives an argument for limits to democratic control on the grounds of political selfishness. He argues that there is: no more reason to believe in the case of the majority that because they want a particular thing this desire is an expression of their sense of justice, than there is ground for such a belief in the case of individuals. In the latter we know only too well that their sense of justice will often be swayed by their desire for particular objects, (p. 7) Individuals are taught to 'curb illegitimate desires', and when they don't, authority is there to restrain them. Political majorities, however, are not taught to be 'civilized' in this way, and hence require restraints regarding what they may legitimately have power over. On these three grounds Hayek concludes that while one must still value democracy, 'Only limited government can be decent government... a single omnipotent "legislature" . . . is wholly incapable of pursuing a consistent course of action, lurching like a steamroller driven by one who is drunk' (Hayek 1982, Vol. Ill, p. 11). We can see that this sort of argument could inform democratic deliberations in society. Perhaps education is one of those areas which will be particularly subject to log-rolling, or to the selfish desires of particular interest groups? Perhaps this is an area in which agreement will be hardest to reach, and minorities most vulnerable or most easily influenced? Perhaps Gutmann's principles will not be enough to protect the education system from corruption, distortion or complacency? These kinds of considerations could lead to a decision to insulate as far as possible education from the reach of over-ambitious democratic control, from the reach of the 'lurching steamroller'. In combination, I suggest that the 'historical' case, the superiority of private schools case and Hayek's case, could be powerful inputs into the debate on the virtues of democracy. If state provision displaces voluntary community self-help and altruism, if markets in education can better deliver the entitlement education for democracy, and if greater democratic control

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brings the danger of selfish corruption of the political process, then in order to defend democracy, markets in education would be a better bet. Markets in education could be endorsed very much on democratic grounds. An argument cannot be made for democratic control of education. I am pleased to note that one of the philosophers I noted as a critic in the equality debate above - Harry Brighouse - seems to agree with me on this one, pretty much for some of the reasons given above. He notes that: Individuals have certain rights (both to aid and to non-interference) which protect their interests, and which may not be justly violated even by democratic decisions... Children are not our political equals. Placing their education in the sphere of democratic discretion would give full members of society (adults) discretion over the conditions in which prospective members develop. Rights protect people's power over themselves, or distribute rights over circumstances they share with others: but rights over children protect power over others who lack reciprocal powers. The fundamental concerns, when thinking about the procedures governing education, are not democratic rights (or parental rights), but children's developmental interests. (Brighouse 1998, pp. 150-1) So democratic control of education cannot be an argument for state intervention in education. The private alternative is not susceptible to this critique. Nor is it susceptible to the critique that it should be heavily regulated in order to provide an adequate 'education for democracy' for all. So with democracy eliminated on both counts as a justification for the state to intervene in education, where does this leave proponents of the state? In our discussions of education democracy we've suggested that any other attempt to impose higher-order values on the curriculum would come up against a parallel type critique. And we've eliminated equity as a desire for state intervention too. The undesirability of educational choice and the information problem aren't serious contenders either as an argument against markets in education. There would seem to be two final problems for those against markets in education. The first is accountability. Professor Christopher Winch argues: 'The neo-liberal agenda has to be argued against and replaced with a democratic agenda of accountability' (Winch 1996, p. 147). If it can't be democratic control, then where is accountability going to come from? And we need, above all, accountability in something as important as education. Second, there are serious misgivings about profit, a sine qua non of the education market as we have defined it. Surely the profit motive will undermine everything desirable about education? Surely for-profit education is an oxymoron? These are the subjects for the next, and final, session.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

To use the left's favourite epithets to describe him. Appendix B to the Crick Report, QCA 1998. The philosopher 'called up' in this case is Cohen 1971, p. 3. As noted, the philosopher is Mill ([1861] 1972b), pp. 307-8. 7foW.,ch.8. /&«*., p. 300. 76/d.,p.303. /te/.,p.304. 7foW.,p.308. The philosopher called up this time is Graham 1987, p. 21. Ibid. The called-up philosopher is Lively 1975, p. 112. A small fear occurs to me as I edit this - that perhaps the neat-and-tidy brigade will rather like my PPC and start campaigning for something like it. One of their number, after all, has argued for 'licensing parents' (LaFollette 1980, pp. 182-97), and defended his argument against critics (LaFollette 1981, pp. 181-3). See Frisch 1981, pp. 173-80. Perhaps I should keep my mouth shut about these ideas? Professor John White - who was my PhD supervisor - and I have debated these issues on many occasions, and I have argued against his position in Tooley 1995b, ch.5. A selection from the ubiquitous examples include Green (1991), Hillcole Group (1991), Ball (1990a & b, 1993),Ranson (1993,1994), White (1988),Whitty (1989). For why they are weak grounds, see Tooley 1998. For review of the evidence for the USA, see Coulson 1999, pp. 279-86. Coulson suggests again that this evidence shows the relative superiority of private schools, even when criticisms of some of the major work is taken into account. Jimenez et al 1991; Jimenez et al 1988. Where there are three candidates, A, B, and C, and three voters x, y, z. Voters preferences are:

x:ABC y:BCA z:CAB Looking at which candidates are preferred, we find that A beats B (for A is preferred over B by voters x and z) and B beats C (preferred by x and y). So if A beats B, and B beats C, we'd expect A to beat C, no? In fact C beats A (preferred by y and z). So we have a cycle of preferences, with A beats B beats C beats A. Any of the options chosen, then, will be completely arbitrary.

Session 5 Accountability

PROLOGUE Central government in the UK has it in for the local education authorities (LEAs).lrThe Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) is seeking to question their power at every turn. If LEAs hadn't been invented, they say, we certainly wouldn't have invented them. I think this LEA-bashing is all a bit unfair. In this chapter I am going to turn the tables on the DfEE. If the DfEE hadn't been invented, would anyone seek to invent itl The London Borough of Hackney has been a thorn in the side of Labour, while in opposition and now in government. As I write, the final chapter in this sorry saga for the children of north London is being written. Hackney's failing services to schools are being contracted out to the private education company, Nord Anglia pic - the first education company to be listed on the Stock Exchange in the UK, chaired by the ebullient Kevin McNeany, 'education's first millionaire' (Times Educational Supplement, 25 June 1999, p. 7). Hackney was the first local education authority to be categorized as failing by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, the no-nonsense Chris Woodhead.The government demanded improvement and sent in a task force. School Standards Minister Stephen Byers, commenting on the publication of the interim report on Hackney's improvement, noted that 'no-one should be in any doubt that there is still much more that needs to be done to fully support the children of Hackney. At long last there is a real prospect of the local authority's statutory duties being discharged' (DfEE Press Release, 23 January 1998). But Hackney didn't improve enough, and was failed again by the inspectors. The management consultancy company KPMG was sent in to assess what could be done and private companies invited to tender for the services, resulting in the 'win' for Nord Anglia, although some might call it more of a poisoned chalice than a victory. It is the first education company to be recruited by the government in this way, under legislation included in the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act.

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But it is not just Hackney that the Labour Government has got it in for. Talk to any director of education (if you can find out who he or she is, given the multiplicity of fancy titles they have taken on of late) in an LEA, and you'll feel their uncertainty about the future. And just because they're paranoid, doesn't mean to say that the government really isn't out to get them. For talk to officials at the DfEE and their frustration with the anti-educational or inefficient practices of the local authorities will soon rise to the surface. A recent straw in the wind was the 'naming and shaming' - in yet another government league table - of those local authorities which spend far too much of public funds on central administration - and certainly more than other more prudent authorities. So we had the average figure for England of £97 per pupil held back from schools for local authority administration. But an 'excessive' £227 per pupil was the figure in Manchester, compared to the 'modest' £35 per pupil in Oxfordshire. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was especially held up for judgement; its administration costs of £192 per pupil made it the highest-spending London borough (Times Educational Supplement, 25 June 1999, p. 23). But this was just the latest of a series of attacks on LEAs by central government. On 10 February 1998, the DfEE's press machine blasted: 'GOVERNMENT ORDERS INVESTIGATION INTO £142 MILLION TAKEN FROM SCHOOLS FOR LOCAL AUTHORITY RED TAPE - BYERS'. Here it was revealed that over £142 million is being taken from local education budgets to fund 'Service Strategy and Regulation' (SSR). This spending is in addition to the costs of administration - a budget held back from schools to cover costs which an authority would need to incur even if it had no direct operational management responsibility for the education service. Stephen Byers again commented: The prime responsibility for raising standards rests with schools themselves. They need to be given the tools to do the job.Teachers and books must come before committee meetings and red tape ... why does Essex with a total education budget of £418 million spend £6.4 million on SSR whilst Nottinghamshire with a total education budget of £407 million spend £2.3 million? He went on: 'Today marks the end of the secret garden surrounding education spending. Teachers and parents have a right to know where money for schools is being spent.' And he spelled out the Labour Government's approach to LEAs: 'Wherever possible spending decisions should rest with schools.' This was the signal for the government to move towards what became known as its 'Fair Funding' reform, devolving budgets to schools away from LEAs. In a delicious irony, Byers commented that 'We want delegation to all schools to be as close as we can get to the level of budget management currently applying in the GM sector'. But abolishing the 'GM sector' - the grant-maintained schools which were a Thatcherite invention, in which all funds were devolved to schools which balloted to opt out of LEA control - was one of the first acts of the new Labour Government. Never mind, it seems they had to do that for

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internal party political reasons (the GM sector was unpopular with socialists because it led to some schools being much better than others). So they decided to get rid of the GM schools but make all schools as nearly as possible to be like them. The DfEE's dissatisfaction with LEAs was made abundantly clear in the insistence that each one had to prepare detailed Education Development Plans and get these approved by the government, and an LEA Code of Practice was published (the former legislated for in the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act, the latter published on 25 March 1998). All aimed at getting LEAs 'to help and challenge schools in their local areas to raise standards across the board'. Moreover, as we have seen, LEAs were, for the first time, under the Labour Government to be included in the Ofsted inspection regime, with the support of the Audit Commission, under a five-year inspection cycle. Finally, there were suggestions that the private sector in any case could do it all better. An invitation to tender for companies interested in bidding for failing LEA services was issued at the beginning of 1999; apparently there were over 300 expressions of interest from optimistic new educational entrepreneurs, a list whittled down to ten companies to be on the 'approved list' eventually invited to tender. Clearly, high-powered people in central government are having severe doubts about LEAs. Surely, voices are saying, there is a better route to ensuring quality educational provision for all? Again, in another delightful irony for us policy analysts, the Conservatives are apparently re-positioning themselves under their new spokeswoman for education, Theresa May MP, as the friend of LEAs (Times Educational Supplement, 25 June 1999, p. 7). Far be it from me to simply follow fashion, but I also want to side with the LEAs on this one. But perhaps my reasons are different. What I object to is that the DfEE has been able to get away with this sanctimonious inquisition into LEA affairs, and in doing so has created enough noise and diversion that no one seems to have had the nerve to turn the spotlight on them. Not any more. To paraphrase the ex-education minister Stephen Byers: Today marks the end of the secret garden surrounding central government education spending. Teachers and parents have a right to know where money for schools is being spent.' Let's go back to those spending figures again. Isn't it terrible that £97 per pupil is held back from schools just for LEA administration? Think what that means in terms of extra teachers or computing facilities! A typical secondary school, with a thousand pupils, could have an extra £97,000, enough for three or four extra highly-qualified teachers, or an extra 200 networked computers. One can hear the politicians tut-tutting with disapproval. It might come as a mild surprise then to know that, once we take the DfEE's own administrative budget for schooling and throw in all the other aspects of central government's expenditure related to schooling, through its various agencies, we can estimate a figure of about £45

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per pupil being held back centrally, before any local authority, let alone any school, gets a look-in.2 Central government may itself be 'withholding' from schools half of the per-pupil amount that LEAs hold back in administration costs. So we can turn the tables on central government. Is it giving us value for money? What do we need the DfEE (and the other central agencies) for? Could we use these funds in better ways elsewhere? Here's a modest proposal to address these questions. All of these central government costs should be devolved to schools under a new reform 'Even Fairer Funding'. Schools can then decide which, if any, of the central government's services they wish to buy back, and the DfEE will have to demonstrate that it is offering 'best value', seeking the custom of schools in competition with private companies and (why not?) efficient LEAs. Again, to echo the wise words of Stephen Byers, 'Wherever possible spending decisions should rest with schools'. Once where funds are being spent is made transparent in this way, then some of the peculiarities of spending currently in the system might be eliminated - such as the fact that the Standards and Effectiveness Unit, that newlycreated division of the DfEE directed by Professor Michael Barber, now produces schemes of work in Science, ICT, History, Geography, and Design and Technology (DfEE and Ofsted 1999, p. 36). (What business has the government got in publishing, by many accounts, somewhat indifferent schemes of work, when there are so many excellent publishing companies already in the market?) To British readers this will sound very familiar, as exactly the proposals the DfEE is putting forward for LEAs. Now why wouldn't that be a sensible way forward? I'm sure the DfEE would find one fundamental objection to this proposal. And that wouldn't be just that employees would lose their jobs and bureaucrats their empires. It would be a reason that would probably gain a sympathetic ear from the public at large, and certainly from the academic educationalists whose arguments we have been grappling with in the course of this book. And a pointer to the objection is contained in my phrase above 'the DfEE will have to demonstrate ...'. For to whom could it 'demonstrate'? To whom could it be accountable? This is the key underpinning assumption as to why we need a body like the DfEE. Accountability stops there. And accountability is absolutely essential in education. Indeed, dragging us back to our unfolding argument in this book, accountability is the key remaining objection as to why we can't leave education to the private alternative. There must be accountability, and markets can't provide that. Can't they? Let's get back to etymology for a moment. My Concise Oxford Dictionary has the following:

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Accountable: a. bound to give account, responsible (for things, to persons ...); explicable; Account n. 1. reckoning of debit and credit, in money or service; Clearly there is nothing in these definitions which says that they can't be met with in markets. What is said by those who object to the private alternative being left to its own devices, and who want to justify having the DfEE and other central agencies (and of course the long-lost justification for having LEAs in the first place), is that we need in education some giving of account, some reckoning of the services offered, to the political process.What we need in education is political accountability. The adjective usually gets dropped - for instance in the words of Professor Christopher Winch whom we quoted at the end of Session 4: 'The neoliberal agenda has to be ... replaced with a democratic agenda of accountability' (Winch 1996, p. 147). There's a danger in dropping the adjective however, because then the argument is too easily won by opponents of the private alternative. Of course the market can't be politically accountable, but this doesn't mean that it can't be accountable in other meaningful and valuable senses. The question then is: are these other senses of accountability enough in terms of education, or do we need something more - the political variety? Of course, if we're stuck in the rut of our everyday thinking about education-asstate-schooling, then it is obvious why we need political accountability, simply because of the old adage 'He who pays the piper calls the tune'. The state pays, so of course the delivery of education must be accountable to the state. But throughout this book we have progressively broken that link between state funding and education. If the state is not paying, then is there any other reason why we would need to be accountable to the state? So what are the other 'meaningful and valuable' senses of accountability? Let's see how they work in the case of food. My brother buys some food from Safebury's for his children, and discovers that the eggs have gone bad. This is an extremely rare experience, first, because of the accountability he has in terms of the right of 'exit', as we discussed in the session on Choice, and the effect this has on the supermarket chain. For Safebury's knows that if, on a couple of occasions, the customer gets bad food off the shelves, then he won't return, but he'll patronize one of their equally-good competitors, who would love to have his custom. So they are accountable to him without knowing anything about him, without even knowing that he shops at their store, simply by virtue of their wanting him - or anyone like him- to continue to shop at their store. Next, on those very rare occasions when this simplest, yet profoundly powerful, form of accountability has failed to deliver the goods, he does then have the second form of accountability which Safebury's offers - their explicit guarantee. (This form of guarantee is not 'exit' but nor is it 'voice' either, in the terminology of Albert Hirschmann (1970)). He can return the eggs and get his money back, as well as a free packet of eggs for his trouble. So he's not out of pocket and not out of eggs either, and he won't have to go to any authority higher than the check-out girl or boy either, to boot.

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But suppose his children had eaten the eggs, and had got sick as a result. Then he is offered a third level - or set of levels - of accountability. He can write to, or visit, the customer service manager in the local store, who will no doubt offer some compensation as a result of this inconvenience. (This now is the 'voice' option.) And if, for whatever reason, this response is unsatisfactory, my brother can go progressively higher (all sub-parts of the third level of accountability) to the store manager, the regional and finally national (or international, as the industry continues to develop) Customer Services Department, and they will be even more apologetic and generous as a result of his inconvenience. I even knew a guy once who (successfully) complained to the manufacturer Mars on the grounds that the legend on the chocolate packaging read 'Money back if not fully satisfied', and he quite reasonably pointed out that he hadn't been 'fully satisfied' because he'd wanted another bar straight away. If, almost per impossible, all these mechanisms of accountability fail to satisfy over the eggs complaint, then my brother does have recourse to the fourth level of accountability, to the legal courts to sue for compensation for breach of contract - that is, moving away from the specifics of the food itself to the general legal framework in which we live. Now, these four levels of accountability which are there in the market can usefully be compared to those found under the systems of political accountability we have for schooling. Let's consider the case prior to Thatcher's government first, prior to the 1980 Education Act in fact. (This system would be similar to that found in those many countries now which have not introduced 'parental choice' reforms.) Again, if one of my brother's children is receiving schooling which is unsatisfactory - say he is not being taught to read properly - then hisfirstport of call is equivalent only to the third level of accountability that he would get in the Safebury's case - and they involve the necessity of using 'voice', which might put some, if not many, people off using them. He can talk to the class teacher, and if not satisfied can go to the headteacher. In the case of schools prior to 1980, it would be most unlikely that schools would listen to such parental complaints - after all, it was schools which knew best about children, not parents. So although there are equivalent levels, he would unlikely be satisfied by what was offered, unlike in the food example. From there he could complain to the local education authority, who would be even less likely to hear the complaint, for the same kind of reason. And under sections 68 and 99 of the 1944 Education Act3 he could complain directly to the Secretary of State for Education. But he or she would be receiving thousands of letters a month in this regard, and would be unlikely to give my brother much joy again, in part because of the same reasons that we have been noting all along. There would be the final fourth level, of recourse to the general legal route, but again this was not likely to bring much joy because the courts tended to take the notion that 'LEAs had virtually unfettered discretion' (Harris 1993, p. 131). Prior to Lady Thatcher's reforms, then, only two of the four levels of

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accountability were present, and, because of the weight of the producer interests at the time, completely unlike in the food case, the interests of the parent would not likely be heard. And in any case, they all involve exercising the 'voice' option, which as we've noted might put off the less articulate and politically adroit people. However, there is a level of accountability which is not present in the food case, but which is present in the case of schooling. This is that my brother has a vote. He can vote every four years at his local elections for the councillors who will have education as one of their many and varied responsibilities. Then he can vote, again every four or five years, for his local MR Political accountability in education prior to Thatcher, in other words, has all the above-mentioned disadvantages and offers, as a substitute for the right of exit and the money-back guarantee, the possibility of influence of education through voting. But this is a pretty remote possibility, isn't it? And it is only ever likely to have general purchase, not be concerned with the particulars of my brother's child's schooling deficiency. So at most, in the local elections, one party might be concerned to put more funds into schooling in general, say, or, more likely, have a more expensive equal opportunities policy than another party. But the impact will be pretty marginal. And in any case, because of the way party loyalty works in local elections, and the way responsibilities for education are splintered, a local councillor is hardly likely to fail to get reelected simply because of the low quality of schooling. In fact, this may well be a platform on which he could get re-elected. Parties can always blame central government for lack of resources, or social deprivation for the poor quality and outcomes of their schools. That hardly seems like a suitable sacrifice for not having the exit and guarantee options. And voting at the national level is hardly any better. One can hardly think of one's vote as being directly even about education in general, let alone the state of one's child's particular school.There is so much else one, and everyone else, is voting about - the economy, hospitals, defence, welfare, the environment, or just simply boredom with the existing government - that education just gets somewhat lost in the fray, in the political free-for-all. And you contribute if you are lucky to electing an MP who then goes to Parliament, and he or she may or may not be in the party which has a majority in Parliament, and hence which may or may not form the Executive in government. When in power, government can always blame others for low standards in schools in general (never mind your child's particular school) including the local authorities, teacher unions and others. So when re-election time comes around, any individual MP is highly unlikely not to be re-elected because of the state of education, and it is almost possible to believe that a government could fall because schools were in bad shape. It all seems like we've been sold a pass, if we've exchanged those simple and easy accountability mechanisms, which we find in shopping and in all other areas of our lives where markets dominate, for this cumbersome, opaque and ineffective political 'accountability'. Lady Thatcher's reforms did sway it all away from the producers somewhat - we could say that she started the process towards what I'm inclined to call

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genuine accountability, rather than political accountability - by introducing parental choice of schools in the 1980 Education Act (s. 6), with rights of appeal (although the committee hearing the appeals legally had a majority from the LEA - based on the odd rationale that 'if that appeals procedure is to bind a local authority it must contain members of that authority'4). This reform was supplemented by the provisions of the 1988 Education Reform Act, which brought 'open enrolment' for schools, ensuring that an individual school couldn't refuse to admit a pupil on the grounds that it was full (at least not up to the limits of their physical capacity), and per capita funding, so that funds for each individual child followed the child to the school of his or her parents' choice, albeit somewhat imperfectly. With these reforms, we can see that the first level of market accountability is brought in - to a certain limited extent. The limitations of this are important to stress, which takes us back to our discussion of why Thatcher's reforms, important though they were as a foundation for moving forward, didn't actually bring markets into education. For in the food case, the exit option means several things which are not present in the case of schools post-1980. Most importantly, the supermarket is, in most areas, one of several competing chains of supermarkets (and because this is true in most areas, it can't afford to let its standards drop in those areas where it is the only chain operating). So competition is real for my brother's custom. In the case of schools operating under the choice system, as we have noted already, the school can be somewhat worried about losing my brother's custom - but if it is the good school in the neighbourhood, it will know that there will be plenty of others apart from my brother who want the place, so can afford to be somewhat complacent about losing him. And if it is one of the less good schools, then it may worry a bit more, but no one is likely to have their jobs on the line through losing customers - such a school will always get funded, however badly they perform. So competition is there to a very limited extent. And in any case, all the 'competing' schools will be under the same LEA, so will be under the same leadership, again differentiating this from the supermarket case, where the competitors will be from completely different businesses. There is also the lack of a price mechanism working here. Parents aren't that involved in the decision, because it is not really their money which is being spent or mis-spent. Finally, perhaps a small point, but nonetheless reducing the psychological impact somewhat, the supermarket knows it will suffer immediately if it loses a customer, whereas the school will only suffer in a year or so. But notice that while this first level of accountability has been, albeit imperfectly, introduced by Lady Thatcher's reforms, the second level - the money-back (or its proxy - a further free-place) guarantee - is still completely absent. When politicians and their civil servants pronounce on the importance of political accountability, it all seems to sound a bit self-serving. It doesn't seem to me that it is worth much, and certainly not as much as the genuine accountability of the market. Of course, it might be argued that the first level of accountability (the 'exit'

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level) could be made more like real markets, with genuinely competing suppliers that will genuinely have the threat of going out of business if they fail to keep customers and raise standards (as we might have, for instance, if education companies like the Edison Project and Nord Anglia pic were to be in competition for the same schools, as we'll discuss later). And it might be argued that the money-back guarantee (or its proxy) could also be brought in under the state system (indeed Michael Barber may have been edging towards such an idea in his The Learning Game, as we shall also see later). So that then we could have all the market accountability levels and the political accountability - so that would be much better. However, if that was ever to be the case, and I doubt if the political process could ever bring it in, then the impact of the political accountability would be so marginal as to be immaterial. What those reforms would bring would be all the desirable forms of accountability, and the political one would disappear into irrelevance. So political accountability is not needed in education, once the link between funding and provision has been broken. This reduces the need for a body like the DfEE, and frees up considerably more resources to go back into the hands of parents for their children's education. But it doesn't completely dissolve the need for something like the DfEE - for there could be other functions which may still remain once this facet is removed. The DfEE itself, for example, says that its Aim is: To give everyone the chance, through education, training and work, to realise their full potential, and thus build an inclusive and fair society and a competitive economy. (DfEE 1999, p. 9) To achieve its overarching Aim, the department has three central objectives, two of which are of concern to us as far as education is concerned (the third is about helping people without jobs back into work): 1. Ensuring that all young people reach 16 with the skills, attitudes and personal qualities that will give them a secure foundation for lifelong learning, work and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. 2. Developing in everyone a commitment to lifelong learning, so as to enhance their lives, improve their employability in a changing labour market and create the skills that our economy and employers need. These are the two relevant raison d'etre of the DfEE. Most of what they stress under these aims and objectives, however, have already been covered under our earlier discussions. And the same questions are raised about these pronouncements as are raised about any state intervention (including the 'generalizable' questions raised in our discussion of education for democracy, such as: But can't these be better met without the state intervention? And how do you know that they can't be met?). We've said then that ensuring all can have access to education in these broad areas can be achieved without anything like the DfEE intervening, but with our own solution involving a widely inclusive

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net of family, educational entrepreneurs given freedom to devise appropriate and innovative solutions, plus philanthropy. In the same way developing in everyone a commitment to, and love of, learning, both for its own sake and for instrumental reasons for themselves and society, can also better be met through those three mechanisms - and indeed, having state compulsory learning might be somewhat counterproductive. I guess some readers will still be worried about the 'ad hoc' nature of this solution. In Session 4 on democracy I went to town on this issue, showing how fears of ad-hocness from what I unkindly called the 'neat-and-tidy' brigade were really unfounded. Whatever the system, whether market or state, the fact that we live in an imperfect world will ensure the imperfection of the solution. Even if a body like the DfEE is there with an explicit mandate to ensure that all have access to high-quality educational opportunities, you can guarantee that some will slip through this safety net. And nothing suggests that this would be fewer than would slip through the safety net provided by the 'invisible hand' of the solution proposed here. It occurs to me that perhaps in this terminology we could find a way to reassure those who fear the ad hoc solution? (I wonder even if this is why Adam Smith's terminology once caught on so readily?) To the cry that surely somebody has to be concerned with ensuring that all had access to these opportunities, that we can't just leave it to this broad network of agencies, we could say that there is 'somebody' - and he has an invisible hand which will ensure what we desire. However, I'm not sure this will catch on yet, so drop the idea forthwith. But there is another possibility. For those who still hanker after some 'overriding' body, for those who fear that education will suffer as a result of such a body not being there, I've got one further trick up my sleeve.To see how this will work, let us take a step back again from education, to learn some important lessons from other areas. (Don't worry, I'm not going back to supermarkets this time. I'm off to the stock exchange, the pharmacy and the airport, for a change.) If we need an 'overriding' body, do we always have to look to the state to provide it? Charles Murray suggests not. He points out how there are many examples of non-government 'overriding' regulators in other areas of our lives. So for example, to regulate bond ratings, we have two private organizations, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, not government agencies, and 'investors around the world trust these ratings' (Murray 1997, p. 68). These are classic examples of what he calls 'third-party surveillance', private bodies which are tried and trusted to make judgements about a particular sector. And these private bodies already can provide us with greater assurance than can the state. Murray notes that he is 'more impressed by the fact that a medical specialist has passed his boards, conducted by a private professional association, than that he has been granted a licence to practise by the state' (p. 69). We can take these ideas to the extreme, to see whether they are applicable in areas at the limits of human safety, and then return to see how they can be applicable in education. Let's consider, following Murray, two test cases. The first is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the regulating body in the

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USA. Many assume that such a government agency is absolutely essential if we are to have safety in medication and foodstuffs. However, Murray notes how it is 'notoriously slow to approve valuable medications'. Were it to disappear, 'a wide range of new medications' could be developed if the drug companies only knew that they would not 'have to recoup the huge regulatory costs and delays now imposed on them' (p. 69). However, many people don't mind these delays at all, seeing them as a necessary quid pro quo of having safe drugs. And Murray agrees that he is one of those people who are concerned that there should be 'demonstrated safety of a drug' (p. 69). But is there no middle (third?) way between the unregulated market and the state regulatory body? Murray argues that there might be, if such were permitted by government. First he notes that 'there is a profitable pharmaceutical market to be won by unregulated products'. If the various drug companies wish to win that market, 'the industry will need a respected third party to certify its products. In other words, there will be money to be made by setting up a non-governmental counterpart to the FDA (p. 69, emphasis added). There will be potential profits in such an organization. This body, suggests Murray, could come into being as an exact analogue of the medical examinations boards already mentioned - and 'as jealous of its professional integrity' (pp. 69-70). Such an organization - he dubs it the American Drug Federation (ADF) - might work in the following ways: For existing drugs the ADF will certify companies as complying with industry standards of quality control. For new drugs it will issue various kinds of provisional verdicts. It will vouch for some as being safe but still of unproved efficacy. It will say of others that they show evidence of efficacy but have harmful side effects. It will attach a specification of its own limited responsibility (as auditing firms do now), stating that these findings hold true within the limits of the research it has done. (p. 70) Some might think that such a private body would be more open to corruption than a government body. Murray argues the opposite. For the ADF - the private body - has so much more to lose than the FDA - the government agency - if it gets caught out in this way. For if the market stops trusting it, then it will be driven out of business. That is not true at all of the FDA. What Murray notes is that a private sector company would do 'what the FDA should do now: provide an expert third-party assessment of drugs without trying to be omniscient' (p. 70). Our second test case is the regulation of airlines and operation of air traffic control - in the USA both being a federal government responsibility. This offers an example of extreme danger - the 'terrifying possibility' of 'dying in an air crash' (p. 70). It also gives an illuminating example of private and public sector operating side by side. Murray argues that the air traffic control system 'is safe not because but in spite of government control' (p. 71). The technology of the (government-run) air traffic control system is positively 'antiquated', and no (private) airline could possibly hope to get away with such a system. 'It

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is inconceivable that a consortium of airlines given permission by the government to set up its own air traffic control system would let its system fall so far behind the state of the art'. Moreover, it is clear that the airlines themselves 'dread crashes more intensely than any government bureaucrat. They have much more at stake'. This factor alone leads to the suggestion that, if the airline industry were to be allowed self-regulation, then this would certainly not lead to 'looser standards' (p. 71). Murray shrewdly observes, 'Think of the airline that you are now most nervous about flying. Imagine that it remains within the federal regulatory system, while United, Delta, and American Airlines opt out of the federal system, creating a shared code of standards. Which would you fly?' (pp. 71-2). The general gist is that in other areas of our lives, we don't necessarily need government agencies to intervene when we have the possibilities of thirdparty surveillance organizations. Returning to education, we see that similar considerations could all apply. If what we want from an overriding agency such as the DfEE is that there is 'somebody' concerned with high educational standards, or the promotion of higher-order values in the curriculum, then there is no reason why precisely the same sort of private 'third-party surveillance' authorities couldn't be formed, outside of the state. Indeed, the possibility of such 'third-party surveillance' organizations provides a useful counter to those who found the idea of competing chains of education on their own too unstable, too messy. It begins to bring in a kind of neat-and-tidy solution without the state! Just as you have Standards and Poor's or Moody's regulating financial bonds, or a potential ADF regulating Pharmaceuticals, so in the same way you could have, in the USA, an American Council for Quality (ACQ) in education, setting national standards, and only accepting schools and other educational settings - of any form - under its framework if they satisfy various desirable curricular and assessment standards. This body would have so much more to lose than its government equivalent - the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) in the UK if any school or other educational setting under its banner failed to meet its standards, or was admitted on false pretences. So I don't think we can find valid reasons for the DfEE's continued existence within its own Aims and Objectives, and if we really do think that an overriding body is necessary, then there is every reason to believe that the market can provide that too. Is that the end of the case for the DfEE? I think its defenders would have one final set of arguments. They could argue that there are some functions which it - but also the LEAs - could better perform, and which individual schools might prefer they perform. When the Conservative Government first brought in its 'local management of schools' (LMS) reform in the 1988 Education Reform Act - which gave quite considerable (for the time) financial and administrative powers to schools - one came across two sorts of responses. The first, from a new type of entrepreneurial headteacher who was being created, or nurtured, by these

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initiatives, relished the new-found freedoms to innovate and shop around for the best deals that were available. However, there was another reaction which was also common. This was illustrated by the headteacher who said: 'Why should I be bothered to mend the central heating boiler? Why should I be bothered with organizing the window cleaning? I'm here to run a school, not to get bogged down in these trivia.' At the time, I was probably unsympathetic to the latter kind of head, and much more in line with the former. On reflection, however, I think there may be something in what the latter kind was saying. Why should each individual school get involved in the whole host of matters which may not be of interest to them, and which could be far better done, it might be argued, by some central provider? I said this at a conference once, and the reaction made it clear that people assumed I was arguing for a return to LEA (or DfEE) control. They assumed that with this sort of comment I was reneging on my market ideas. Let's see if they are right. Or is there, shall we say, a third way? I've set the scene enough. The focus group is meeting for the last time, and these kind of issues are on the agenda today. Before we turn to them, however, let's be absolutely clear what proportion of funding gets through to schools out of the total amount currently available for education. The figure we come up with will be a useful hook for the discussion that follows. On average the total budget devolved from central government to each LEA in England is £2,625 per student. We add to that the £45 per pupil held back by central government from schools, as noted earlier, to give a total of £2,670 per pupil. But the amount that gets devolved to schools is £2,162 per pupil, once spending by LEAs on special educational needs, school improvement (advisory services), transport, and other non-devolved budgets are subtracted.5 That is, about 20 per cent of all available funding is not currently devolved to schools.6 The question then to be asked is, from behind the Veil of Ignorance, would we be willing to have such a large proportion of funding diverted away from our educational settings?

FOCUS GROUP In which, in our final session, we are to mop up some remaining issues about education, including looking at the issue of accountability. Our final session began after tea, after our long afternoon break. Jack began: 'Suppose parents using the Centres of Learning (or schools, thinking in terms of what's beyond the Veil) were asked to decide whether or not some proportion of the budget - perhaps even up to 20 per cent - was to be given to an organization with authority over their school. Would they agree, knowing, of course that this would mean up to 20 per cent less funds per student would result?'

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We deliberated on this for a while, while Jack was away on a task, and eventually we came up with six possible reasons why this might be desirable although we weren't at all sure whether we would want as much as 20 per cent to be kept back. But in any case, we had a solution to that problem too. I reported back the summary of our discussions to the group when Jack returned. The first set of reasons concerned quality control. It was clear, we thought, that a 'head office' could probably better ensure quality control, rather than leaving this to the individual Centre of Learning (or school). An individual centre would perhaps be tempted to inflate how well it was doing, if it was not subjected to thorough inspection from outside. Also, an individual centre might not have knowledge of, or access to, the best ways forward in terms of quality control, so would benefit from the greater expertise of head office. And an individual centre might not know what could be expected of it in terms of standards, so would benefit from the superior knowledge of head office on this too. Moreover, having head office keeping an eye on quality, of course, would also assist with ensuring that all children and young people especially the disadvantaged - enjoyed the same high standards as others. Behind the Veil, of course, this was of great importance. So the head office could ensure that quality was consistent across all of the centres within its jurisdiction. Second, we came up with a set of reasons around the idea of 'scale'. A head office could ensure some economies of scale, providing some services that individual centres would not choose to, or could not afford to, fund, but which might be essential for the sake of quality and equity. This would clearly include funding research and development into better ways of teaching and learning. Individual centres would not be able to have the resources to fund these on their own - and yet research and development into better ways of teaching and learning would be hugely beneficial. The head office could also help the centre in disseminating best practice between the centres under its jurisdiction, whether or not it was the result of such research and development. Also it was possible that individual centres would not necessarily be able to fund all their required specialist learning supporters or teachers, so economies of scale could be found by having groups of centres clustered together, using technological solutions where appropriate. Moreover, some children may have particular 'special needs' which could not be provided for in a cost-effective manner in an individual centre. So these might also be best sorted out in a head office. Similarly, a head office could have more clout with suppliers than an individual centre, so bargain down prices. It could also have a much greater network of contacts in further education and amongst employers, so be able to better assist individual centres in helping young people into further opportunities, and in finding projects for them to cut their teeth on in the centre. And it could also have a much greater network of contacts amongst the six levels of 'teachers' that we had isolated, especially in terms of the rarer levels. Third, there were issues around planning of supply. Such a central authority could help plan supply of places and teachers, looking at evidence of demographic change over a larger area than an individual centre, and perhaps

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being able to move resources around between centres as these were required. Fourth, there were issues around equity not covered already in terms of quality control. We also would want a head office to be organizing and funding mechanisms such as a student loan scheme, or cross-subsidizing places, or providing direct subsidies or free places to students. And a head office could probably have a better network of contacts to help with philanthropic funding of places too. Fifth, we thought a head office might have the edge on strategic planning, being able to even employ specialized people to think ahead of the possibilities and challenges which might face the centre, and how best to innovate to cope with change. This would all be linked to the research and development aspect, of course. Sixth, if any aspect of the centre's workings were under some state compulsion or regulation, then such a central organization could also be concerned with ensuring that such statutory obligations were met. For each of these six reasons, it would seem that parents wanting the best for their children would not object to some central authority at all. And from behind the Veil, we would have to insist on some of the six, for the sake of equity, not knowing to which sort of family we might return. So some percentage of the budget could legitimately not be used within each individual centre. Now, as regards the 20 per cent aspect, we did have a solution to find out if that was the best level - however, at this point Jack interrupted and guided us to what he said was a more important question, one he had prepared earlier on the flip-chart. It read: Authorities: local or national? Decentralized or centralized? 'So you've got these authorities over your schools. Now should they be decentralized, or centralized? Should they be sending their funds to local or central government, I mean, authorities?' We hadn't come to any definite conclusion about that, but suspected that it would most likely be an authority which worked nationally or internationally - that would seem to be the way the world was moving, towards globalization, we said. But it would also have regional headquarters. So in a sense, local and national or global. Jack wrote next to 'national': 'international?' And by the side of that he wrote in brackets 'EU? UN?' We didn't know whether these were initials for names of education companies beyond the Veil, or little words in a foreign language. In any case, they were clearly for his consumption, not ours. What was important, we stressed, was that the central authority would do all the things we required and do them well and cost-effectively, which was why we were pleased with our proposed solution to the '20 per cent question' - but again he waved us to wait, and to consider another question he had prepared earlier: Should the (local or national) authority employ teachers?

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We had to admit, we hadn't thought about that either. (Jack scribbled to include 'international' between the parenthesis too.) To us, teachers would probably be employed differently for each of the six different levels. The first level - the inspirer and motivator - would probably be self-employed, and be on a contract to various media and educational concerns. The seminar leader could well be the peripatetic philosopher type that Winston had fantasized about being and would again be self-employed. The 'human touch' teachers would probably be best employed by the centre itself, and so on. But it was getting close to the end and Jack seemed so caught up in the novelty and importance of his question, that we didn't want to disturb his train of thought. So we said that we thought it would be best if the central authority employed them, and he smiled, made a note of this on the flip-chart and we left it at that. Then Jack had begun introducing the 'final, brief topic' for our deliberations. So he didn't get a chance to hear of our solution to the '20 per cent question'. For the record, it was pretty obvious really. As there would be competing companies running the centres and zones, competition would force them to keep their central overheads as low as possible. Rather than being 20 per cent of total funding per centre, we were sure that the figure could be dramatically reduced as competition did its best. After all, if you were the manager of a centre and your head office wanted 20 per cent of all your income for overheads, you'd soon try to move your centre elsewhere. Likewise, if you were a parent and saw 20 per cent of your fees being siphoned away to head office - even taking into account the need to subsidize places and so on - then you'd probably start looking elsewhere too. Competition could ensure that central administration was kept on its toes as much as the centres themselves. Anyway, Jack was away on the final topic. We had hardly any time left, and would only touch on this. But this really went to the heart of why we had all been invited here in the first place. He put on the final video for us to watch. It was all about schools beyond the Veil. Some such schools, funded by government, weren't doing well. So some in England and in America were being taken over by private education companies. They still got funds from the state, but managed everything else themselves. Everything started well, and the commentator's voice was racy. We saw how one of the companies moved in and invested heavily in the school, in technology and making the school more comfortable. Students at first enjoyed the new regime, and seemed to be performing better than expected. They bunked off from school less. But then the commentator's voice changed, and the video cut to groups of adults - teachers - standing by the school gates, waving placards denouncing the chairman of the company, the prime minister and other people whose names we didn't recognize. Apparently some of their number had been given the sack and all the teachers had come out on strike in sympathy. Eventually the company took the teachers back and all was happy again. The commentator concluded with the comment that 'the profit motive can be tamed, the evils of profit can be kept at bay'. Jack pulled down his sleeves and took his jacket from the back of the chair.

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'So this brings us to the heart of why we convened this group. We wanted to know what you would make of it all, from first principles, and without prejudice. Your views have been very interesting to us. We've looked at many areas which have implications for the whole issue, talking about the very nature of education, about the fundamental issues of equality and democracy, choice and accountability. Some things you said were predictable, others less so. I'm looking forward to writing up your deliberations, and reporting on them to my superiors. I've got tons of great data' (he pointed to the pile of flipchart papers). 'But this final issue remains: would you mind your schools Centres of Learning as you call them - being run for profit? Or would you prefer that profit had no part to play in the matter? I've shown you the video, illustrating some of the worries back home, as it were. What do you think?' We mused on this for a bit. Jack was anxiously looking at his watch, apologizing that he had to go and make an urgent phone call. Ruth and Winston summarized the message from the video, that the profit motive in education would mean that a company might put the needs of its shareholders before those of teachers. Joel was about to put forward an alternative case, but Jack was busy writing their points on the flip-chart and asked Ruth to clarify a couple of the issues raised. And then time was up. Jack held out his hands. 'So, not so keen on profit, then? Look, it's been great, really great. I'm sorry it's all been a bit rushed at the end. But we've got our special dinner tonight - with an extra-special guest who I know you'll be absolutely delighted to meet, and who'll be particularly interested in the things we've been discussing, especially today. He's coming not by rail as you did, but by helicopter! And he's bringing his lovely -1 mean, intelligent - wife too, I hope. I've got to phone and check they know how to get here. Don't want our important visitor stranded in some foggy other place, do we? It'll be a great evening I know.' And he was off, and the focus group was formally over. Back in my room, I dressed for dinner, in the wonderful evening dress that had appeared in my room. Even after doing my hair and make-up, there was still an hour or so before we were due downstairs. Suddenly, there was a quiet knock at my door. Joel entered, resplendent in tuxedo and bow tie. We smiled at each other. 'So who's the special guest, I wonder?' he said. We guessed a few names. Then he asked if I wanted to go for a walk, and so we stepped out together. I said that I thought he'd been very quiet in the last session. 'Yes', he said,'I've been thinking about it all. I've written some parables. About profit. I want to give them to Jack, to see if they'll make him change his mind - because he clearly doesn't like profit, does he? I wonder... I wonder if you could read them sometime, and let me know if they're at all sensible?' I told him, of course, and: why not now? So we sat down, and he pulled out crumpled papers from his pockets. Before I started to read, he said: 'I've written them all about state schools, like we saw on the video. Because that's what we're going back to.' He sounded wistful. 'What I'd ask Jack is: at what point do any of the activities I describe become immoral or unjust?' I read:

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First parable: A trained teacher living near one of the most deprived wards in London recognizes that children are getting a bad deal in the local state schools. Aware of their problems, she invites a couple of disadvantaged children around to her own home on a Saturday, to help them with basic literacy and numeracy. She does this purely from love of children and concern for the poor. Several other parents get to hear of her kindness and ask if she will also help their children - and make sure they come equipped with pencils, notebooks and so on. Her home becomes a buzz of scholarly activity on a Saturday morning, and several young people are helped by her kindness. The parents are full of praise for what she is doing. One local businessman hears of her activities and donates a computer. Other parents ask if their children can be included, but sadly our teacher -V - has to turn them away. She has no room and no more time. Joel interrupted: 'There's no injustice or immorality yet, is there?' How could there be? Of course I would join the parents in praising this woman for her activity, and wish there were more like her, or that the local schools weren't so bad. If there is any injustice, then it comes from the assumption that the state provision is so bad, but nothing to do with what the woman is doing. I continued to read: One day, having turned yet more parents away from her house on a Saturday, saying she just doesn't have the time, a realization comes to her in a dream. Waking up the next morning, she goes to her local church, and persuades the vicar to give her use of the church hall each week, for the whole Saturday. On Monday she persuades a local firm to donate a few computers - which are surplus to their requirements, but by no stretch of the imagination obsolete. She has decided to expand the school! Some of the parents agree to help her supervise the young people and also to clean the church hall and get it ready for the services the next day. And the Saturday school continues in this way for many more weeks, with many more parents and children. Soon the teacher is having to turn other parents away. But her Saturday school is full. She knows she is doing a great work for her community, and parents and children are proud of her and her service, as is the local vicar. That's the end of the first parable. 'Shall I carry on?' I asked. 'Sure, if you want', said Joel. I did and so I read on:

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Second parable: As before, V is helping the poor and disadvantaged. She runs a Saturday school. But it grieves her to have to turn away so many parents - for she cannot possibly take on any more, even with all the help from other parents and now older children. She has another dream. In her dream she starts to feel guilty about turning so many children away. And, for those who are not turned away, she starts to feel guilty that they have to use facilities like the hand-me-down computers unwanted by the local firm. She tries to persuade further donations from other companies, and tries to persuade other friends and colleagues to join her teaching voluntarily on a Saturday, both to no avail. In this way, her dream echoes real life. But then she realizes what she can do. In her dream she sees a way out of her impasse. She wakes up the next morning and sets to work to turn her dream into reality. First, she tells her dedicated parents - those she has known from the beginning, who are now a 'parents' committee' for the Saturday school - in the privacy of her own home, of her dream, that she should expand the Saturday school. But there is only one way of doing this. She can't find any voluntary teaching help, or better donated computers. So she will have to pay for them. She asks: just how much could they afford if she was going to charge fees? One or two said they were quite happy with the way things were and didn't see why she wanted to expand. Others pointed out how selfish that was and that wouldn't it be great if others could benefit from what their own children had! To her surprise, she finds that many would be prepared to spend sums which, although still small, are much greater than she imagined they would have available. Many could afford more, but there are some who, sadly and in privacy, tell her that they couldn't afford anything, or only a small amount. But, doing her calculations, she realizes that her dream could come true. She calculates that if she charges a certain amount for each child, she can have enough to employ a couple of teachers, buy some suitable technology, pay a nominal fee for the hall and provide some subsidized places to those who can't afford the fees. And if, as she anticipates, demand is so great, then she will easily be able to expand at this level of fee for some time to come. Demand is great. Her Saturday school expands, and she decides to open another one, in a nearby community centre. This expands too. And then a third. Joel interrupted: 'Will Jack see any ethical shortcomings now?' I said that clearly he'll think that there is a difference now that fees are being charged, whereas before it was free. But, as those who are too poor are still getting their schooling for free, and the fees are not set very high in any case, genuinely affordable by the families without too much sacrifice, then this would still seem to fit in with what we had decided was acceptable when we

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spoke about equality and equity. So no injustice. Unless of course, as we said in our first session, some parents are getting the school for free, even though really they could afford it. They are deceiving the teacher. But then, the teacher knows them well, and will be able to discern who is pulling a fast one and so the problem shouldn't arise. So, still no ethical shortcomings. So I continued reading: Many parents now ask our teacher to take a further step. They point out that the reason why their children need the Saturday schools so much is because the day schools are so bad. Why doesn't she take the plunge and use her obvious organizational talents to open a day school? But this would have to be more expensive, she protests. And I am not sure you could afford that. We could afford it, we would try. And we could get funds from others. She opens the day school, and the school is a great success. The Saturday schools still continue for those who can't afford the slightly greater fees. V is persuaded by another group of parents in a neighbouring area to open a school there, or to take over the management of a failing state school. She does this. Eventually, she - and her respected and loyal team - gradually become responsible for five, then ten schools. In each case, they move into an area where the schools were either bad or very bad. They drastically improve these, and conditions for all children are improved. V hears much about new ways of teaching and learning, involving new technology, and thinks that this could greatly benefit her set of deprived parents. So she does a business plan and sees that, if investment could be raised to fund some research and development, and then some further investment raised to rationalize some of the facilities within the schools and create extra possibilities, then she could dramatically improve her schools and make them replicable in a way that could increase their potential to reach disadvantaged children - as well as those who are not so disadvantaged now. Raising investment requires a return for the investors. The expansion also requires of her key personnel even greater commitment of time and energy and she thinks that they should be rewarded accordingly. And, why not?, she would also now like some small reward over and above her personal satisfaction. Her business advisers tell her that she can do all of these by setting up a limited company, raising capital from investors with the promise of interest and return in five years, and give her key personnel equity in the company. And looking at the figures from the schools, it can all be done by just slightly increasing the margin that each school gives to the central office - but, and this is the key assumption - this small margin will not decrease in any way the educational effectiveness of what she can offer her students - indeed, they will all be better served by the fruits of this investment.

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'I know Jack will see injustice now' said Joel, butting in, 'But I'm not sure that he should. I mean, if there's nothing worse in the school - and especially if the educational opportunities offered these children are better. If it means that even more children can be reached with high quality educational opportunities, then why should there be anything wrong with making a profit per seT I agreed with him. There was one more parable. I read it: Third parable: Suppose the situation is as it was originally, with the disadvantaged children in the 'sink' schools. And our noble, angelic V is nowhere to be found. Living in her house instead is a hard-nosed, calculating entrepreneur businessman, let's call him W. In everything he does he is purely motivated by self-interest and gain for himself and his family. Now, one of the lessons that entrepreneurs like him often learn in the course of their lives is that every cloud has a silver lining for a businessman. That is, that any disaster or terrible situation creates a potential market. He's the sort of entrepreneur who will hear of an increase in attacks on women and not mourn the rise of rape but see a potentially lucrative market for personal alarms. Joel apologized for the example. I shrugged and read on: He hears of the terrible schools in his district and doesn't mourn the increase in illiteracy: he sees a potentially very lucrative market opportunity. Poor state schools? Great news! he thinks. Here is a market for supplementary schooling. He can see a potentially lucrative return. He employs a local retired teacher as school principal and some other teachers, and creates a Saturday school. Parents coming to the school would see very little, if any, difference between it and the school created by V before. It is in a rented church hall. W knows that parents don't have much money, so he has to keep costs low. He knows that they will connect with the principal far better than him, so makes sure it is someone personable and attractive to them, and he himself keeps a low profile. He is also rather calculating about the poverty in his area. He knows that his school will be less threatening to local politicians and school principals if they know that he is providing some places free of charge to the very needy. So he does this -just as V did, but for different motives. The fees are set at a level whereby a few places for the poor are subsidized. He involves some local dignitaries in helping decide who the beneficiaries should be. Indeed, using his numerous contacts in the business world, he persuades other local companies to donate small sums of money to subsidize the places of several other poor children at the school. Just as with V, his Saturday school takes off, and he eventually opens others. And he goes the same route as before, eventually opening a

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chain of day schools, funded in the same way. Again, at all times, the children get a much better deal than before. Indeed, because he has employed some wonderful and caring teachers, and keeps himself very much in the background, no one would really know whether they were in one of V's schools, or one of W's. Joel said: 'I know Jack would object to this now. But why, if the outcome is the same?' I pointed out that there is a relevant difference now, and Jack would be right to complain. For I completely trusted V's motives, she was transparently concerned for the children, so I was sure that she wouldn't do the children any harm. But as far as W is concerned, his motivation is purely profit: what's to stop him behaving unscrupulously, cutting costs and giving the children once they're in the school a bad deal? Joel nodded, and began to muse aloud. 'Yes, I do need to close that particular loop-hole. What we need is to ensure that W has the incentive not to do that. If there were other entrepreneurs, X, Y, and Z, all running chains of schools, that would solve it, wouldn't it? For if W does what you're afraid he'll do, treating kids as a captive market to be exploited, then one of these others will step in and offer a better deal. And even if he colludes with all of these, there's still A, and B, and C, who can come in and offer a better deal to children.' I pointed out that in some areas there couldn't be competition like this. His solution was all well and good for large cities, but what about areas where there wouldn't be enough children, say, in a relatively rural area, or small town? Joel thought about that for a bit, and then said: 'If W is exploiting children in one school where there isn't competition yet, if he tries to open another school - which he will with his voracious appetite for expansion - some journalists or other trouble-makers will make sure the world knows that he can't be trusted. There'll be a scandal over W's schools, and parents will be warned away. So W will realize that if he wants to expand across the whole country - internationally even! - he'd better keep standards high wherever he operates, whether or not there is actual competition on the ground, and his profits as low as he can bear. That solves the problem, doesn't it? Competition again. It keeps even the evil businessman from exploiting the poor.' Overhead we heard the sound of a helicopter. Our special guest had arrived. As we walked back to dinner, I slipped my arm in his.

COMMENTARY Screaming Lord Sutch, the eccentric English character politician, who stood at 40 elections through his Monster Raving Loony Party, losing them all7 and who sadly committed suicide while I was writing this book, famously asked:

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'Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?' The focus group would have paraphrased Lord Sutch's question, asking about education: 'Why is there only one Accountability authority?' For true accountability, they would argue, can only come through competing authorities, who have something real to lose if they fail to meet their promises. In this final session, we looked at two issues which may still have been of concern even for those readers who had come this far with me. In Session 2, we suggested that the need for equity could be solved by the private alternative. For it had two parts - ensuring that there were high-quality educational opportunities for all and that there were funding opportunities available for those too poor to otherwise use them. But there may have been some outstanding disquiet about our proposed solution - of competing education companies, supplemented by the family and philanthropy - on two grounds. Where would the accountability for such a system reside? And surely there is something amiss about the profit motive being involved in education? On both those grounds this session has sought to reassure readers. As far as accountability is concerned, we've agreed that accountability is of great importance. No one wants schools - or the other kinds of educational opportunities outlined by our focus group - which are not accountable. But the accountability which we currently take for granted in education may not be particularly desirable. Political accountability has all sorts of shortcomings; what we want in education is the accountability, in all its levels, that we take for granted in the market: The accountability of the right of 'exit', and the effect this has on the suppliers. The accountability of the money-back guarantee. And then the various 'voice' options which would be shared with the political process, although may be worth more in the market, where there won't be such a patronizing attitude towards parents and their concerns about education. All of these levels of accountability are desired for education. The private alternative can provide them. And finally, if these are not enough, educational companies can also be accountable to a private 'third-party surveillance' organization, which maintains standards for all under its rubric. Again, all without the state. This is not to say that we want all individual educational settings - schools, Centres of Learning, Quiet Zones or whatever - to be free-standing, autonomous units. The focus group came up with six sets of reasons why we might want these centres to be accountable to some higher authority. For the sake of quality control, economies of scale, planning and strategic planning and promoting equity (as well as ensuring any compulsory measures are met), it would seem desirable to have some funding siphoned away from each local setting to a head office. I can't quibble with any of these reasons. So what would have been the focus group's answer had it been explicitly asked the question which we left hanging from the Prologue: if the current system - DfEE and all the other state education agencies, and LEAs - had not been invented, would they seek to invent it? The answer would be a resounding 'No'. One main objection would be to its political character - they would have wondered what politics was doing intruding in something as important as

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education. They certainly wouldn't have seen any of these six factors as bringing the need for political accountability either. Then they would have severely objected to there being only one 'accountability authority' which had a monopoly over schools, through the DfEE at the national level and the LEAs at the local level. Competition would be absolutely essential to keep quality high, and to ensure that costs - including the costs of central administration - were kept low. Hence if the current system had not been invented, they would certainly not choose politically accountable and monopolistic authorities to govern and manage the 'schools', whether at local or central level. Instead they would opt for competitive, lean organizations which would be more responsive to their needs. It is this lack of monopoly and competition which brings the major difference between these education companies and local education authorities. In discussion with friends and colleagues, and when I've given papers on this subject, many people at first wonder whether all I'm proposing is to bring back something which might just as well be an LEA (or the DfEE). But what I'm proposing, let's be very clear, is that within the same geographical jurisdiction there would be five or six competing educational companies each managing different schools - let's use the word for simplicity here - plus a multitude of smaller companies or outlets, as well as home schooling, and so on. The model is one which is fairly familiar to us in other areas - think of the market for food with competing chains of supermarkets, plus corner shops and so on, as we outlined in the Introduction. And notice that these competing education companies would provide all that we could ever need from the DfEE or other central authority. They would provide strategic direction and overall planning. They would cater for special needs and equality of opportunity. There would be no need for any other overarching political authority. There would be no public funds, so no need for any other piper than the parents (or philanthropists) to call the tune. If we look at the examples of education companies around the world, we see that many of these already have people concerned with strategic oversight, with planning and exploring bold new ideas. That is all part of what it means to be an education company. There are people already planning for the future, looking at the results of research and development, or planning its execution, people already learning from the latest ideas and seeing how these could be put into practice within their companies. And because of competition these companies are keeping up with the latest developments because of the profit motive. We don't need a further body, a politically accountable one, to replicate any of this. However, many critics have balked at these suggestions. One of the most fundamental objections is that involving such companies in the management of education would bring the profit motive into education - assuming some of the companies were 'for profit' - and this is completely undesirable. There is nothing new about the aversion to profit in education. A 1928 PhD thesis studied thousands of private schools across the USA, and found even then that proprietors had to defend themselves against the notion that they were

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for-profit (Cole 1928). Andrew Coulson notes, 'Antipathy toward profitmaking and capitalism generally have been defining traits of such influential educators as Horace Mann and John Dewey' (Coulson 1999, p. 288). In the UK, there does seem to be some embarrassment, particularly in government, about the role of for-profit companies taking over failing LEAs and schools - reforms that were made possible by the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act. The waters were rather muddied by an exchange of letters between the Secretary of State David Blunkett and Doug McAvoy, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the leading teachers' union in the UK, in March 1998. In his letter, David Blunkett was careful to point out that profit could not be made from state education. However, he did not rule out that any education company could charge management fees, and apparently this would be all that the companies would need in order to operate. However, not surprisingly, the government's protests about management fees rather than profit have not been found convincing by some critics. Francis Beckett, who is extremely critical of New Labour education policy from what we call an 'Old Labour', i.e. socialist, position, wrote for the New Statesman an article carrying the title 'Blunkett accepts schools for profit', pointing out how the Conservatives had been 'outflanked on the right by a Labour education secretary' (Beckett 1999). First there is Estelle Morris, the Minister of State for Education, saying, 'There is no question of a state school being run for profit by a private company.' But Morris also goes on to point out that this stricture does not rule out the myriad ways in which profit is routinely made out of state funds in education - whenever, for example, a school buys a pencil or a computer, or pays for window-cleaning or computer maintenance. Moreover, a private education company could charge a management fee. Beckett writes: Tn a coded way, Morris was telling the education contractors that she meant the exact opposite of what she said. A state school can be run for private profit' (p. 9). So the government is getting itself into a muddle on this issue, because it doesn't want to offend anyone who thinks that for-profit education is an oxymoron. So companies can make a profit, but call it something else. Such semantic games can be fun sometimes. But perhaps the time has come to move on. I wonder if we could start learning to love profit in education. In other parts of the world, the situation is even more explicit. In several countries, for-profit education is illegal. This is true, for example, in Indonesia, Peru (when the company TECSUP was established, although this has now been relaxed), Romania, Russia and Argentina. It is a little-known fact that for-profit higher education is also illegal in some American states. In India, for instance, this restriction against profit in education has been incorporated into its constitution: The promoting body cannot distribute its surplus, if any, at the end of a year, but must plough it back into Reserves or further Capital Expenditure. Surpluses can, however, be used to service loans or pay lease money.

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Against this background, I propose (as our first lesson in learning to love profit in education) the following seven virtues of the profit motive in education, based on my observations of education companies around the world.8 First Virtue: the desire for expansion One of the most depressing spectacles in the current educational set-up is of an excellent state school in a deprived area - and there are a few - with a long waiting list. The school has a successful formula, strong and dynamic leadership, but it doesn't occur to anyone to do other than turn poor parents away. Many of the City Technology Colleges in England are like this, as are some of the more entrepreneurial grant-maintained schools, as well as others in the state sector. In the USA, there are key examples of these types of schools too, as Magnet or Charter schools. They give their own students a great deal, but consign other children to the indifferent mediocrity of neighbouring schools. The key question here is: what other business would treat potential customers like this? Of course it could be risky taking over failing schools in the neighbourhood, or starting from scratch elsewhere to cater for demand. Given our musings behind the veil of ignorance, it will surprise no one to hear that profit can enter here. For it provides the additional incentive to take these risks - and to make the investment too, as investors are also attracted by the possibility of a return. This invisible hand of self-interest leads to the excellent school being replicated, dramatically improving the life chances of many disadvantaged kids. Second Virtue: the necessity for quality control A growing 'chain' of schools - the successful school that takes over a failing one and improves it, and then looks elsewhere - brings in the second virtue. As it grows, the desire for quality control becomes of paramount importance. Once a brand name becomes formed and known, customers - parents and children - have to be reassured about the quality of the service on offer. Now, in the UK, the Labour Government, and the previous one, thinks that the only way parents can be thus reassured is to have a hugely expensive and cumbersome apparatus of nationalized curriculum, nationalized testing, nationalized inspection, nationalized targets and nationalized league tables. But one problem, as we have noted, with these state surveillance measures is that they become politicized. So, for example, instead of it being a matter of educational importance which testing procedures are used, what works best and what is most effective at raising standards, it becomes a matter of finding testing procedures which pass political muster. Similarly the politically correct inspection procedures are mired in subjectivity and waffle. And throughout it all, mediocre schools can acquiesce in their mediocrity, and can always blame central or local government, or the class of children in the school, without addressing their own incompetence. In the for-profit private education sector, such an approach is not an option.The schools or colleges have as their raison

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d'etre the provision of quality educational services. If they don't do this, they'll go out of business. Hence the need for tailor-made solutions to quality control which really are about raising standards. Third Virtue: brand names solve the information problem This brings us to the third virtue of for-profit education. Consumers of education, we are told by experts, will suffer from the 'information' problem. They don't know what high-quality education is, and this will allow devious business people to take advantage of their ignorance (Barr 1993). This, as we've noted, is the paramount reason for many why we need the state to be in education. We are ignorant in so many areas of our lives, but Barr does not think we suffer the same problems there. I know nothing about lap-top computers, for example, but I was able to buy one of the highest quality without anyone taking advantage of my ignorance. How? I bought into a brand name. We know that the company's reputation is absolutely paramount and that the company knows that some of its customers are informed and can't take the risk that I am not one of these. Hence the company has to have quality control procedures in place to ensure excellence. It is exactly the same with for-profit education companies around the world, all of which take quality control measures extremely seriously, to ensure that their students have the highest quality opportunities. Fourth Virtue: the necessity of research and development The success of one education chain or company inspires others to enter the market - and this brings the various virtues ofcompetition.This is real competition in a genuine market, not the phoney, if well-intentioned, competition which the previous government introduced in education with its impossible barriers to entry for new suppliers, as we have noted. Real competition between expansion-hungry, quality-conscious education companies brings with it our fourth virtue, the necessity of research and development. It's not necessarily that the business wants to invest funds in R&D - after all, these funds could simply line the pockets of investors. Why bother to seek to improve what you are offering and make it more effective? The answer is the hard-headed business reason that if you don't, your competitors will. If your company doesn't find out what works best in pedagogy, a competitor will, and parents and students might be tempted away. But notice that this doesn't mean that education companies can indulge in fads, like the ones thought up in ivory tower education departments which have done such damage to many children's life chances (see Tooley with Darby 1998). I'm thinking of the anti-phonics movement for 'teaching' reading, or various new mathematics crazes which have left children innumerate. The competing companies will need to know that any innovation introduced is proven to raise standards or enhance opportunities, or again they will risk losing customers.

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Moreover, another virtue of the profit motive is that the market will ensure that such research-based best practice gets copied by others, and hence disseminated to all. The difference between this approach and that found in state schools - and, true, in some private schools not governed by the profit motive - is well illustrated in the musings of Professor Michael Barber. In The Learning Game (Barber 1996) one of his most telling examples is the description of the research project based at King's College, London, which succeeded, without additional resources, in raising pupils' attainment in Science, Mathematics and English. Indeed, for boys, the effect was of a 300 per cent increase in attainment! (see Adey and Shayer 1994). Under current conditions, hardly any schools have imitated these reforms, and Barber notes that, 'in spite of this dramatic result . . . there has been no national initiative to follow it up ... this should not be left to chance' (Barber 1996, pp. 180-1). But is it likely that, in any other service industry (acting in the market where things are 'left to chance'), if one business found that it could raise productivity by 300 per cent without much increase in resources, that other businesses would simply ignore the initiative? Perhaps what schools lack is not a 'national initiative' to force them to follow best practice, as Barber wants, but the simple market incentive of profit which encourages other businesses to seek improvement? Fifth Virtue: proper rewards for, and utilization of, teachers The profit motive, fifth, also can ensure that teachers are properly rewarded and teaching excellence widely disseminated. Isn't it bizarre the limits imposed upon gifted teachers today? This takes us back to the focus group's deliberations in the first session. We ignore the fact that gifted communicators and inspirers of the young are a rare commodity. Instead we force them into an egalitarian strait] acket, for a gifted teacher is exposed to the same number of children as a mediocre one, reaching out to at most the same couple of hundred children each week. Imagine if the same principle applied in other communication businesses - we would have the odd spectacle of a Jeremy Paxman limited to broadcasting to a tiny audience on a local hospital radio, say, or writing only for the Malvern College Times. We have the technological possibilities available to ensure that excellent teachers can reach out to thousands of students, and the profit motive would ensure that this was the case. Sixth Virtue: attracting investment and cost-effectiveness The profit motive can help provide the desperately needed capital for investment in our schools - because investors will be attracted by the returns that might be available. In an age of fiscal restraint, this investment is not likely to be forthcoming from government and, even if it was, there would be no guarantee that it would be used wisely and effectively. Under the present system, there is little encouragement to deliver educational services more cheaply or efficiently. However, with the incentive of profit, educational

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companies are always anxious to ensure that technological innovation is utilized which can both keep costs as low as possible and keep standards high - else learners will be lost to other competitors. It is this combination of costeffectiveness and the possibility of investment which can lead to higher standards for all. Seventh Virtue: concern for student destinations If you were a director of a private school chain, and wanted to distinguish yourself from others, how would you do it? All the ways mentioned above, and particularly investing in R&D would be important. But you might consider one final approach, which would make you extremely attractive to parents and students. This would be to focus on ensuring that your graduates found satisfactory options after they left you - because certainly one (not of course the only) important aspect of what parents and children seek from schools or colleges is that they leave equipped to go on to something else, such as employment or further education. So you foster close links with businesses around you, and with these links help students and employers develop confidence in each other. But why stop there? There are recruitment agencies which specialize in such placements. What some of the education companies have done worldwide is to buy up recruitment agencies, to be sure that the synergy between the two lines of business are used to full effect. Educor, in South Africa, has bought PAG and Renwick. And once one company does this, and it is effective, then others have to follow, for precisely the reasons outlined above concerning R&D - for if they don't, they will lag behind in the consumer stakes. Of course, state schools do this to a certain extent, and are subject to various cajoling from local and central government to this end, to form links with other businesses and further education institutions. But it isn't in their blood as it is for the for-profit companies. The Virtue of the Seven Virtues: No need for human virtue Perhaps the key point to emphasize here is that none of the above seven virtues depends upon anyone being well-meaning or well-intentioned. Exactly as was argued by Joel in his parables in the last focus group session, they do not depend upon philanthropy or public-spirited individuals. All they require is hard-headed, calculating business decisions. But these decisions lead to the raising of standards and improvement of opportunities. Bringing profit into education is a manifesto for our schools which can transform them without the necessity of anyone being angels. It is a manifesto for schools based on a realistic perception of humanity, not on heady but unrealistic aspirations about how we might wish people to be. But of course the reality is that we do have a public-spirited side too. And even CEOs of big education companies are also public-spirited individuals. It's worth mentioning a few of the social responsibility programmes which I found in the global study to reinforce this point:

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DPS, India, has its Village Schools programme. Government schools in the deprived area of Mewat have been taken over and upgraded, subsidized using surplus resources of the larger Core schools. A similar scheme is now beginning operation in the Punjab. Educor has a 'black empowerment' partner, Nozala Investments, a women's economic empowerment organization. Nozala has a right to acquire up to 10 per cent of Educor's shares, and has one seat on the Educor board and one seat on each of its subsidiary boards. Educor also offers various bursaries to students. Some of these come from retail groups in South Africa. These cover half the fees, and Educor provides the other half. Bursaries are awarded as customer loyalty bonuses. In one campus, for example, there are 120 students on the scheme. Other bursaries are offered under the Educor Social Responsibility programme, in particular giving half-price correspondence courses to prisoners and ex-convicts. Similarly, Midrand Campus Group also subsidizes education of prisoners through correspondence courses. R1.5 million is set aside for bursaries each year, and aims to match this with company donations. It also has linked up with the ANC to run a Law Clinic, a citizen's advice centre, voluntarily staffed by staff and students, which is financed by the Campus to the tune of R100,000 per year; similarly it runs a Psychology Crisis Clinic, which gives counselling to victims of hijacking and rape. Objetivo/UNIP, Brazil, has several social responsibility programmes, including: the dentistry departments in UNIP offer a free service to ordinary people in Sao Paulo, who can make an appointment and be used as 'models' for the final year students. Similarly, the law departments all offer free advisory services for the community; the 'nature schools' in Manaus, Angra Dos Reis, and Natal show urban Brazilians aspects of the environment and the difficulties faced by rural people. These also give advice to fishermen about environmental preservation. Pitagoras, Brazil, has three key aspects to its social responsibility programme. The first is 'Projeto Viver', which is aimed at enabling teenage students to engage in volunteer social work in their communities. The second, and perhaps most significant in terms of impact (and also in terms of brand promotion) is 'Projeto Pitagoras-JB'. This involves the distribution of a free newspaper, in partnership with the Jornal do Brasil, to 150,000 students across Brazil. The edited newspaper includes news stories of national, international, economic, scientific and cultural significance, as well as sports news. The project also has the financial support of Fiat. It began in September 1997 with monthly circulation, and the aim is that eventually it will be circulated free of charge to every school in Brazil, weekly. Third, Pitagoras has teamed up with Eurocentres - a company with headquarters in Zurich which runs language schools in Europe - to form Eurocentres Pitagoras. These are based in Pitagoras schools and offer English and Spanish lessons to students, teachers, parents and workers, all free of charge.

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This company-centred philanthropy, as admirable as it is, provides the icing on the cake as far as the argument here is concerned. High-quality educational opportunities for the vast majority do not depend upon it. It is a final virtue worth pondering as we move to our conclusions. NOTES 1 LEAs are the equivalent of School Districts in the USA, except that School Districts are governed by a separately (in general) elected School Board, solely responsible for education, and with some specific tax-raising powers for education. In LEAs, the education officers are responsible to councillors elected in local elections on a party ticket to cover the whole range of local responsibilities, not just education, and with no specific education tax-raising powers. 2 Figures in £ million Cash plans imillion DfEE admin, costs (excluding employment services) Funding agency for schools SCAA QCA TTA Ofsted Total central budget

1997-98 Outturn 155.0 13.0 5.5 12.6 5.0 150.0 341.1

Source: DfEE and Ofsted (1999) from Annexe A, Bi, Ei and Annexe H, incorporating note 6. Annexe Ei gives a figure of £238.9 million for running costs of departmental HQ excluding employment services - and excluding running costs for Ofsted (the whole of Ofsted is included separately above). We can subtract £1.2 million from this, which is the department's own running costs of other noneducation budgets (Annexe A, page 198), leaving £237.7 million. The DfEE does not disaggregate its administrative budget in terms of schools and 'life-long learning' separately. Given that about 65 per cent of government spending on education is on schools (Annexe Biii), one guess would be that a similar proportion of the DfEE's administrative budget goes on schools, hence our figure of about £155 million. There are 7,502,000 pupils in maintained schools (in England), excluding sixth-form colleges but including special schools and pupil referral units (Annexe L). Hence, the per-pupil expenditure for the DfEE admin, costs, if our assumption is correct, would be approximately £21 per pupil. Including the other central agencies gives approximately £45 per pupil. 3 Section 68 of the 1944 Education Act empowers the Secretary of State, where he is of the opinion that an LEA or the governors of a school are acting or are proposing to act 'unreasonably', to give 'such directions as to the exercise of ... the performance of [a] duty [under the Act] as appear to him to be expedient' (Harris, Neville (1993) quoted p. 31). Recent rulings show that such directions would be statutory, and compliance could be forced by an order of mandamus. Section 99(1) states, among other things, that if the Secretary of State is satisfied that the governors or LEA have 'failed to discharge any duty imposed on them by or for the purposes of this Act', he [may] make an order declaring them to be in default and 'giving such

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directions for the purpose of enforcing the execution thereof as appear to [him] to be expedient' (p. 31). This section specifically states that these are enforceable by mandamus. Interestingly, these complaints can be exercised by 'any person' (section 68) or 'any person interested' (section 99), or at the Secretary of State's own personal initiative. According to a National Consumer Council report When Things Go Wrong at School: Redress Procedures in the Education Service, (1992), p. 5, the Secretary of State receives thousands of letters each month which consist of potential section 68 and 99 cases. Hansard Commons, Debates, Vol. 973, col. 39 (5 November 1979), Mark Carlisle MP, Secretary of State for Education and Science. The 1993 Education Act removed the need for LEA members to be in a majority of one. All figures on LEAs from Times Educational Supplement, 25 June 1999, and for central government from DfEE and Ofsted (op cit., 1999). Even if the assumption made earlier about DfEE administrative funding overstates the percentage devoted to school admin., this will make very little difference to the percentage given here. Indeed some economists would argue that it is much worse than this. Because funding for schools is currently paid for out of taxes collected, this brings about the 'deadweight' or 'welfare' costs of taxation. But then, in effect, a larger sum of money has to be collected in order to provide each dollar of taxation. Economists estimate that for every dollar of tax funds spent, $1.40 is the cost to the taxpayer (West 1997). In other words, instead of £2,670 per pupil, actually £3,738 or so is the 'cost' to the taxpayer. This would make the figure that doesn't get into school nearer 40 per cent. We'll leave this as a technicality here, however. He did have one famous 'victory' - the demise of the Social Democratic Party under Dr David Owen was probably inevitable when Lord Sutch polled more votes than the SDP candidate. It is true that some of these virtues can be found in not-for-profit education companies too.

Conclusions Reclaiming Education

WHERE HAVE WE GOT TO? I was once bought a book by someone who wanted to make some point or other, now lost on me. The book was entitled Everything That Men Know About Women. It was a slim book, and in any case, its pages were all blank. I think there's another book waiting to be written: Everything That Government Needs to do to Promote the Education Revolution. It too would be slim and its pages blank. However, Professor Michael Barber could not be clearer in the conclusion to his The Learning Game. 'Much of what I have advocated in this book demands a government which puts education at the heart of its work . . . [requiring] visionary and assertive leadership' (1996, p. 291). Soon after Barber wrote these words he was brought into the heart of Tony Blair's government as that 'visionary and assertive' leader. But paraphrasing Barber, much of what I have advocated in this book demands a government which puts education outside of its work. It demands a government which gets out of the way of education. The question then arises whether or not this too will need 'visionary and assertive leadership', and whether government still needs, as Barber argued, 'to create a new legislative, administrative and economic framework' fit for this alternative revolution (p. 291). In which case, are we to fall victim to the 'paradox of rolling back the state', that in order to accomplish what we want, we have to use the state to do so? If so, then we'll be subject to all the kinds of difficulties mentioned throughout this book, because the state won't let us go there, or will deflect us from our major purpose. However, I think in education this may not be the case, at least not in general. There are enough clues and signs to suggest that we might not need the power of central government to help us in eliminating state schooling, as we shall see. But this is running ahead of ourselves. Let's be clear what this book has been arguing. There were two strands of argument interwoven throughout the

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text. The primary strand looked at the three major challenges facing us in education, while the secondary strand examined the three ways in which states could intervene in education. We'll examine these in turn before looking at what other key players - our 'Millennial Four' - have proposed as being useful ways forward, critiquing them in the light of our preceding discussion. Finally, we'll lay out what I believe to be a better way forward, which doesn't need government in the vanguard. Primary strand: the three challenges The primary strand confronted the three major challenges to education laid out in the Introduction. The first challenge was how we could meet unsatisfied demand for educational opportunities of all kinds, in developed and developing countries alike. The argument of the book was that the 'private alternative' - markets in education in combination with a reinforced civil society - could satisfy this demand. To this end, this book provided two 'jolts' or 'wake-up calls'. In Session 2 we showed how, historically, 'the private alternative' was there to satisfy educational demand until state intervention stamped or crowded it out. In England and Wales this was illustrated quite dramatically, with almost universal schooling and literacy before the 1870 Act allowed the state to 'jump into the saddle' of the horse that was already galloping. A similar picture applied in the USA and, although there was less evidence, in France and Germany too. The global 'wake-up call' in Session 3 revealed graphic new evidence that the private alternative has emerged in quite dramatic forms in developing countries. Partly as a response to a mistrust of government and partly because there are simply not the resources to ensure that state education reaches many people, private education has emerged in forms which are relatively unknown in the developed world. Burgeoning private education companies, which had got started on a shoestring and which had financed their expansion by pulling themselves up by their own boot-straps (if you'll excuse too many footwear metaphors) were everywhere. And such companies showed how education needn't suffer from the information problem - where parents didn't know what they were buying into - nor that education needed government intervention to ensure quality control or resources devoted to research and development. The argument throughout the book has been that the private alternative can blossom again if it is given the freedom to do so. It requires effort and space - for the family, for entrepreneurs and for philanthropy - and we'll come to ways in which these can be encouraged in the final part of this chapter. But there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that we don't need government schooling in order to satisfy educational demand. The second challenge was to face up to what we mean by education, and why we seem obsessed with putting all our educational eggs into the state school basket. Through our focus group discussions in Session 1, we recognized just how broad the concept of education was, and how bizarre it was

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thinking that all of it could be met within the institution of the school. Although we didn't start with any 'de-schooling' assumption, it became clear that the first way in which we had to 'reclaim education' was by defending it against those who would imprison it within the harsh confines of schooling. Thus liberated, we were able to consider throughout the rest of the book ways in which education, broadly understood, could be best provided and nurtured within the whole of society (although at times, we did think in terms of 'schools', to make the concepts easier to grasp for those of us not accustomed to breaking away from traditional thinking). The third challenge was the biggest of all. For the good society needs certain things from education. The promotion of equality of opportunity, or equity, was the first major requirement. Democracy was the second. We took time to examine both of these. In Session 2 we looked at equity. We concluded that equity demanded two things of education: that the quality on offer should be consistently high for all; and that no one should be excluded from these opportunities on the grounds of poverty. Nowhere could we see that governments had met these requirements. In fact, it seemed likely that they had exacerbated the problem. But, in the light of the two 'wake-up calls', and bearing in mind the huge potential for philanthropy - with charitable giving in England and Wales even now standing at a third of the amount that government spends on schooling - and the ways in which consistently high quality is met in other areas of our lives, we recognized that the solution to the equity problem was not more government but less. The solution lay in allowing education companies to compete for the high-quality stakes, perhaps moderated by some private 'third-party surveillance' authorities. This raised some further worries - and the need to justify markets in education against their detractors. Didn't our conclusions make certain unwarranted assumptions about parental rights, for instance? By looking in Session 3 at why we want choice in education - to protect us from unscrupulous monopoly suppliers and from the potential of propaganda to indoctrinate us - we suggested that this reinforced, not undermined, the argument for the private alternative, whatever our perspective on parental rights. What about accountability - surely the private alternative wouldn't be able to respond to our requirements for education there? By considering in Session 5 what is provided by political accountability, we suggested that the kinds of accountability offered in the private sector had far more to offer, in education as in other areas. Finally, this couldn't mean that profit could be made out of education, did it? For surely that would be undesirable? On the contrary, Session 5 also revealed seven virtues of the profit motive in education, and the overriding virtue of all is that profit can deliver high-quality education without the need for a society teeming with angels. All that was related to equity and the proposed solution of competing education companies. But what about the second most important good that society requires of education, the promotion of democracy? Surely education for democracy, and the need for democratic control of education, both provide reasons for government to intervene in education, albeit only to regulate it?

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We explored these ideas in Session 4 and suggested that such a conclusion was untenable. Government could only regulate schooling, but to confine education for democracy to schools was simply absurd. And in any case, there seemed to be an undesirable illiberal consequence of wanting to go the 'neatand-tidy' route here. These conclusions, we suggested, would be applicable more generally to any attempt to impose higher-order values on the curriculum. And as far as democratic control of education was concerned, it was soon realized that even its most enthusiastic supporters wanted drastic curbs on it, so that wilful majorities couldn't oppress minorities. But once this potential danger was accepted, there was a whole range of other dangers of democracy waiting to be considered. In any case, the promotion of a thriving democracy it seemed could probably better be provided by the private alternative, in all its forms. All these considerations led us to the second way in which we need to 'reclaim education': from the state. But did we want to reclaim it from all types of state intervention, or just some? This was our secondary strand running throughout the book. Secondary strand: three types of state intervention in education The secondary strand focused on the three ways in which states can intervene in education, viz., provision, funding and regulation, and considered which of these, if any, could be justified in the light of the arguments presented here. The exploration of the historical evidence in particular in Session 1, complemented by the global evidence from Session 3 and the musings of the focus group, suggested that there was no need for the state to intervene in educational provision. This evidence also suggested that for the great majority, funding would not be a problem, but that equity concerns would ensure our focus was on the poor and disadvantaged. The discussion in Session 2 argued that all these funding needs could better be met through philanthropy and giving freedom to education companies to devise ways in which their needs could be met. Regulation of education could come in many shapes and forms. It was important to address each of them. Not only did particular regulations arise as concrete proposals to satisfy individual demands for state intervention in education, but regulation could be seen as the beginning of a slippery slope to further state intervention in terms of funding and provision. It was necessary to nip early in the bud each claim for state regulation.The desire for regulation also showed us something particularly revealing about the mind-set of those who want state intervention in education, which we'll come to in a moment. We met the desire for state compulsion in Sessions 1 and 2 - compulsion for parents who didn't want their children to partake of educational opportunities and compulsion of educational institutions to make sure that 10 per cent or so of their places went to the poor. Historically, we saw that state compulsion was not necessary to get the vast majority of parents to send their children to school, and in our focus group we considered that there were better, more

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humane ways of ensuring that all children partook of their educational entitlement than getting so heavy-handed about it with state compulsion. Finally, the various strands of regulation proposed around democracy were examined in detail. In particular, the desire for a compulsory 'education for democracy' was explored in depth, pointing as it did to some of the fundamental features of those seeking state intervention, encapsulated in what I called, perhaps unkindly, the 'neat-and-tidy' syndrome. The neat-and-tidy syndrome An overriding theme of this book is that those who are proposing the state as a solution to the challenges facing us in education are suffering from the desire for neat-and-tidy solutions. I have argued throughout that the neat-and-tidy solutions, while appealing on paper, simply evaporate when governments get hold of them. Most simply we can see this in terms of compulsory 'education' - not only can it not ensure universal schooling (with many still falling through the supposedly cast-iron safety net) but much less can it ensure that even those in schools get out of it what we want them to, in terms of the desirable goods of education. We saw it graphically illustrated in the case of the desired regulation of'education for democracy'. Again, a very appealing solution on paper turned out to have undesirable consequences and to be completely unnecessary as soon as we broke our conflation of schooling and education. Once this is realized, the 'ad hoc' alternative - which I prefer to call, after Hayek, the 'spontaneous order' solution - suddenly seems less undesirable. If governments cannot ensure universality of education, or if government intervention has all sorts of undesirable consequences, then we can look again at what the private alternative can achieve. The status quo of state education is untenable Both interweaving strands lead us to our conclusion. The status quo of state education systems is simply untenable: it cannot be morally justified. State education systems are harmful - in delivering poor quality and low expectations. Our own comments in this regard were brief, building as they did on the many existing critiques of the poor quality and negative impacts of state education (we mentioned in particular Barber, Bentley, Phillips and Walden the 'Millennial Four'). State education is expensive and uncompetitive. It has undesirable side-effects, in particular with regard to undermining the institutions in civil society and the love of learning. Above all, it is simply unnecessary. If we want to promote a 'learning society', as both Barber and Bentley and many others - do, then we don't need the engines of government to steer us on that course. The wind is already blowing in the desired direction, simply by virtue of us being in human society. If government would get out of the way, then we could really set sail unhindered. That's the conclusion we've reached after our philosophical musings and consideration of historical and global evidence. What are the specifics of what

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this means for policy, though? And what about policy programmes which have already been put forward in response to the 'crisis' in education? In the next section, I look at some of the most powerful suggestions for the way forward, showing how our response will be rather different. How and why, in the light of the discussions in this book, are these alternatives wanting? WHERE DO OTHERS THINK WE SHOULD GO, AND HOW SHOULD WE GET THERE? Throughout the book we have playfully spoken of the 'Millennial Four', influential authors who are writing about the 'crisis' facing education and proposing ways forward to solve their interpretation of that crisis. I want to build on their policy proposals, to show precisely in what ways mine is different. Some prizes for Melanie Phillips First, Melanie Phillips and her book All Must Have Prizes. She has some very helpful things to say about the family as part of the solution to the crisis, very much in agreement, I think, with the focus group deliberations earlier, and which we will take up in our final section. However, her solution in terms of 'educational reform' (1996, p. 334) I do find somewhat disappointing. She wants to 'take a leaf from the continental book' and impose a selective schooling system, sorting educational sheep from goats by government fiat at age 11 (or 14, it makes little difference) as do the Germans and Swiss, and have yet another go at re-jigging the National Curriculum. I don't find the selective model at all appealing. It wouldn't have appealed either to our focus group behind the veil of ignorance, who would have been very wary of the way such selection could go wrong - pushing people too early in ways in which they didn't want to go, confining children within labels rather than allowing them to explore as and when they are ready to their full potential. They would also have been wary of the ways in which government could distort this process to their own ends and not meet the 'common good', as Phillips thinks is possible (p. 335). Readers might be interested to know that it is not only my focus group which would be suspicious of this model. The much-maligned Sir Cyril Burt, who in many people's eyes was one of the chief architects of the system in England and Wales which did select children according to ability at age 11, was actually against the 11+, for exactly the same sort of reasons: in his evidence to the 1943 Norwood Committee, which led to the selective system, he said: The grounds for allocating children to schools of different types at the early age of 11 are administrative rather than psychological... It would be only in very exceptional cases that such types as are envisaged by the Norwood report display themselves so early as 11 or 12 ... once the children have been sent to some special types of school at the age of 11

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there is rarely much likelihood of any large re-sorting at a later age. (Burt 1943, pp. 126-42) The latter phrase acts as a warning to people like Melanie Phillips who believe that there could be a system which had 'maximum flexibility, so that children can move from one pathway to another as their abilities and aptitudes develop' (Phillips 1996, p. 335). A solution to this dilemma - of recognizing individual difference, but not countenancing government directives - may not have been obvious to Sir Cyril, but there is a solution available now, as the argument of the book has suggested. That is, to break the ubiquitous conflation between education and schooling and realize that diverse individuals may benefit from a diversity of educational experiences, not all of which involve schooling as we now know it. If a selective system is undesirably too rigid, then this doesn't mean we have to wholeheartedly embrace an imposed common school for all. The humane direction, sensitive to equity, is to question the imposition of schooling at all and to ask whether educational opportunities for all, which give equal value to all, could not be better met in a truly diverse system. George Walden should know better Second, George Walden (We Should Know Better). We have noted already, in discussing the 'information problem' in Session 3 above, that Walden discusses various 'bogus solutions' for the 'crisis in education', before setting out his non-bogus solution. This has two aspects. Both are aimed at closing the public-private divide in education, which he thinks is the greatest scourge in the British system and one of the main causes of its current problems. First, he wants to 'open up' the private schools to the state sector, by creating a voluntary sector, the 'Open Sector of Independent Schools', which would 'open their doors to all, regardless of income or social status, by aptitude and ability' (1996, p. 76). He particularly has in mind the 120 'former direct grant schools', private secondary grammar schools which prior to 1976 had roughly 50 per cent of their places either free or heavily subsidized by the state (local and national), but were forced to become fully private when these subsidies were dropped by the Labour Government. There would be some small parental contribution to the fees in this 'third way' sector, but most would come from government. Now Walden thinks that the creation of such a sector of schools would have an impact 'disproportionate' (p. 91) to the actual numbers in them (only about 100,000 students). His reason seems completely implausible, however: Once a significant number of private schools had opened their doors to all by selective examination, many at the top of society might find it less easy than before to find a niche for their children as new talent displaced them. (pp. 91-2)

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This is because these schools would now be taking the 'most able pupils, irrespective of ability to pay or social background' (p. 91) and so parents from the middle classes who had previously patronized them would not be guaranteed a place. Their predicament would be as follows: they 'could continue to buy education in a fee-paying school which had not entered the new sector, or was not considered of high enough quality to be accepted; or they could search for a suitable school in the state sector'. And only if they did the latter, as Walden expects many of them will, will they avoid 'a relative drop in standards as time went by', which would be their fate in the private sector rump. So inevitably, he thinks, these parents will transfer their progeny into the state sector, and their presence there would mean 4 a new and constructive interest' in and for state education (p. 93). The problem with this is that it assumes a static market. There is exactly this number of private school places, and there will only be this number whatever happens. I think Walden may have been unduly influenced by the current complacency of the independent sector in this country, which isn't the most dynamic and innovative for reasons given in Session 2. But this is no reason to think that even it wouldn't expand to meet this extra demand. (Many independent schools even now are very anxious to increase their market share.) More importantly, it doesn't mean that other education companies won't enter the market, to meet the demand from these parents pushed out by the thrusting, bright, working-class kids. This fact alone makes the first part of Walden's solution unlikely to achieve very much. The second strand of his proposed reform is to improve state schools. In his own little thought experiment behind his own veil of ignorance, he suggested that the 'seven wise men and women' would simply be able to shake up and transform the state system through their own great intelligence, charm and persuasion, without any of the vested interests - teachers, local and national education bureaucrats, academics in the universities, whomsoever - getting in their way, and without any of their principles and proposals getting distorted as they went through the system. This again seems highly implausible. Back in the real world, Walden is rather short on details as to how he sees actual reforms working in practice to improve education. We've already discussed in Session 1 the most detailed of his proposals, for compulsory nursery schooling for 3-yearolds, above. As far as primary schools are concerned, he wants 'the educational profession' to 'heal itself (p. 141), so that the schools can stop being playgrounds, and became educational establishments again. Again, there is no apparent method for this and no acceptance that the incentives within schools under government control may not be to improve, but that the vested interests within them may undermine the 'healing' process. One of the problems, of course, is simply that many within the teaching profession, unions and higher education don't think that there is an illness to be healed. It seems that more of a challenge to current incentives is needed than that countenanced by Walden. At the secondary level, in agreement with Melanie Phillips, he thinks that comprehensive schools are a complete folly. Again, however, his solution is to

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go the German route (p. 157-66). I suggest my comments above again apply to this proposal. Finally, all Walden's ideas will require substantially more money, and suggest that teacher-pupil ratios should be lowered and teachers paid 10 per cent more than now (p. 196).There is no sense that perhaps the current model of teachers and schools and pupils is not the ideal one - here or in Germany or anywhere else - and that by simply tinkering with the status quo, all will be made to work just fine. All in all, I'm not convinced that George Walden has found viable solutions which will change much. Learning beyond Bentley's classroom Our third author, Tom Bentley, has written Learning Beyond the Classroom, which is likely to strike a chord internationally, although the content itself is entirely focused on the UK. For it explicitly seeks to build on the work of some highly influential American figures: Harvard education professor Howard Gardner, with his theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983); Daniel Goleman, building on this with a theory of emotional intelligence (Goleman 1996), and finally David Perkins, another Harvard psychologist, whose work on 'outsmarting IQ' (Perkins 1995) also has made a great impression internationally. These three authors provide the 'seeds of solution' to the problems facing society and its educational aspirations. All this shows that Bentley's thoughts are likely to fit in with this very influential genre. (It must also be said that Howard Gardner has endorsed the back cover of Bentley's book.) There is much in Bentley's proposals which we can endorse in this book, as has already been suggested in Session 1. His ideas on breaking away from the conflation of education and schooling, and creating 'a system of networked learning, connecting neighbourhood learning centres with a wealth of learning resources and opportunities' (Bentley 1999, p. 182) seem eminently in keeping with the ideas expressed here, even though it has been suggested that Bentley isn't entirely consistent in his approach. However, the problem comes in how Bentley proposes that we get to where he wants us to go. He favours a 'top-down' solution, via government. This is for the simple reason that, unless government institutions are there organizing it all, it won't happen. But he has no conception that there might be dangers in thinking in terms of this route, nor that the bureaucratic behemoth he is trying to slay is precisely of the form it is because it was created by government. Trying to get state education to change itself will be like trying to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. What Bentley says - largely agreeing with Michael Barber as we shall see is that at the moment, too much is 'left... to chance'; the learning society, he tells us, 'will not happen spontaneously' (p. 182). There needs to be government action to 'reconfigure the resources we already have, to establish new connections, and to create an educational infrastructure which is genuinely open to the range of experience, ability and aspiration which surrounds it' (p. 180).

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Readers of my book will perhaps sense a desire for the 'neat-and-tidy' syndrome creeping in here. Even though what is most striking about all his numerous examples of the desired types of learning opportunities is that all are precisely examples of spontaneous action - that is, of individuals and groups taking responsibility and doing something about education without being told to do so by government. Some of his notable examples include: • Education Extra - which 'supports and develops opportunities for children to pursue learning activities outside school hours' (p. 31). • Kids' Club Network - which does the same for pre-school provision. • Community Service Volunteers and the Prince's Trust Volunteers 'both of which have become major national providers and coordinators of volunteering opportunities for young people' (p. 33). • Changemakers, 'which gives young people opportunities to create their own community projects, collaborating with peers, teachers, youth workers and others in their communities to achieve positive social outcomes' (p. 33). • Youth at Risk, which 'works with some of the rawest and most difficult young people - repeat offenders, drug addicts, those in local authority care - who often have huge problems to overcome' (p. 85). All these projects have emerged largely without government intervention. So why does he want government to get involved here? Presumably because state schools have got to change too, and also because such opportunities aren't as widespread as they might be. On the latter issue, can it really be plausible that we could get government to legislate to make them more widespread? The lessons of our book are that you can't get government to produce desired goods in this way, that this intervention will lead to an undermining of all that these organizations stand for. So what will happen if you get government working on this project, as Bentley envisages? First, you'll crowd out all these voluntary activities in civil society. No longer will you get the variety and the blooming of a thousand experimental flowers. Government won't like that untidy solution. And volunteers and those engaged in charitable giving will also be pushed to the margins as the entitlement first to government compulsion and regulation and then government funding takes over. And then comes the stultification, the building up of vested interests in keeping things exactly as they are, resistant to change and innovation. If Bentley has his way and gets government involved, it will be rather like the brave reforms at the end of the last century. All were great ideas to push forward the new face of education for the new century. All got stuck in the past, deprived of the incentives to innovate that are there now in the spontaneous order which Bentley feels ambivalent towards. And what of schools? Bentley thinks that under this central direction, 'schools will progressively transform themselves to become the hubs of learning networks, centres of learning excellence which aid the development of understanding by brokering learning opportunities with people and

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organisations in the communities around them' and 'With core public funding, they would evolve into a variety of forms' (p. 186). But it's not clear to me how they will evolve, given the enfeebling effect of public funding. Indeed, he notes that 'The power of teachers at the front line to stymie the plans of those at the top is obvious, because in the end they control the way in which priorities and objectives are delivered' (p. 177). He doesn't take this crucial difficulty any further. But it isn't only teachers that are the problem, of course, but also bureaucrats in local education authorities and in all the agencies of central government. Usefully, he does note that the developments he has in mind are more chaotic than the standard educational model. It is less easy to predict what people will be doing at what time, who will be involved and exactly what the outcomes will be. They are therefore more challenging for those responsible for governing the whole system, and there may be a risk involved in permitting them to happen, (p. 178, emphasis added) Exactly. And because there's that risk, the exciting reality of what Bentley is proposing certainly won't appeal to the neat-and-tidy minds in Whitehall or the local town hall. Game to learn? Our fourth and most prominent Millennial author is Michael Barber,1 who is, as I've noted, at the heart of current government policy on education. In office, Barber has been a key figure behind the government's first Education White Paper (DfEE 1997) and the School Standards and Framework Act, which reflect many of the issues contained in his book. The Learning Game can thus be seen as an extremely influential sourcebook for trends in reform. His ideas will continue to have serious repercussions throughout the early decades of the twenty-first century. Barber is writing about an 'education revolution' which he hopes will transcend the sterility of the 'left-right' debate, echoing my search for equity through markets, a sort of'egalitarian libertarian' project. However, although full of imaginative proposals, the advice that emerges 'to politicians with a passion for education' is, I suggest, ultimately incoherent. For there are two Barbers writing, and they are at odds with each other. 'New' Barber is the imaginative thinker, excited about the potential for liberation of educational supply and the unleashing of demand. 'Old' Barber is still at heart the NUT Official, the young socialist teacher in Zimbabwe, the Hackney Councillor. Usefully, in agreement with the perspective implicit throughout this book, New Barber realizes that grand 'systems' will not solve the educational crisis, indeed, may have caused it. And again, fitting in entirely with the perspective presented throughout this book, he looks to the potential of the spontaneous order (or 'chaos' as he calls it) to solve the educational crisis. For the solution can be found at the level of the 'chaotic myriad of personal interactions'

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(Barber 1996, p. 160), unleashing the creativity of individuals within communities, acting in terms of their own incentives, needs, aspirations, tacit knowledge: Given this unstoppable intellectual surge towards chaos, one has to ask why people in education in the late 1980s and 1990s were so obsessed with structures. It is time to recognise that reforming structures will not bring about real change, least of all in education, where quality depends so heavily on a chaotic myriad of personal interactions. We need to understand that chaos matters too. (p. 160) Half the time Barber is persuaded of this, but half the time he yearns for old familiar territory. I don't think that the 'revolution' sought by Barber will be possible until these conflicting positions are reconciled. For example, his ideas on the 'reconstruction' of the teaching profession to suit the changing circumstances of the 'learning society' exhibit the imaginative thinker at his finest: [Teachers] might work in a school, but increasingly schools will open for longer hours, providing a much wider range of learning options. Teachers might work in an out-of-school study centre. They might provide individual tuition to pupils and their families . . . Groups of teachers might work in the equivalent of consulting companies, and put together a portfolio of activities ... (p. 236) Teacher education will be similarly transformed, with 'apprentice' teachers getting paid and immediately working in schools, completely replacing the current entry channels through higher education. But how does Barber propose to arrive at this desirable flexibility? Again, it's a top-down approach. He thinks that a professional body - a 'Learning Council' - will effect the transformation. But why should such a body, made up, in large part, of teachers, teacher educators and 'other partners in the education process' go for this wholesale 'reconstruction'? Wherein lie the incentives for them to threaten teachers' and teacher educators' terms and conditions of service and job security? The chief mechanism that will emerge from the Learning Council to transform the profession, says Barber, is the five-yearly teacher 'MOT'. If a teacher fails this, he or she gets struck off the teaching register. Can one really imagine such a body sanctioning a thorough inspection of teachers' skills and achievements, when so much is at stake for them and their colleagues? More likely, an anodyne proposal would emerge from endless consultations with the unions, something that couldn't possibly secure public esteem, let alone all the other changes that hinge upon it. But this proposal to transform the teaching profession from the top down also runs into a second considerable problem. Why does he assume that he can successfully predict the changes required of teachers in the 'New Century'? Barber might be correct with his model, but it would seem more consistent

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with his theoretical assumptions that the 'learning society' is too fast-changing to predict its needs. The system he is proposing, even put forward by the Learning Council, let alone imposed by government, is as much a rigid system as those he condemns from his perspective of 'chaos'. Of course, Barber could argue that these are just his proposals, and that they will be open to discussion with interested bodies. But this solution then falls foul of the problem of 'competing visions', with vested interests conspiring to distort the outcome from what is desired by any group, and overriding Barber's desired flexibility. Similar problems emerge with Barber's 'Millennium Curriculum'. He wants everyone to learn the basics of literacy, numeracy and technological capability, as well as be immersed in our culture, learn thinking and reasoning skills and be environmentally concerned. And again, rather than trust the spontaneous order which supposedly underlies his ideas, he wants government to intervene to promote it. But surely Barber should be arguing that the curriculum needs to be able to adapt to the fluctuations of unpredictable changing environments? Barber suggests that his redesign of the National Curriculum will 'anticipate the changing needs of democratic society in the early twenty-first century' (p. 170), but the lesson of his 'chaos' theory is precisely that government should not try to predict such changing needs. For in doing so, they inevitably come up against the 'knowledge' problem that undermines any attempt at central planning. The intuition behind this position is that there are severe limitations on the knowledge which can be gained by governments about education, in part because the knowledge about educational needs cannot be found in the quantitative measures which government is forced to deploy. It is this intuition which has been lying behind our proposals throughout the book which embrace the spontaneous order of the 'ad hoc' solution. There's another danger too, that of the controversy of National Curriculum proposals leading to over-prescription. If there is 'excessive prescription', then this 'destroys teachers' commitment and undermines their image of themselves' (p. 197). However, Barber believes that his curriculum will not be too prescriptive, that lessons have been learnt from the introduction of the current National Curriculum. Interestingly, Lady Thatcher also believed that her proposals would not be over-prescriptive. Indeed, her comments about her National Curriculum almost exactly echo Barber's. For example: Lady Thatcher: It always seemed to me that a small committee of good teachers ought to be able to pool their experience and write down a list of the topics and sources to be covered without too much difficulty. (Thatcher 1993, p. 593) Professor Barber: It should not be beyond the wit of man or woman to put these things into suitable words for a statutory order. (Barber 1996, p. 173)

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However, the suggestion here is that the problems which plagued Thatcher's proposals would also undermine Barber's good intentions.The key problem is that his curriculum prescriptions and even the basis of his curriculum are all highly controversial. This leads to the likelihood of over-bearing prescription, because there are strong incentives in a democracy for those who win power to formalize any proposals in a heavily prescriptive way, both to ensure compliance and prevent future governments from undermining them (see the argument inTooley 1996a, Ch. 5). For example, Barber grounds his curriculum in Gardner's theory of'multiple intelligences'; but Gardner's theory is heavily contested (see, e.g., Brody 1992, Perkins 1995, Sternberg 1985). Moreover, Barber's proposed curriculum includes 'reading, writing, numeracy and competence in information technology', history, and environmental awareness (Barber 1996, p. 172), but he brushes away any notions that any of these might be controversial. His comments about the introduction of recent English reforms seem typical: The chief debate was about standard English and how it should be defined. Away from the frontlines of the conflict, here, too, it is hard to see what all the sound and fury are about. Everyone agrees that every child needs... access to what used to be called BBC English... the same is true of grammar and spelling, (p. 173, emphasis added) But it is on, rather than away from, the 'front lines of the conflict' that these matters will have to be discussed in order to impose them through the democratic process, and not everyone does agree with Barber's position. Similarly, the notion that there could easily be an agreed canon of great writers and important historical events seems unlikely in a multicultural society, where education is so clearly politically contested. Finally, New and Old Barber co-exist most unhappily with the lynch-pin of Barber's policy proposals. The revolution he 'envisions' is a 're-engineering'2 of education, 'tossing aside' the assumptions that students learn better if they are grouped together in same-age classes, that one teacher for 30 children is the only sensible ratio, or that information technology is an add-on rather than fundamental to the learning process (Barber 1996, p. 252). Schools would emerge as institutions which provided the central point of contact for learning, but which organized children to attend different organizations and learning settings. Again, all this might seem to resonate very well with the ideas the focus group put forward in Session 1. But again we note that Barber proposes to bring these radical changes about from the top down. Barber's 'key' to 'unlock' the revolution is the government-imposed 'Individual Learning Promise' (ILP), a 'commitment to learning agreed between a school, a learner and the learner's parents' (p. 252). Parents would meet with their child's teacher every six months and agree a plan of learning, set out targets for the child, identify needed resources, and specify the responsibilities of school, outside agencies and the parents. This has two important functions. First it re-establishes 'the

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role of the parent as co-educator' (p. 253). Second, it ensures that schools are concerned to 'meet the needs of individuals', and not to be more concerned, say, about teachers or the institution. But how can the ILP possibly bring any of these about? Clearly what Barber has in mind is that the improved 'demand' of parents, once they are reinvested with responsibility for their children's education, will lead to desirable changes in supply. But does the ILP really have enough teeth? One example: Barber suggests that school will 'guarantee' that every child becomes literate, numerate and technologically competent. But what incentives are there for a school to really ensure this, if the ultimate sanction Barber envisages is that the school can hold the child back year after year until these are achieved? That's not the sort of guarantee we expect in terms of other goods and services, as we noted in Session 5. What we seek amongst other things is a guarantee with teeth - a money-back guarantee. But such is not possible under Barber's system. Perhaps the ILP is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the educational development of the disadvantaged? What is also needed, says Barber, is more government intervention to support it.The government will provide 'an infrastructure and the necessary funding to encourage the development of a range of out-of-school learning opportunities in disadvantaged locations ... a national network of study-support centres' (pp. 268-9). These should be well stocked with 'the best information technology available, including access to the Internet, CD-ROMs and ISDN lines' (p. 269) and staffed with professionals and volunteers, including students on stipends. But again problems arise from this solution. For Barber admits part of the problem with schools is that they 'run into the conservatism of the vested interests which play such a part in the politics of education' (p. 270). But won't Barber's new study centres also run into similar conservative vested interests? At first, probably not. They will be new, 're-engineering' projects, with committed staff and brand-new technology and buildings. What Barber ignores is that inner-city schools themselves could be thought of in exactly the same way - as exciting new ventures in disadvantaged areas - whether they were constructed in the 1890s or the 1950s. But, just as it did for these brave new schools, the technology will become older and the staff staid, organized with vested interests of their own. Innovative teaching methods might become set in stone and irrelevant. Barber argues that these study centres could be linked to universities, but unfortunately universities themselves, including departments of education, are not known particularly for their innovativeness or lack of conservatism - on this one I couldn't agree more with Melanie Phillips, who wants to see them all closed down (Phillips 1996, p. 337). Moreover, even if the centres did achieve all the desirable outcomes that Barber foresees, a further problem arises. They might then solve the educational crisis in the inner cities - while leaving schools themselves untouched! Now the compact between parents and school will have even less sting, because parents will know that the real learning takes place out of school. Schools might become increasingly obsolete, yet not have their position threat-

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ened in the least. Barber's proposals have the capacity to solidify bad practice in schools. So the kinds of dramatic change argued by Barber for education do not seem to be realizable using the methods he describes. For 'Old' Barber still believes that exhortation from the centre will provide enough incentives for educational improvement, that the previously stubborn vested interests will succumb to the charm of his persuasion. Towards a finished revolution I don't want to sound too negative about Michael Barber's proposals - nor for that matter Tom Bentley's either. For within both I see the germs of a different way forward, one which can ensure the overwhelming of the vested interests which would act to undermine Barber's (and Bentley's) valued idealism. But the way forward outlined in my final section does not require a top-down, government intervention and so avoids all the difficulties and problems discussed in this book. THE 3FS OF THE FINISHED REVOLUTION Tony Blair famously said, while in Opposition, that his future government's priorities would be 'Education, education, education'. John Major, then Prime Minister, said that his priorities were the same, but in a different order. These priorities were encapsulated as the '3Es' in the new education company which won the contract for Surrey County Council's Kings' Manor School.To defend the 3Es, I suggest we need the '3Fs' of the finished revolution. We'll get to these in a moment. But first let's be clear what the approach is not. For some readers might be tempted by the following proposal. In Session 1, certain educational ideas were set out and supplemented or adjusted in the light of considerations from the other sessions. For the record, in summary, the ideas created a system something like this. For the extremely critical and important early years of education, between birth and the ages of say 5 to 7, the family should be the all-important educational agent. All our aspirations and ideals for education need to be focused on the family, and where it is not working, to ensure that appropriate family substitutes are in place, or that damaged families are nurtured to health. This was true both for liberal education and instrumental conceptions of education. For the second stage of education, a whole range of organizations within society would be involved. Families would still play an important role, but children would also move away from these now, and start to get integrated more into adult society. There would be Centres of Learning linked physically and virtually to places of adult work - to provide the young people with opportunities to 'master the brief of real problem-solving. Quiet Zones, would supplement these for more reflective learning. There would be physical or metaphorical Places Apart, for liberal education. Newspapers, magazines and other media together with debating societies and reading groups would help promote education for democracy. Religious leaders would inspire

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and motivate young people in their spiritual quest. And the society at large would be geared to promoting moral education. And when these two stages of preparation are over, individuals can continue and specialize in the process of life-long learning, using the same range and diversity of institutions. Within these particulars, we would find competing education chains managing Centres of Learning, Quiet Zones and Places Apart, and no doubt other related educational media and publishing concerns. And teachers - for the six levels we noted, ranging from inspirer through seminar leader to human supporter - would be employed in a diversity of ways and manners, many selfemployed and peripatetic, many employed within the Centres of Learning, Quiet Zones and Places Apart. Funding for this whole range of opportunities would come from parents, from the educational companies themselves, from student loan schemes with commercial banks and specialized education companies, and philanthropy. In any case, many of the educational opportunities would come very cheap, if not free. Nothing in this system would be compulsory or state regulated, over and above the normal regulations and safeguards we find in any markets. If some children or families did need motivating, then society would gear itself up to ensuring that they could be motivated and inspired to partake in schooling. So given all these ideas, some readers might be tempted by the approach that we should then seek to bring these about through government intervention. That is not the approach to be followed here. There is another way to move forward, however. I said in Session 1 that the particulars themselves weren't the important thing, but the principles that underlay them. That is, one shouldn't necessarily feel attached to the ideas of Centres of Learning, Quiet Zones, Places Apart, and so on, as such. For who is to say that my focus group got these particulars exactly right? Especially given the fast-changing nature of technology, and, especially given that the whole point of their deliberations was to provide a system which catered for the demands of the myriad of customers hungry for educational opportunities. And like all good focus groups, mine certainly wasn't representative or randomly sampled,3 so other groups may well have come up with different particulars. But the principles - of ensuring that the whole range of educational opportunities in society is utilized fully, of seeking the co-operation of the family and of philanthropy and ensuring that educational and social entrepreneurs have the freedom to provide for all the needs in society - are non-negotiable. And these principles lead us to the '3Fs' of the way forward for the learning society: • Family. • Freedom. • Philanthropy. For a thriving learning society, for education that satisfies our aspirations as individuals and as a society, for education that is of high quality for all, the '3Fs' need to be reinforced, strengthened and nurtured.

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It is obvious where the family fits into this. It is the core institution around which all others are built in society, crucial to early development, and to the promotion of a thriving civil society on which the other Fs are built. Freedom is required, for families first, to choose educational opportunities, but then for the whole range of entrepreneurs who will be attracted to the enterprise of education. They must have freedom to invest their energies in whatever ways they see fit to find solutions to educational problems. They need to have freedom to raise investment. They need freedom to be able to devise student loan schemes and methods of cross-subsidization. And they need the freedom to devise methods of inspiring and motivating young people to want to learn. Finally, there is philanthropy. It has a key part to play here, to help with those families who are dysfunctional, providing substitute families if necessary or mentoring for those who need it. It also has a key part to play in mentoring for many young people who need that extra help with finding their way in life. And finally it has a part to play in finding funds, administered with discretion and discernment, for those who need help to fund their own or their children's educational opportunities. The '3Fs' provide the principles, the blue-print by which we can model and assess any possible ways forward. However, currently we are a long way from where this book suggests is desirable and justified. Some might wonder whether it is even possible to get where we want to go, given our current starting point of heavy state regulation, funding and provision, the vested interests behind all these things, and the evident attachment of the public to the statist status quo, even if they don't like its outcomes and consequences. Of course, in general terms, there are important areas in which government reform will be needed - in order to nurture each one of the '3Fs'. Many social commentators argue that current legislative and taxation systems act to undermine the family - e.g., by making 'no fault' divorce far too easy, by removing any social obligations on fathers, by discouraging adoption, or by the tax system making it economically more attractive for both parents to work, rather than have one stay at home when the children are young.4 Such structures would need to be reformed in order to move towards the private alternative in education as outlined in this book. Similarly, in countries where for-profit education is illegal, or where there are severe regulatory disincentives to private education, then repealing of these laws and regulations would be desirable too, as would reforms which enhanced, through tax incentives, the attractiveness of philanthropy. As for action which impinges on what most people would more particularly think of as 'educational reform', there are at least three potential ways forward which could move us to the 'private alternative'. In embryo, they are all contained within Barber's work and one is there in Bentley's work too.

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Three potential ways of getting from here to there 1. Vouchers or learning accounts In The Learning Game, Barber puts forward the idea of an Individual Learning Account (ILA) for further and higher education. In this account, employees would invest to fund their own learning, accruing matched contributions from their employers and government. The logic of the learning society, however, does not seem to support the bifurcation between an initial period of compulsory schooling and lifetime learning.5 Hence, the principle of Barber's ILA could usefully instead be extended to cover everyone of school age. In an earlier work, I proposed a 'LIFE' (Lifelong Individual Fund for Education) account on similar lines (Tooley 1996a, Ch. 6). This is the 'learning account', often known as the 'voucher', our first possible way forward. When many people hear of the argument for the privatization of education, they assume it is an argument for these 'vouchers' of some shape or form. The idea of these universal state vouchers seems to go back to Milton Friedman.6 Here he points out that in the past, 'Governments have, in the main, financed schooling by paying directly the costs of running educational institutions', but that this was not strictly required by the 'decision to subsidize schooling'. Instead, he proposes that: Governments could require a minimum level of schooling financed by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on 'approved' educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum they themselves provided on purchasing educational services from an 'approved' institution of their own choice. (1962, p. 89) Milton Friedman proposed universal state vouchers for all parents to fund schooling. Before this, however, there was a long history of social reformers proposing targeted vouchers. Thomas Paine notes that in the good society he was planning, with relief for the poor, there may be a number of families who, though not properly of the class of the poor, yet find it difficult to give education to their children ... The method will be, to allow for each of these children ten shillings a year for the expense of schooling, for six years each, which will give them six months schooling each year and half a crown for paper and spelling books. (Paine 1791) Similarly, John Stuart Mill proposed: If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they

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pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no-one else to pay for them. (Mill 1959) Both writers had it in mind that some government funding might be necessary to ensure universal education, although they certainly didn't see the need to extend this to government provision. Universal voucher proposals are rather similar to the choice systems already discussed in the Introduction here, although with two significant differences - instead of funds being transferred from government to the school on a per capita basis, the parent has the voucher to take to the school of choice. This may have the advantage of a greater psychological impact on parents. They may feel more involved with the choice being made and so may feel more ownership of the process. The school also may feel more connected to the choice of parents, given that funds arrive immediately, or soon thereafter, rather than waiting for lengthy procedures to be followed through. Clearly, such state funding, of the universal or targeted type, is not what we had in mind as our final destination in this book. But could it be a useful mechanism for getting there? Would instituting a voucher or learning account system help undermine state education, so that we could see this as a first step towards the genuinely private alternative laid out here. Many have certainly argued that, including Joseph Blast and David Harmer (1997). I argued it myself once too, in Education Without the State (1996). There I painted a glowing picture of what might happen if state-funded learning accounts were available to all young people, simultaneously with lowering the school leaving age to 14, and if these accounts could be used at any 'approved' private educational setting or state institution: The important point is, they dramatically liberate the educational demand side. They bring very important incentives into schooling, allow increased funds to be used, and used more efficiently, and facilitate the development of the learning society. And they would help stimulate the supply-side, to create an entrepreneurial class of educators. They would be completely flexible - so young people could use them to fund a little bit of schooling here, some further education in a college there, an attractive course from a back-street educational entrepreneur there, and even buy multimedia equipment if they so desired in lieu of courses. I still feel a bit attached to the proposal, especially its flexibility, and still think that it may have some beneficial outcomes. However, I now see three main problems with it. First, I don't have faith that any government would ever introduce it, or at least not in the form that I foresaw. And this applies to any voucher system which could be used in any educational setting, public or private, in the way envisaged. We haven't seen any similar voucher proposal introduced by an advanced democratic government anywhere in the world.

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What we have seen in the USA, after considerable struggles, are rather limited experiments which severely constrain the types of schools (let alone more adventurous educational settings) at which the vouchers can be used, and limit the powers of schools receiving them in various undesirable ways, such as their ability to use voucher funds for religious education (see Dewey 1997). In some developing countries there have been some more promising developments, but at the risk of presenting a rather obvious hostage to fortune, the most promising development of all was in Pinochet's Chile, and this was severely curtailed once democracy was restored (Nunez Prieto 1995).The reason I risk including this here is because it reinforces the points mentioned in Sessions 2 and 4 earlier, on middle-class appropriation of welfare, and of the impact of rent-seeking and log-rolling in a democracy. It is highly unlikely that developments which could undermine the power of strong vested interests such as unions and the intelligentsia in universities, or which aim to benefit the poor at the expense of the middle classes (e.g. by targeting public education expenditure primarily toward the poor) could be instituted in a democracy, although a dictatorship, or very weak democracy as found in many developing countries, may be able to get away with bringing them in. For this reason, I am rather more pessimistic than I was in 1996 that anything resembling my flexible friend, the LIFE account, could be introduced. Second, there is the problem of what form the 'approval' for educational settings would take. In 1996 I did realistically see that any voucher principle would invoke the 'He who pays the piper calls the tune' principle. However, drawing on the precedent of what happened to independent schools receiving funds from the Conservative Government's 'Assisted Places Scheme' - a sort of voucher scheme for private schools ostensibly for the needy, although one which didn't quite work out that way -1 suggested that the regulation would only need to be of a very 'light touch' indeed for each educational setting: If the majority of their funds is received from private sources, then all they need to do is to register as an Independent School to be able to receive LIFE funds. However, if they receive the majority of their funds from public sources, then they would need to register and, as well, undergo a rigorous inspection, similar to that endured by state schools. (Tooley 1996a) I think I fell victim to a triumph of hope over experience there. Public funds would likely need much more public scrutiny than that, particularly given the diverse range of educational settings I had in mind to receive the funds. And if this is the case, then the voucher scheme has a very serious drawback indeed: private educational settings which were previously unregulated will get drawn under government regulations. The 'Give the state an inch, and she'll think she's a Ruler' principle may then get invoked, and before you know i t . . . the regulations could have undermined the desirable components of the private setting, and led to demands for further regulation, then funding and provision. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, I ignored the problem of fraud and

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mismanagement which would be likely to arise, again particularly given the diverse range of educational settings which could be in receipt of these public funds. Andrew Coulson (1999) carefully highlights these problems. He notes that 'every facet of the two existing pilot voucher programmes [in Milwaukee and Cleveland] has been probed and prodded by countless observers', as they are so much in the media spotlight because of their novelty (p. 325): 'It is particularly worrisome, therefore, that two of the seventeen Milwaukee schools accepting scholarship students were shut down in 1996 due to apparent fraud' (p. 325), viz., the misrepresentation of their enrolment figures. Coulson points out the issue here: The possibility of inflating enrolment figures in order to pilfer government coffers is inherent in any funding mechanism that separates payment from consumption. Public bureaucrats do not have first-hand knowledge of every student and every school to which they must allocate tax money, and are thus subject both to errors and to deliberate attempts to mislead them, as the Milwaukee cases attest, (p. 326) That is, in these extremely carefully scrutinized experiments, bad cases of fraud arose: how much worse could it be when such funding is the norm? Note how this is a problem inherent in public funding: Parents . . . typically know how many children they have, and are not easily duped into paying tuition for fictitious children. It is only the removal from parents of the responsibility of paying for their children's education that makes this sort of fraud feasible, (p. 326) Couldn't smart-cards or similar solve the problem of fraud? The evidence of the way South Houston police uncovered smart-card fraud on welfare chits suggests not: Police opened up their own convenience store to see if debit-card-using welfare recipients would ask for illegal cash payments, rather than purchasing groceries as intended ... Within a few days they had their first such request, and ten weeks into the sting operation the number of people allegedly wanting in on the deal had grown to 225. (pp. 326-7) The undercover officers were debiting a welfare recipient's card for $100 worth of food, giving the person $70 in cash. 'Variations on this theme could just as easily be orchestrated around government scholarship debit cards.. .Whenever the consumer is not the payer, such abuse is difficult to avoid' (p. 327). On all three counts, then, I think my proposal for a voucher-type scheme fell victim to, let's call it, youthful naivete. And I think any such scheme will be similarly suspect. So the first possible way forward does not appear to get us as far as we might want.

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2. Private management of state schools and services Our second potential way forward certainly doesn't suffer from the disadvantage that governments won't do it - because governments are doing it already to varying extents. In my research on the global education industry discussed in Session 3, we found examples of small but nonetheless significant public-private partnerships, including the Delhi Public Schools' 'satellite' schools, Pitagoras' involvement with management and quality control in Minas Gerais and Colombia, and the Colombian Coffee Grower's Federation partnership with the state to provide schools for the rural poor (IFC1998). All these are examples of our second potential way forward. This route is also very clearly part of Michael Barber's philosophy. Since coming to power Barber's influence has been apparent as Labour has explored the potential for private companies to be brought into the management of state schools and LEA services. Three relevant proposals were set out in the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act. The first is the Education Action Zone model. The intention here was to create a zone around two secondary schools and their feeder primary schools where almost 'anything goes', including opting out of the National Curriculum, or teachers' pay and conditions, to allow for maximum flexibility and innovation. Initially, the action zone proposal was almost a classic case of the way in which the vested producer interests can 'capture' a reform and transform it for their own ends - and if nothing else had changed would make me rather pessimistic about their potential. While it was made absolutely clear by Barber when announcing the zones that they were there in part to give schools freedom from LEA control, all but one of the initial zone proposals submitted were from LEAs. Why? The way the application form was drawn up, under advice from key educational providers, made it virtually impossible for any body other than an LEA to get the required information in time for the deadline. And if any school showed an inclination to 'go it alone' without the LEA, there were reports of considerable strong-arm tactics to make sure the headteacher and governors realized it was not in their interests to go that way at all. However, it is fair to say that after some disappointment about the first 25 zones created - they were just LEA governance under a new (and expensive) guise - the government has moved to make it easier for schools to bid, and it is likely that the next round, the results of which will be announced when this book is in press, will feature more innovative ways forward. And some day, we may see a private education management company running all of the schools within the zone. The second aspect of the legislation concerns individual schools which have been 'failing' (in the government's definition, involving continual low standards) for more than two years. These schools can now be taken over by central or local government, and could then be handed over to an education company to manage. It is possible already for LEAs to do this, and before the Act became law, Conservative-controlled Surrey put the management of one of its failing schools out to tender, Kings' Manor School, a

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contract awarded to the education company 3Es, as we noted earlier. Finally, there are the procedures in the 1998 Act which allow the Secretary of State to bring private education companies into the management of failing LE As. As we have already noted, the first such contract was awarded on 1 July 1999 to Nord Anglia to run the School Improvement Service in Hackney, while the Ethnic Minorities Achievement Service will be got into shape and similarly 'privatized' on 1 April 2000. Closely behind will be the London Borough of Islington and Liverpool - both authorities which have been 'failed', and which are likely to be privatized in toto - not an insignificant proposal, given their £16 million and £30 million turnover respectively. Similarly, in the USA, for-profit education companies have taken over the management of schools within School Districts and Charter Schools - public schools which have freedom from normal public school regulations. They are granted autonomy on condition that they reach the state's performance targets.The Edison Project is a key example here. It currently has contracts to manage 80 schools, and will probably double that number in the next year. It has succeeded in raising over $120 million of new investment - in addition to the original $40 million raised. The Edison Project has never been fired by a school district or Charter school board of trustees, even though to do so is easy within the terms of their contracts. Indeed, every school district they are involved with has asked them to expand, because all their schools have waiting lists. Moreover, they really are catering to deprived youngsters - 65 per cent of their pupils qualify for Title l,i.e. are at or below the poverty line. In American public schools, these kids generally lose ground each year. On standardized tests (i.e. not Edison's own tests, but those administered by the district), 84 per cent of Edison's classes have made statistically significant gains. On average for all classes, on norm-referenced tests, relating to all students in the country, students have gained five percentile points. Most school districts would claim that they were doing extremely well if they had a flat position. Are these types of reforms possible ways forward in terms of getting us to the 'private alternative'? And do they have any disadvantages for our purposes? I can see three major advantages. The first is that each of these possibilities has the potential to bring the 'seven virtues' of the profit motive (Session 5) into state education. That is, they can bring a range of new incentives, investment and innovation into the state sector, and improved management and customer concern. This could lead to dramatic improvements in quality and conditions for all children within the state schools taken over. I use the word 'potential' deliberately - for these virtues will depend on there being competing companies running geographically contiguous schools, enabling genuine choice of several brands, just as in the way we have choice with supermarkets now. So it would be less advantageous if a UK version of the Edison Project, say, had all its schools in the south-east and Nord Anglia all its in the north-west. (Even here, there would be some competition brought in - for the performance of these two chains would be compared with each other, and so competition would have some impact.)

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There is also less potential for our purposes of moving towards the private alternative if a single education company gets to run, say Liverpool or Islington LEA, for a private monopoly can be almost as bad as a public one. Again, however, provided that there are competing education companies in the country as a whole, then there will be some competitive influences brought to bear. For the company awarded one of these LEAs is also likely to be seeking further education ventures, and its performance in that LEA will be compared to the performance of other contractors and this will influence whether it can expand further into other spheres. It is also the case that the LEAs themselves are becoming far less important, as we noted in Session 5 above. What really matters is what the schools themselves are doing, and this will be independent of whoever is running the LEA.7 The second major advantage is that these modest privatization measures begin the process of getting people to think in terms of the advantages of education companies, and, in my language earlier, helps them to 'learn to love profit in education'. Once significant numbers of schools are being created which are run by education companies, and once parents and students can see the way this enhances investment in the schools, improves management and starts to eliminate some 'sink' schools, then there will be less resistance to the notion that education companies have a role in schools. The third major advantage concerns the ways in which such moves could help create or expand the class of educational entrepreneurs in a country. In the UK we have seen already how the introduction of local management of schools, grant-maintained (GM) schools and City Technology Colleges (CTCs) - all moves by the Thatcher government which devolved power away from LEAs to headteachers and governing bodies - helped foster and nurture a new breed of highly entrepreneurial headteachers. It is no accident that some of these headteachers are now at the forefront of education companies seeking to manage schools and LEAs (Valerie Bragg, for example, the principal of the first CTC, is a director of 3Es which won the Surrey contract, Gareth Newman, ex-principal of another CTC, is creating a new chain of private 'Newman Schools', while Tom Clark, principal of a leading GM school, is a director of a company seeking overseas contracts). I think these are three very real advantages which would enhance moves towards the private alternative. But there are also several disadvantages of these proposals which must be considered. The first is that this kind of contracting out could create rather cosy relationships between the state (local or national) and the education companies, which then might begin to undermine innovation and excellence. This would be rather in the way that the close symbiotic relationship between the Ministry of Defence and key defence industries in many countries is blamed for high prices and lengthy delays in the production process. In terms of education, would it be in any company's interest, for example, to help point out that there is a considerable amount of fat within government spending on education? Or would it rather be in their interest to keep quiet about this or, indeed, say that more state funds need to be devoted to education, in order to help inflate profits? Just as in the voucher

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proposals, there is the potential for corruption here too, with deals being done between central or local government and education companies which might not bear scrutiny. Whether companies could get away with doing this would depend upon how open the supply-side is - for if a couple of companies pretend that more funds are needed, there is an obvious market niche for a company to show how it could create high quality at less cost to the government. In the UK, the DfEE has created a group of ten companies on their Approved List. Perhaps ten is large enough to stop companies colluding to keep costs high. But this is a real danger and a definite downside to these types of moves. However, there are positive precedents to suggest that privatization of state-subsidized services in the UK won't necessarily lead to this happening. When the railways were privatized, companies were given subsidies for many routes, but on a diminishing basis, to be eliminated completely in a few years' time. And I notice that when the private company Stagecoach Holdings took over the ailing Sheffield Supertram, it cut operating losses from £3 million to £1.4 million in its first year of operation, and experts suggest that they will eliminate these operating losses altogether in the next two years - all without being forced to do this by the local authority, which would have been prepared to continue with the massive subsidy.8 Second, there is the danger of setting in stone the current system, and now with new vested interests to help preserve the status quo. It is my impression, for example, that consultants drawing up the procedures for the privatization of the LE As in the UK seem to have proceeded in a distinctly unimaginative fashion, seeking simply to contract out everything as it currently is. But it may well be that things as they are now are actually there undermining educational aspirations and standards, and contracting them out could simply reinforce that process. Third, there is also the danger of the types of performance contracts that will be brought to bear for the education companies taking over schools and LEA services. All companies will be in favour of performance-related rewards, of course. But performance could be very narrowly drawn up in terms of what is easily measured and may not be what is necessarily desirable in terms of educational outcomes. This could be in terms of getting teachers simply to teach to the test, in order to ensure the terms of the contract are met. Or it could be in terms of more arcane terms within the contract. For example, when one London borough was conducting market research to see whether it was worth contracting out its Education Welfare Service (EWS - the service which is there to combat truancy) it was adamant that its performance indicator for that service must be the number of parents taken quickly to court for not having their children in schools. A few discrete indicators like that might completely undermine a holistic view of an LEA's greater role in improving educational opportunities for all. Finally, another disadvantage within the US context, which may or may not be applicable elsewhere, is that currently private schools are seeking to become Charter schools. They then become in effect state schools, under strict

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regulations, and break the bond of financial responsibility with parents paying fees. This could actually be undermining moves towards the 'private alternative', rather than enhancing them. All these I think are genuine disadvantages to be weighed against the genuine advantages mentioned here too. Perhaps if this second route was the only way forward, again one might be a little pessimistic. But if it can be combined with our third approach below, (or per impossible, with a flexible voucher scheme as described above), then I think it has a great deal of potential for moving us towards the private alternative. It does have the key virtue that governments are willing to do it now, and that their willingness helps change the mind-set of the people that there is nothing wrong with the connection between profit and education. THE SNAKES AND LADDERS OF STATE I N T E R V E N T I O N

Before moving to the third possible way forward, let us just take stock of these solutions for a moment. The various options and possibilities described in this book, and ways forward for reform are laid out in the snakes and ladders diagram below. Where we are now is in the bottom left-hand corner. We have a state education system which has (almost) universal provision of education, universal funding and heavy regulation. Using this diagram we can also see how zm-dramatic the proposals that many put forward in education really are. For embracing choice systems in education - the kind that we mentioned in the Introduction which had very little to do with real markets - moves us in our snakes and ladders diagram . . . precisely nowhere. We are still in the bottom left-hand corner. Moreover, even more disappointingly for many, I assume, a full-blown voucher scheme - considered to be the pinnacle of achievement for many market reformers - takes us precisely nowhere too, at least when the vouchers can only be used within existing state-provided schools. Things get slightly better when we consider reforms which allow vouchers to be used in a wider variety of schools, including private schools, and proposals which undermine the state's monopoly over provision, bringing private companies into the management of schools. These take us up one diagonal place. Still these feature (near) universal funding. I would suggest that that would be as far as most people would have got in terms of their thoughts about markets in education, before reading this far, that is. The focus group also discussed the idea of moving towards a state 'safety net' funding idea, of targeted state vouchers or learning accounts. This wasn't pursued, although we noted in this chapter that both Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill had similar ideas. These kinds of proposals would take us horizontally across one square - as it is unlikely that with targeted vouchers specific regulation would be relaxed. (I am assuming that there is still a whole range of educational settings offered, including the aforementioned Charter schools, contracted out schools, and other opportunities too.) Finally, we get to the final column and either the top right-hand corner which is the 'private alternative', where the 3Fs - the Family, Freedom and

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Figure 1: Snakes and ladders of state intervention

Philanthropy - combine to ensure that quality is high and education is accessible to all. We've set these out graphically in order to illustrate what many will assume to be the only viable path of reform, if we are to move towards the private alternative. We have to start where we are, in the bottom left-hand corner. Only gradually can we move up diagonally to the next levels, gradually getting more virtuous as we move on in the general upward and onward direction. We have to take these incremental ladders, because nothing else would be politically viable. However, what the previous section has tried to show is that there may be dangers with such incremental steps. Not only is there the danger that we might simply move on to the next stage, only to stagnate there, but there are the dangers of the lurking snakes. For as long as we keep accepting that there is some state involvement in regulation and funding, then this legitimizes a slippery slope back down to total state education. (Joel's maxim: 'Give the state an inch and she'll think she's a Ruler' again.) The situation will always be

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unstable. Indeed, it could be argued that as various states historically started to intervene, they started from the top right-hand corner, and slowly slithered their way down, taking on more and more responsibilities and duties, not because of need, but because of the bureaucratic imperative to pursue the neat-and-tidy solution and to expand empires. The snakes show us the dangers of these slippery slopes. All this sounds rather negative as far as possible reform routes are concerned, and reflect some of the disadvantages which we suggested with the two possible routes above. However, there is a third route that we could represent on the above diagram by adding a ladder leading directly from the bottom left hand square to the top right. It's the 'Just Do It' route. 3. The 'Just Do It' route Our third possibility, the 'Just Do It' route, is there in embryo in Michael Barber's work too. We noted that Barber's final chapter is all about what the state should do to bring about the learning society. However, Barber ends on a note which is out of character with my reading of his earlier ideas - 'New' versus 'Old' Barber in action again perhaps. For he concludes with something which he clearly thinks is very important (he has saved it till last) and has no potential for government intervention at all (at least I'm assuming this is his intention!). It is all about individuals taking their own proud, first steps towards the 'learning revolution': 'through changing ... language people can change society' (Barber 1996, p. 304). He says let's use language to begin to create the learning society: instead of asking acquaintances 'What do you do?', as we generally do at dinner parties and the like, we might instead try asking 'What did you learn todayT Barber tried it, he tells us, and the 'effect was electrifying. I had more fun and learnt more than at any other event I can remember' (p. 305). The point of what he is saying is that, while he thinks government has a very important role, 'ultimately', it's all down to us, it 'depends on everyone playing their part. Most of all, the learning society... is the speech of the people' (p. 305). It fits in perfectly with the focus group's discussion of creating norms in society which support learning. That's 'just doing it' par excellence. And we find the same germ of an idea in Tom Bentley's book too. For his writing is absolutely jammed full of models of people and organizations 'just doing it'. All the examples he gives to illustrate his desirable types of learning are of individuals and organizations providing opportunities outside of the state, not prompted by the state, but because they themselves have seen a need to move in this way. And I also note something else of interest for my purposes in Bentley's writing. Each of his examples shares the striking characteristic that the valued type of learning takes place in what might be called the interstices of compulsory schooling - before school, after school, on weekends and in the vacations away from school and for groups who are excluded from mainstream schooling. And these considerations provide the basis for my solution, the way of

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taking that virtuous ladder from the bottom left to the top right-hand corner. It's to 'just do it', from all angles and approaches, chiselling away into the interstices of state schooling. Here's twelve of these fissures, in no particular order - except I've saved the most significant till last - that are there within the current system which will, I believe, lead to the collapse of state schooling. I'll put them in the context of England and Wales, but the lessons will be applicable to any other country - some of which may already be more advanced down this road than we are. They are my best guess of how the state system will be broken down, slowly one brick at a time at first, then with increasing vigour, until one day there are no more bricks left in the wall. First fissure, the private education management company. Linking in with our second possible approach above, private education companies will start to manage LEAs and schools around the country. Parents will see that, once a private management company takes over their LEA or school, service improves. They'll see enhanced investment and enhanced technology in the schools. They'll see children who want to learn, who are nurtured in an environment where learning and achievement are the norm. Slowly the sense that government provision is needed for high standards will disappear, and then be reversed. A parallel awareness that pervades the middle classes now - that independent schools are undoubtedly better than state schools - will hit a mass audience. Government schools will be seen to be undoubtedly worse than the privately-managed ones. These parents will be in receptive mood for educational entrepreneurs offering full-blown private education at an affordable price. Second fissure: parents attracted away from state schools to the emerging chains of private schools. We saw in Session 3 how entrepreneurs have created chains of high-quality, relatively low-cost private schools in developing countries. In the USA there is also a striking example, Nobel Learning Communities, now with 139 schools. Since 1994, the company has been growing at a rate of 30 per cent or more a year, acquiring 55 schools in that period, and obtaining $144 million in investment. Crucially, fees at Nobel schools are less than the average state school funding in the USA, and academic achievement significantly higher. Despite the relatively low fees, this for-profit chain can afford to keep average class size down to seventeen pupils, and the central administrative office has only 32 staff, at most 40 per cent of what a comparable state system would have. In the UK several groups of entrepreneurs and investors are just beginning to create something rather similar. Their hunch is that, while the political spotlight is increasingly being turned on education through the Blair government's spin, improvements will not be as dramatic as is hoped, leading to increasing dissatisfaction with state schools. These entrepreneurs are learning from the most sophisticated and advanced of the City Technology Colleges and grant-maintained schools, and from other research and development. Their aim is to create chains of highquality, technologically-innovative and very affordable schools. The companies are managed by masters of media spin, people anxious to convey in the strongest terms a political message: we can deliver the highest quality

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at less than the cost of state education and with minimal bureaucracy. Fast forward five to ten years. There are three or four such chains, with 200 to 300 schools. That's another quarter of a million children, say, in this new kind of private school. But this isn't private education as we know it today, hidden away as the guilty secret of many in the middle classes, complacent in its lack of innovation and ludicrously high fees. This is private education appealing to a larger audience, to tabloid readers as well as readers of broadsheets. Private education which does not shrink from publicity and making comparisons between itself and the state sector. Questions are being asked all the time as to how these schools can do it, without the costs and bureaucratic paraphernalia of the state sector. And questions are asked as to why these parents should be paying twice, once for their private schools, and once through the tax system for schools they no longer value. Third fissure, education for long-term sick9 and excluded children. Last year there were 100,000 children off school with long-term illnesses, and about 13,000 students permanently excluded from school (DfEE 1999, p. 47). No one has had much of a clue what to do with the long-term sick. Until now. A group of educational entrepreneurs is getting together with businessmen, investors, and technology experts to create a company which will offer them a superb educational experience. Using ASDL or more advanced technology, the company is creating a programme to cover the whole of the school curriculum, and which can connect them to others in a virtual national 'classroom'. A similar programme is developed for the permanently excluded children, but this time the company is creating purpose-built small-scale technologically sophisticated centres for these young people to attend, attached perhaps to a work-place where they can feel a part of a larger adult community. In both cases, the company can make substantial profits but still charge £1,500 a year or less to the LEA for each child. That is, for significantly less than the per capita funding for the state schools, these children can benefit from a very high quality schooling, in their homes or centres, using expert teachers, purpose-created curriculum materials, and the latest in technology. At first, teachers will be employed by the company in various geographical locations to assist with the curriculum delivery and to respond to difficulties. But as the programme evolves and expands, a sophisticated smart-card system will be introduced, allowing the company to create its own 'internal market' for teachers and curriculum developers. It will contract out its teaching, and will be able to see immediately who are the most popular and most effective teachers. Ineffective and unpopular teachers will not have their contracts renewed. Through these mechanisms, the quality of the curriculum and its delivery will be enhanced. Fourth fissure, other parents enviously look on. Soon other parents will start comparing what the long-term sick and excluded children are getting and wonder why their children can't have access to the same high-quality materials and teaching. The education company will recognize that its curriculum has wider appeal, and will start marketing itself to this new group. Initially it will offer after-school and weekend clubs, bringing the virtues of its stimu-

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lating and challenging curriculum to children in these interstices of state schooling, in small-scale learning centres connected to teaching headquarters, with very low overheads, either attached to existing schools, community centres or workplaces. But soon the company will realize that here is a market for parents to be able to buy a very affordable full-time 'schooling' in these centres, or indeed, in their own homes. A growing number of parents will begin to use these instead of sending their children to school. These will be ordinary working parents. Again a powerful constituency is being created. And because of the market success of this company, other education companies specializing in a similar combination of physical centres and distance learning will start to emerge. No doubt one of them will take the name e-ducation. Fifth fissure, supplements to schooling (1). More prosaically, but nonetheless of equally as great significance, a growing range of curriculum materials is currently being offered by private companies to parents and students, to help them through schooling and examinations, offering accelerated home learning packages and learning-made-fun before-and-after school clubs. As these markets grow, and as these materials develop in terms of quality and compass, a growing number of parents will start to realize that they are having to pay for these supplementary materials because of the inadequacies of state schooling. If schools were teaching all that they were supposed to be, then parents wouldn't need to be buying this stuff. In combination with other of the gaping fissures, their voices will be added to those who are wondering about the purposes and functions of state schooling and why it is not doing the job it is supposed to be doing. Sixth fissure, supplements to schooling (2). Some of the entrepreneurs who have created the supplementary learning packages will realize that their curricula are far superior to those on offer to schools, and will negotiate with LEAs - some of which themselves have been privatized - or individual schools, to contract out the delivery of a particular curriculum area, say mathematics or science. Initially, the company will simply take over a physical classroom within the school, and either employ existing teachers or, more likely, bus in its own. As time passes, more and more of the school curriculum will be offered by particular specialist companies, until the time comes when some state schools may become an empty shell in which private companies deliver the goods. But then the companies involved will want to improve what they can offer children - because their contracts will be up for renewal - and will also be continuously seeking to cut costs and find economies of scale. It will become apparent that they could do this with a mix of virtual and physically present teaching methods, and by utilizing a whole range of different teachers, from social workers through 'policemen', to inspirers and motivators, utilizing them differently with appropriate levels of technology. However, it is unlikely that any school or LEA could tolerate such flexibility, and will stop these kinds of ideas and innovation in their tracks. But the companies and parents will begin to realize that the current ways of doing things are not necessarily the best. Another constituency is added to the growing list of voices wanting change.

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Seventh fissure, the rise of the teacher-entrepreneur. Partly in response to all of the above fissures, a new breed of teacher-entrepreneur will be created. These teachers will see that there are numerous opportunities outside of state schooling, in the new private chains, in distance teaching, in the virtual global education market. Those with excellent skills will recognize that they have a keen market value. If they can animate and inspire young people, if they have the knack of helping children through problem areas, if they are inspirational seminar leaders, or great at pastoral care, they will become more aware that they don't have to settle for being just another cog in an uninspiring schoolwheel, paid the same mediocre rates as everybody else, or subject to the mockery of various government initiatives to improve their pay and status (which further control them). They will recognize that they are better going out on their own, or linking in partnership with like-minded others, and selling their services to the highest bidder. And they too will start to see ways of marketing what they have to offer, further chiselling away at whatever market-opportunity fissures they can see in the state edifice. Eighth fissure: home-schooling. This is growing at an extraordinary rate, with perhaps 5 per cent of parents homeschooling children in the USA and a smaller but still significant number in the UK. As dissatisfaction with state schooling grows, and the potential enhancement for home-schooling through technology becomes apparent, more parents will opt for this. Again, another constituency will be added to those who are not using state schooling but who are paying for it through taxation. Ninth fissure: the recognition that higher education costs money. A government-led reform is exposing a gaping fissure in the state education edifice, which will create an unstoppable momentum for change. In the UK, as students begin to pay fees for their higher education, and as these fees become more realistically priced and maintenance grants gradually disappear, young people and their parents will start to look again at the opportunity costs and quality of those long, leisurely university degrees. This probably won't be enough to precipitate much change on its own, but zooming in to capitalize on this dissatisfaction will be the for-profit universities - of the sort we saw in Session 3 offering students the chance of doing degrees more quickly, at a much lower price. Some of these courses will be Internet-based, others at physical centres which capitalize on economies of scale by having some parts of the curriculum delivered at a distance, by teachers serving thousands of students. Soon news will get out to the bus driver on the Oxford Road that his son or daughter (of the first generation in his family to go to university) can do a degree at a forprofit university for a fraction of what it costs to go to one of those posh universities. And he'll hear that they can guarantee his child employment afterwards, and offer a loan for living expenses which can be paid back during the first few years of work. Soon the mantra will go out: Tight student poverty, close the union bar', as the decadence and waste of current student life dawns on ordinary working people. Of course some young people will want their times of self-exploration and doubt, but there is nothing to stop them doing this at their own, not the tax-payers', expense, in 'gap years' or whatever.

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Tenth fissure, a new awareness of the opportunity costs of schooling. Following on from the awareness of the opportunity costs of higher education will come an awareness of the same for schooling itself. Bright kids who currently have to tread water for several of the years of secondary schooling will wonder why they can't move more quickly and get out of school, particularly as they have access to more and more flexible curriculum offerings and as education companies and teacher entrepreneurs market their courses to them. Some of these young people will want to get out of schooling to proceed with their chosen careers, others will want to get out in order to drop out, or do voluntary work or travel. Now that there is no longer the promise of a free university experience to buy them off with, these young people will become increasingly vociferous in their complaints about the waste of their time being at school. Eleventh fissure, the demand for a solution to the 'paying twice' dilemma. Dissent from all quarters grows from those using private education opportunities, but who are paying for state schooling through their taxes. Politicians will become aware that a whole new constituency has been created, right in the heart of their favoured 'middle England'. The parents patronizing the chains of private or virtual schools don't have lots of surplus income, they are often having to cut back on some luxuries to pay fees. It is worth it, but why should they be paying twice, for private as well as public education? In exactly the opposite way to that envisaged by George Walden, by opting out of the state sector less wealthy parents will make politicians acutely aware of the need to do something about state education. But, by this stage, gone will be any sense that what needs to be done is to throw good money after bad, or to push through yet more burdensome reforms. This new constituency of parents will respond to the politician who gives voice to their injustice and puts forward a proposal for tax refunds for those in private education. It may not pass immediately. But as the chains of schools take on more students, and other parents look on enviously, aware that they are getting an inferior deal, then soon the political pressure will be irresistible. Twelfth fissure, the unleashing of demand. With a tax refund available, the current system will be completely shaken up. The wealth of private education opportunities which have been brewing in the background will become accessible and attractive to a huge constituency. The revolution truly will have begun. And that's as far as my imagination need take us. From then on, the road is open to take us to the private alternative, in all the ways we have described it here. But let's be quite clear - the beauty of this route is that no one of us need to start worrying about how we can get an educational tax credit through the political process now. The ways and means will follow, once the political constituency is large and vociferous enough. It's a crucial difference. When there is a large enough critical mass of people ready for change, then the politicians can act in complete safety. And act they will. The 'just do it' route puts power back in the hands of the people. But notice the impact which such a proposal can have on those who are concerned with

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education and social inclusion. It provides a different route for social action. No longer do you have to try to get your ideas in a form which has to impress any politicians, constrained as they are by the tyranny of the thinkable. No longer do you have to go through all the political shenanigans and power-plays in order to bring about what you want. No longer do you have to compromise your true values for the politically feasible. This route provides you with the incentives and initiatives to unleash your energies now, to do what you think will be best for people. All you have to do is to carry some investors or sponsors with you. That's a hell of a lot easier than trying to carry politicians. So, particular policies required: none. Let government follow the people for a change. It is time for the people to reassert themselves, to take back what was taken from them by stealth in 1870. It wasn't meant to work out this way. But now it is time for the people to reclaim education - from schooling and from the state. The Times Educational Supplement gave a piece of mine on the theme of people in developing countries weighing up the pros and cons of private and state education and opting for the former, the heading: 'The lesser of two evils'. I remember what Mae West had to say about that one: faced with the choice 'between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before'. That's not the choice facing us in education now. The private alternative is being tried in embryonic form around the world. The time is now ripe for us to carry it forward to the next stage. LAST WORD TO AND FOR MY FOCUS GROUP As I finish this, the focus group has finished its dinner party with its special guest and his wife, who were both very impressed by the fine young people and their passion for education, which they too shared. Now a disco-dance has been laid on for them all. After several rather indifferent numbers, Jack, doubling as DJ, puts on a record which gets all four couples straight up on to the dance floor. A middle-aged male American voice narrates over a slow mix, offering his speech-day advice to a graduation class, ranging from why it is not wise to read beauty magazines ('They'll only make you feel ugly') to why they should value their parents and siblings ('They're most likely to stick with you in the future'). Oh, and to be kind to their knees ('You'll miss them when they're gone').10 Watching the four couples slowly dance to this beat, and especially watching Joel and Jayshree, who seemed to have a particular concern for education, if I could offer them 'only one tip for the future', what would it be? If you have a passion for education and a heart throbbing with social concern, then apprentice yourselves to one of the many educational entrepreneurs you can find, in your own country or around the world. Do an MBA by distance learning while you're at it - there's a distinct shortage of people with a passion for education and the clout of an MBA to boot. And use your imagination tempered by the desires of your heart to devise solutions to the challenges facing us in education. You don't have to dissipate your energies lobbying

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politicians to help effect that change. What we need are cheap, cost-effective solutions to educational problems. You can be in the vanguard of working those out. Let the politicians huff and puff about their essential role in it all; they'll be huffing and puffing to catch up with you when they realize the world has moved on. NOTES 1 For a more detailed critique of Barber's ideas, see Tooley (1999a) on which this section is based. 2 Barber has borrowed the notion of 're-engineering' from the management 'gurus', Hammer and Champy. Interestingly, their argument has itself been criticized for avoiding the implications of chaos theory: 'they are seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea that somehow there is an optimal process that can be planned or designed' (Parker and Stacey 1994, fn 3, p. 65). For example, Hammer and Champy argue that 'Building a strategy around what [technology] one can buy in the market today means that a company will always be playing catch up with competitors who have already anticipated it. These competitors know what they are going to do with the technology before it becomes available, so they will be ready to deploy it when it becomes available' (Hammer and Champy 1993, p. 100). Clearly the idea that a business can really know what it will do with as yet unavailable technology is absurd - and is perhaps not to be taken literally, but Parker and Stacey argue that the implications of Chaos Theory are that 'a firm cannot know at the outset what it will ultimately do even with existing technology' (p. 65). Hence, Barber may be falling here for a one-off're-engineering' project, rather than a process which will 'continually generate novelty and adaptability' (p. 66), as would be required for chaotic systems. 3 For advice on setting up a focus group of your own, advice which I took very much to heart when setting up mine, see the excellent Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (Morgan 1997) or the more comprehensive Focus Group Interviews in Education and Psychology (Vaughn et al. 1996). 4 See for example, Blankenhorn (1995), Dennis (1993), Dennis and Erdos (1992), Davies (1993), Morgan (1995), Berger and Berger (1983). 5 See for example Husen 1974,1986, Hutchins 1968, Ball 1993. 6 He first wrote of the idea in a 1952 essay, later republished in 1955 in an edited book, and finally reappearing in Friedman's own 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. 1 A possible conflict of interest here is that one of the LEA's statutory responsibilities is 'supporting and training school governors' - and the government is at present thinking of privatizing this as part of the LEA's services. But then the LEA will be supporting and training governors to become more aware of the potential market of services on offer, and of course the company will also be a service provider, so may be tempted to sway the schools towards its services. A way around this problem would be to separately privatize the governing body training and support. This would allow a private education consumer organization to be created which could train and support school governors nationally, not just in one LEA, in being more entrepreneurial, using more of their devolved budgets to buy services from private-sector companies, and perhaps looking to the possibility of contracting out their school management too.

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8 'Stagecoach to propose new Sheffield line', Tramways and Urban Transit, July 1999, No. 739, p. 247. 9 This is the official, somewhat awkward, terminology. 10 'The Sunscreen Song (Class of '99)' by Baz Luhrmann, EMI, 1999 (No. 1 in the Charts as I write this in June 1999). The full text of the song can be found at http://www.powerup.com.au/~songhurs/every.htm. It was originally composed by a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich, as an attempt to indulge her own fantasy of pontificating to the young from her accumulated wisdom.

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Index

accountability 9,15,170,194 'exit' 132,176,178,179,194 of the market 175-6 money-back guarantee 176,178,194, 218 political 176,177-80,194-5,206 'voice' 176-7,194 ad hoc approach 91-2,141,147-8,181, 208

Adey, Philip 199 advertising 97,112-14 Advisory Group on Citizenship 141-7, 149,151-2 ADvTECH education company (South Africa) 115,116,117 affordability 84-6 aggression 51-2 air traffic control 182-3 American National Center for Clinical Infant Programs 53 Apollo Group 98 Argentina 66,196 Aristotle 140 Arrow's Theorem 168-9 Australia 10 autonomy 27-8,160-1 Bailey, Charles 60n. Ball, Stephen I 12-13,126,171n., 222 Barber, Michael 2-3,4,8,12,15,48-9, 111, 130-1,175,180,199,204,212, 214-19,226,232 Barr, Nicholas 133,134,198

Barrow, Robin 28,58-9,60n. Beckett, Francis 196 Benn, Melissa 19 Bentley,Tom 2-3,8,26-7,58,65,212-14, 232

Berger, Brigitte 239n. Berger, Peter 239n. Berlin, Isaiah lOOn. Black, Paul 3 Blair, Tony 4,148,204,219 Blankenhorn,D. 239 Blast, Joseph L. 223 Blunkett, David (Secretary of State for Education and Employment) 26, 141,196 brand names 85,104,112-14,198 Brazil 2,104-6,112,113,115-17,118-19, 123,201-2 Brighouse, Harry 78-83,170 Brighouse,Tim 65,124 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 83 Brody,N 217 Brougham, Henry 68 Brown, Byron W. 133-5 Brummer, Johann (chairman of Educor) 110 Bryant, Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan 67,71 Burt, Sir Cyril 209-10 Byers, Stephen (School Standards Minister 1997-8) 172,173,174

252

Index

Canada 10,57,65 Carr, Wilfred 160-1,162,165-6 censorship 70 Centre for Open Distance Education for Civil Society (CODECS) (Romania) 111,116 Centres of Learning 39-40,43,88-91,93, 95,153-4,184,219-20 chains hotel 83-5,104 school 84-7,103-24 supermarket 11,12-15,84-6,104, 175-8,194 ChampyJ. 239n. charities see philanthropy children excluded 65,234 long-term sick 234 over-fives 38^7,55-60 under-fives 34-8,48-54,87,219 Chile, voucher scheme 165 Chitty, Clyde 19 choice between suppliers 64,130-2,239n. parental 9,11,124-7,132-8,179 personal costs of 126-7 citizenship aptitudes for 142,152,159 concepts for 142,152,159 knowledge and understanding for 28-9,140-1,142-3,148-53,159 school curriculum for 141-7,208 skills for 142,152,159 values for 142,152,159 citizenship see also democracy City Technology Colleges 197,228,233 Clark, Gordon H. 28 Cobbett, William 25,70 COC see Colegio Oswlado Cruz Cohen, Carl 171n. Colegio Oswlado Cruz (education chain, Brazil) 105-6,113,115,116,117, 119,121,123 Coleman, Stephen 151 Colombia 66,165,226 Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers 103,226 competition 179,187,206,227-8 compulsion compulsory learning 46-7,94

compulsory schooling 9, lOOn., 134, 207-8 history of compulsory schooling 2-3, 16,25-6,67-75,205 conflation of schooling and education 25-7,55-60,205-6,208,210,212 consumers 175-6,178 Cote d'lvoire 66 Coulson, Andrew 4,28,65,70,75-7,99, 125,196,225 Crick, Bernard 140,141 Damelin, Dr Benjamin (founder of Damelin/Educor) 110 Daviesjon 239n. day-care 36-7,48-54 staff turnover 53 Dearden,R.F. 27,60n. Deem, Rosemary 17 Delhi Public Schools (chain of schools in India) 107,120-1,123,201,226 deliberation 160-1 democracy 139-53 competency testing for 143-6,155-6 and control of education 160-71, 206-7 educative function of 157-9 limitations on 166-70,207 DEMOS 148 Dennis, Norman 239n. deschooling 25,70,206 development, sustainable 145 Dewey, Douglas 224 Deweyjohn 160,196 Di Genio, Joao Carlos (founder of UNIP/Objetivo) 105 direct grant schools 210-11 distance learning 98,109,110, 111, 121, 201,234-5,236 diversity 210 Dominican Republic 165 DPS see Delhi Public Schools drug regulation 182 Dworkin, Gerald 125 early childhood 34-8,48-54,87,219 economic growth 95 Edison Project (USA education management company) 180,227 Education 2000 97

Index instrinsic worth 27,29-31,38-9 as instrumental good 27-9,38-9 nature of 3-5,24-61 as schooling 25-7,55-60,82-3,205-6, 208,210,212 Education Action Zones 226 education acts Education Act (1870) 67,71 Education Act (1944) 177 Education Act (1980) 177 Education Act (1993) 203n. Education Reform Act (1988) 179, 183 School Standards and Framework Act (1998) 172,174,196,214,226 education companies 103-4,124,187, 220,221,233 brand name 85,104,112-14,198 dangers of corruption 228-9 efficiency 121 expansion 104,114-17 horizontal integration 114-15 lateral integration 115 vertical integration 114-15 franchising 116-17 funding for the less advantaged 104, 121-2 innovation 104,119,120-1,198 quality control 104,117-19 raising capital 116 research and development 104,119, 198-9 social responsibility programmes 200-1 Education and Employment, Department for 59,65,180,194-5,214 administrative costs 174-5,184,202n. attacks on LEAs 172-4 Education Investment Corporation (Educor) 109-11,112,113,114-15, 116,117,118,200,201 Educational Choice Charitable Trust 98 educational research 10-11,17,56,107, 119,185,198-9 Educational Welfare Service 229 England and Wales, history of education in 2-3,16,25-6,67-75,205 entitlement 45-6,206,213 environmental issues 145 Equal Opportunities Commission 49

253

equality of opportunity see equity equity 28,62-101 adequate minimum education for 78-87 administration 186,194 and family background 78-83 and government intervention 9-10, 62-4,206 and social disadvantage 78-83 Erdos, George 239n. Ethnic Minorities Achievement Service 227 excluded students 65,234 exit see accountability externalities, of education 28,90,94-5, 139 failing schools 5,197,226 family 48-54,220-1 dysfunctional 15,49,54,74,80-1,83, 86,219,221 and equality of opportunity 78- 87, 219 income 11,15,86,89,96 negative attitudes to education 73-4 parental choice 9,11,124-7 parental rights 125-6,206 role of mother 53-4,61 taxation of 221 two-income families 37,54,221 working-class 25 Flew, Antony lOOn. focus groups 22-3,31-47,87-95,127-30, 153-9,184-93,209,220 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 181 Forster (Education) Act (1870) 67,71 Forster, William 67,71-2 France 16,66,163,205 freedom 220-1 Friedman, Milton 132,139^0,166,222 Friedman, Rose 132,140 Frisch, Lawrence E. 171n. funding of education 11,85-6,87-95,96, 121-4,161,199-200,207 by children 88-9 further education see higher education Gardner, Howard 212,217 Gardner, Philip 163

254

Index

Gates, Bill 6-7 gender equality 53-4,145 general interest, promotion of in democracy 158 Germany 4,16,65,209,212 non-state provision 76-7,205 Gewirtz, Sharon 13,126,166 Giddens,Tony 17 Goleman, Daniel 212 government, limited 169 Graham, Keith 171n. grant-maintained (GM) schools 173, 197,228,233 Green, Andy 163 Green, David G. 171n. Gutmann, Amy 141,152,163,165,166, 170 Hackney, London Borough of see LEAs Hackney Downs School (London) 124 Halpin, David 13,125 Hammer, M. 239n. Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government 151 Hargreaves, David 55,125 Harmer, David 223 Harris, Neville 202n. Hartnett, Anthony 160-1,162,165-6 Harty, Sheila 17-19 Haskins,Ron 50,52 Hayek, E A. 166-70,208 Head Start 50 health risks, day care and 52 Herrnstein, Richard J. 49,50,54 High/Scope Perry Pre-School Project 49-50; see also Head Start higher education 94,218,222 costs 236 demand for 7 in developing countries 63,165 in England and Wales 74-5 in Germany 75 private expenditure in 63,74-5 in US A 75 Hirschmann, Albert 176 Hirst,PH. 30,60n. Hochschild, Luis (founder of TECSUP) 109 Hodge, Margaret 49 home-schooling 195,236

Horn,Albrecht 63 human rights 145 Hume, David 140 Illich,Ivan 26,58 illiteracy 1,4,7,67,72,76,162 functional 65 India 2,107-9,113,114,116,117,120-1, 123,196,201,226 Individual Learning Account 222 Individual Learning Promise 217-18 individualism 160-1 Indonesia 17,18,66,196 industry, demand for educated workers 74,76 information and communications technology 6-7,57-8,99-100,106, 120-1,151-2,217,219 education in 107-8 information problem 9,132-8 innumeracy 4 functional 65 inspectors, school 72,197 Institute of Economic Affairs 67,68 instrumental concept of education 35, 38-9,87-8 International Adult Literacy Survey 4 International Evaluation of Education Achievement (IEA) 4 International Finance Corporation 102 Internet 6-7,120,151,218,236 intrinsic value of education 27,29-31,35, 38-9 investment see funding of education lonescu, Adrian (founder of CODECS) 111 James, Estelle 165 Japan 4 Jimenez, Emmanuel 164-5 Johnson, Richard 25-6 Jonathan, Ruth 16,28 King's Manor School, Surrey 219,226 Korea 4,17 KPMG (management consultancy) 172 Krashinsky,M. 28,126 Labour education policy 3,48-9,141, 219,226-7,233

Index LaFollette, Hugh 171n. language skills 50-1 Lauder, Hugh 10,11-12,20 Laverdos, George (founder of Speciss College) 111-12 Le Grand, Julian 79-80 Leach, Penelope 53 learning networks 212-14 liberal concept of education 29-31,38, 87-8,92-4,97 liberty, promotion of in democracy 165-6 Lieberman, Myron 4,86 life-long learning 47 Lifelong Individual Fund for Education 222-5 Lively, Jack 156 local education authorities (LEAs) 194-5,202n., 214,228-9 administration costs 173-4,184 and Education Action Zones 226 government dissatisfaction with 172, 173-4 Hackney 172,175,227 Islington 227-8 Kensington & Chelsea 173 Lambeth 175 Liverpool 175,228 Manchester 173 Nottinghamshire 173 Oxfordshire 173 Service Strategy and Regulation (SSR) 173 Surrey 219,226 Tower Hamlets 175 local management of schools (LMS) 183-4,228 Local Nutrition Authority 14-15 Locke, John 140 Lockheed, M.E. 164-5 log-rolling (political bargaining) 169-70, 224 Lucas, J.R. lOOn. McAvoy, Doug (Gen Sec of NUT) 196 McMurtry, James 16 McNeany, Kevin (founder of Nord Anglia) 172 Major, John 219 Malaysia 18 Malthus, Thomas 70

255

Mann, Horace 196 marketing of education 46 markets definition 11-13 in education 10-17 education for 16-17 Marks, John 63 mathematics international comparisons 4 testing 3 May, Theresa (Opposition Education and Employment spokesman) 174 mentoring 36,37,46,221 Mill, James 67-8,70 Mill, John Stuart 71,72,140,157-9, 222-3,230 Millennial Four (books) 2-3,5,26,48,65, 99,132,205,208,209-19 Mitch, David F. 68-9,72 Molnar,Alex 17-19,57 Monopolies Commission 194 monopoly 128-9,132,206,228 Morgan, Patricia 49-53 Morris, Estelle (Minister of State for Education) 196 Mosler,SirClaus 49 Mulgan, Geoff 148 Murray, Charles 87,181-3 National Commission on Education 49 National Curriculum 209,216,226 Working Groups 3 National Forum on Values in Education and the Community 147 National Institute for Information Technology (India) 107-8,113,114, 116,117-8,119,122 National Union of Teachers (NUT) 196 neat and tidy syndrome 141-3,145-7, 152-3,159-60,181,207,208,213-14 neighbourhood effects see externalities Neiva, Evando (founder of Pitagoras) Nestle 18 Netherlands, The 65 New Statesman 67,196 New Zealand 7,10,12 Newcastle Commission on Popular Education 69,71,163 NUT see National Institute for Information Technology

256

Index

Nobel Learning Communities (chain of private schools, USA) 233 NordAnglia 172,180,227 norms, pressures of 73,232 nursery education see also day care 48-51,211 Oakeshott, Michael 29-30 Objetivo see UNIP/Objetivo Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) 172,174 O'Hear,Anthony 29-30 O'Keefe, Dennis 65 Olasky, Marvin 85 Open University 98,111 opportunity costs 73,236-7 Paine, Thomas 70,222,230 parents see family participation rates 7 paternalism 83,133 Pawar, Rajendra S. (founder of NUT) 107-8 Paxman, Jeremy 199 performance testing 229 Perkins, David 212,217 personal, social and health education 27, 59-60 Peru 109-10,115,119,120,121,196 Peters, Richard S. 29,30,60n. philanthropy 69,74,86,91-2,94,97,163, 206,207,213,220-1 company-centred 200-2 Philippines, The 165 Phillips, Melanie 2-3,4,8,209-10,218 Pitagoras Group (chain of schools in Brazil) 106,114,115,117,118-19, 120,123,201-2,226 Pizza Hut 17-18,19 Places Apart 40,47,95,219-20 Plato 22 Poland 65 political equality 166-70,207; see also equity Political Proficiency Certificate 155-9, 171n. Porter, Alex 140 Power, Sally 13,125 prejudice 144 preparation for adult life 38-9

price mechanism 11,179 Pring, Richard 29,30-1,60n. private education management companies see education companies private schools 65-6,210-11,224 costs 163-5,234 elitist 1 superiority over public 72,86,164-5 see also education companies privatization of education 210,222-38 profit 111,221 not-for-profit 86-7,195-6 virtues of profit motive 187-93, 195-202,227 propaganda 206 provision of education 11,65-6,85,161, 207 developing countries 66,102-27,205 public choice theory 80 publishing and multimedia development 108,109,115 Q-Tips sponsorship 18 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority 141,183 quality control 104,117-19,185,194, 197-8 Quiet Zones 40,219-20 radio 97,115 Ranson, Stewart 171n. Rawlsjohn 20-1 Reagan, Ronald 139,166 recruitment, education companies and 115,200 Reformation 76 regulation of education 11,85,161, 207-8,224-5 non-government 181,183,206 religion in education 76-7,220 Riker,W. 168 Robbins Committee 75 Robertson, Heather-Jane 17-19,57-8, 62,78 Romania 111,116,121,196 Rowlinson, Charles (CEO of Educor) 110 Russia 196 Rutter, Michael 55

Index scale, economies of 185,194 scholarships 122 school boards, England and Wales 67 school boards (USA) 202n., 227 school districts (USA) 202n., 227 School Standards and Framework Act (1998) see education acts schooling education as 25-7,55-60,82-3,205-6, 208,210,212 supplements to 235 universal 208 universal without the state 2,67-79, 205 schools Charter Schools (USA) 197,227,229 City Technology Colleges (CTCs) 197,228,233 direct grant 210-11 effectiveness and improvement research 63 elitist private 1 governors 97,239n. grant-maintained (GM) 173,197,228, 233 parental choice of 9,11,124-7,132-8, 179 Saturday schools 189-93 selective 209-10,211-12 'shack' 1,102-3 'sink' 64,83,84-5,130,228 in Victorian England 67-74 Seldon, Arthur 68 selective schools 209-10,211-12 self-help, community 163 Service Strategy and Regulation (SSR) 173 Shayer, Michael 199 Singapore 4 Smiles, Samuel 163 Smith, Adam 181 Smith, David J. 63 social cohesion 94 social skills 51-2 Society for Teaching Altruism to Everyone (STATE) 90-1 South Africa 2,102-3,109,112,113,116, 117,118,200,201 special needs 184,185,195 Speciss College, Zimbabwe 111-12,113, 114,116

257

sponsorship of education 17-19,95-6, 113-14 spontaneous order 208,214-15 standards, educational 3-4,197-8,208 Standards and Effectiveness Unit (DfEE) 175 state intervention, levels of 9-10,207-8 Stephens,W.B. 72,73,74 Sternberg,R.J. 217 stock exchange, regulation 181 strategic planning 186,194,195 student loans 121-3,220,221 subsidies cross-subsidization 123-4 government 68-9,90-1 supply, planning of 185-6,194 Sutch, Screaming Lord 193-4 Switzerland 65,209 Taiwan 17 Tanzania 165 Task Group on Assessment and Testing 3 Taunton Report (1868) 162-3 tax credits 237 taxation deadweight costs of 203n. as disincentive 76-7,86-7 and family 221 on literacy 70 as 'paying twice' 237 teachers bonds with students 42-3,57 as entrepreneurs 87,183-4,215,223, 228,235-6 funding of 88,93,186-7,199,212,220 as human support 43,56,187 asinspirers 42,56,93,187 as learning guides 42,56,93 monitoring of 111'-19,215 as pedagogical assistance 42-3,56 peripatetic 93-4 as seminar leaders 43,56,93-4,187 as supervisors 43,56 training of 43,107,215 utilization of 199 technology in schools see Information and Communications Technology TECSUP (chain of technical colleges in Peru) 109-10,119,120,121,122, 123,196

258

Index

television 97,105,115 advertising revenue 97 testing international comparisons 4 national 3-4,197 and performance contracts 229 Thailand 164-5 Thatcher, Margaret 139,166,173,177, 178-9,216-17,228 Thomas Coram Research Unit 50-2 three Fs 19-21,231 Times Educational Supplement 1-2,238 Tomlinson, Sally 63 Trevelyan, George Macaulay 67,71 truancy 56,65,229 Tullock, Gordon 169 UNIP/Objetivo education chain (Brazil) 104-5,114,115,116-17,118,120, 123,201 United Kingdom lOOn. United Nations 186 United States 197,202n. educational standards 4,65 higher education 75,196 non-state provision 75-6,98,205,227, 229,233 universal attendance 65 universities see higher education values in education 29,58 spiritual and moral development 220 Varkey Group (UAE education company) 123 veil of ignorance 20-2 vocational education 16-17 voice see accountability voluntary projects 213 voting Borda Count method 167-8 cycle of preferences 168 paradox of 167-8 procedures 167 vouchers Chile 165,224

private 97-8,132,136 problems of corruption 168-70,225 targeted 222-3,230 universal 222-4,230 USA 98,224,225 Walden, George 2-3,23n., 48-9,65-6, 132-3,134,135-6,210-12,237 Walford, Geoffrey 125 Weisbrod,B.A. 28 welfare benefits 11,86 middle-class appropriation of 79-80, 224 Wellington 55-6 West,E.G. 67-71,77,87,140,161 West, Mae 238 Whelan, Robert 163 White, John 27,60n., 141,160,161,171n. White, Patricia 125 Whitty, George 13,19,125,171n. Wilkinson, Helen 148 Wilson, John 60n. Winch, Christopher 170,176 Woodhead, Chris 17,172 World Bank 7,102,103 xenophobia 144 youth alcoholism and drug dependency 55, 149,213 alienation 55,90,148-9 employment 55 ghettoization of 55,97 teenage pregnancy 50 truancy from schools 56,65,149 work experience 55-6 youth culture 55 Zaher, Dr Chaim (founder of COC) 105-6 Zimbabwe 111-12,113,116