It is in the interests of local authorities to make sure no school becomes outstanding

23 January 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Even where education officers aren’t hampered by PFIs, there are still plenty of barriers to raising standards. In those boroughs where one comprehensive is conspicuously better than all the rest, the good comp will end up massively oversubscribed. It follows that a majority of the parents who’ve applied will not end up getting into their first choice of school — and a fair percentage of them will be so cheesed off about this that they will not vote for whichever party is running the local authority at the next council election. It follows that if local education officers succeed in creating a high-performing state school they will not please their political masters. On the contrary, their efforts are more likely to be met with redundancy.

Alan Milburn, the government’s ‘mobility tsar’, is aware of this design flaw in the provision of state education and he came up with a solution. Why not give the poorest children a voucher worth 150 per cent of the amount the state typically spends on educating them? If their parents are unhappy with the existing provision, they can simply switch to a better performing state school, thereby giving local authorities a financial incentive to drive up standards. Unfortunately, of the 88 recommendations Milburn made on improving social mobility, the government has only adopted 83 — and this wasn’t one of them.

The only way to improve standards in state schools is to create genuine competition and that will never happen under the present system. The problem with the Tories’ policy is that they’re not proposing to set schools free, merely to transfer state control from the local to the national level. In the long run, the best solution is to hand control over to parents and teachers.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.