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Friday 9 January 2009

Good news for London

Guido writes, quite rightly, about the renaissance in free market think tanks.

One of the liveliest and most infuential is, of course, Policy Exchange, and it's something of a coup for Boris Johnson to have lured its director, Anthony Browne, to be his policy director.

It's also very good news for London to have so able a man directing policy.

What a change from the Socialist Action cell which took charge under Livingstone.

Michael Gove's advocacy of the Swedish model of "free schools" may owe a little to another recent ASI report Open Access for UK Schools: What Britain can learn from Swedish Education Reform.

If Denmark has a long history of choice, the situation in Sweden could not have been more different. High tax rates meant that school fees were unaffordable to all but a tiny number of parents; so as recently as 1990 less than one per cent of pupils attended independent schools — the lowest proportion in the Western world.

But far from Swedish schools providing a model education, standards were low and the schools paid no attention to parental concerns. They didn’t need to – their funding would remain intact however bad their results.

By 1991, popular dissatisfaction had grown to such an extent that the new right-of-centre government had made education reform one of its key pledges. The 1991 legislation devolved power from the central government to parents, municipalities and independent schools. Crucially, the reforms also introduced an element of parental choice in education. For the first time, parents were free to send their children to any government school within their municipality — or to an independent school, with public funding following the child to the school chosen. Independent schools approved by the new National Agency for Education would receive 85 percent of the cost of educating a student in the municipal school system. Within a year, the number of independent schools doubled.

Swedish governments have changed the voucher amount twice since 1991, first reducing it from 85 to 75 percent and, then, in 1997 raising it to (in theory) 100 percent of municipal schools' funding per student. The National Agency for Education now receives hundreds of applications each year from parents and educators hoping to start their own schools. In 1999 it received 195 applications and in 2000 the number increased to 269, due largely to the increased demand for independent secondary schools.

Though they began as a tiny minority of the education supply, independent education is a growing and diversifying sector whose influence for good on Swedish education is out of all proportion to the current proportion of the student population — 3.6 percent in 1999 — that it serves. The number of independent schools is growing by between 0.5-1% and educating approximately 3500 more students every year, at a time when the school-age population in Sweden is declining.

The fastest-growing schools are those started by teachers, parents and educators who were dissatisfied with the education provided by their local government schools. Each new school offers students an educational alternative in response to a local demand and is paid for by the public voucher.

Sweden's voucher system has been an enormous step toward decentralization, but all schools are still heavily regulated by central government. Both independent and municipal schools must follow curricula imposed by the government, which stipulates the exact number of hours each mandatory subject must be taught, and all students must sit local government tests four times in their academic careers.

A recent report by the OECD recommended that Sweden should continue to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its education system by pursuing further the decentralization process started in 1991. It recommended more explicit independence for school administrators and greater parental influence on schools. In return for increased local control, the Ministry could demand greater accountability and quality controls from the municipalities, as New Zealand has done.

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