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Thursday 4 December 2008

Lessons for less: affordable excellence

Neil Collins commends the business plan, and theeducational ethos, of the New Model School Company

The answer lies with the local authorities. The Royal Borough is proud of its schools. It can produce statistics to show how well they’re doing, and quite a few have unfilled vacancies. Are more schools needed? No, say the planners, what we really need is more housing. They have a hard task, as property owners seek to maximise the value of their tiny slice of the country’s most valuable real estate, and other boroughs are worse. Brent’s planners have simply refused to respond to phone calls, letters or emails from NMS.

Many London councils oppose private education on principle. They really believe that forcing children into a bad state school will make it better. Besides, each child lost to the private sector shrinks their empire a little more.

This is the real reason why private education is so expensive in London. Maple Walk has proved that it takes little more than enthusiasm and determination to launch a primary school charging affordable fees once planning permission has been granted. But the process is interminable and the outcome uncertain. Without permission, there’s no school, and the housing shortage, like the poor, is always with us. Meanwhile, another generation of children is denied the chance of a decent education.

The way to cut this Gordian knot has been shown clearly enough in Sweden — as Fraser Nelson wrote here recently and as Rick Williams, chairman of Maple Walk’s governors, explains: ‘Planning is the key. In Sweden there’s an educational planning authority which is designed to cut through the delays and local vested interests.’ Sweden, the West’s most socialist country, introduced education vouchers and allows any small group of parents to set up a school. Says Whelan: ‘Studies in Sweden and where vouchers have been tried in the US show that a plurality of providers benefits those at the bottom just as much as those further up.’

This is only counterintuitive to those who believe the state is a better allocator of resources than the market. As any disinterested observer of state education can see, the combination of political grandstanding at the top, and preservation of the entrenched interests of the educational bureaucrats lower down, is a lethal one. The teacher at the chalk face is a distant third. Our Dear Leader likes to boast that his government now spends nearly £6,000 per pupil per year. Maple Walk has demonstrated that this is more than enough to fund a decent primary education for every child, if only the massed ranks of non-teachers on the state’s payroll would get out of the way. Unfortunately, they are far more likely to see this little school as a terrible threat, and to try to throttle such a precocious youngster before too many people notice what it can do.

Neil Collins Is A Columnist For The London Evening Standard.

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