There is something distinctly Orwellian about Ed Balls’s latest wheeze.
There is something distinctly Orwellian about Ed Balls’s latest wheeze. As of this week, parents requesting that their child be sent to a particular school are being informed by text message if their application has been successful. It is amazing how technology gives governments so many new ways to show contempt for citizens. This rejection-by-text system could only have been designed by a bureaucracy that has no idea how much of a blow it is for parents to be told that their child will not, after all, escape the local sink school.
Just as shoppers in Soviet-era Moscow could not imagine full supermarkets, today it is hard for British parents to imagine a system in which they are the ones doing the choosing. Yet this power flip is precisely what the Conservatives are pledging to introduce: a voucher system, where every child is credited with, say, £5,500 a year, paid for by the government to any independent school that can educate for the price. It is a system that has transformed education in Sweden. And it promises to do the same in Britain.
This week The Spectator hosted a one-day conference to discuss the coming schools revolution. We flew in experts from Stockholm and New York to share their experiences and tips with teachers and would-be school providers. It is a conference which will, we like to think, nurture the beginnings of an English education industry: one which not only has the potential to export our teachers’ expertise around the world, but which will bring new school choice to those who could never dream of being able to afford it.
Mikael Sandström, a state secretary in the Swedish government, has this message for our conference: new schools must be allowed to run as businesses as well as charities. This key lesson, he says, allowed the Swedish transformation to proceed at pace. From a standing start in 1992, its independent school sector now educates one in eight pupils.
It remains unclear to what extent the Conservatives will allow schools to profit. At first, Michael Gove understandably considered this a potential distraction from the principle of school liberalisation. Since then, the evidence from Sweden — where both charities and profit-seeking companies exist — has been conclusive. The profit-making schools have no waiting lists: their response to excess demand is to open new schools. They have no catchment areas, accepting pupils from every part of town.
Mr Gove need not shout about this. But there is a reason why his Swedish counterparts advocate profit-making schools with such passion. If the ‘new schools’ are left to charities and churches, they will roll out at a fraction of the speed. Without the profit motive, waiting lists will form, which gives an advantage to the well-off, who are skilled in jumping such queues.
There’s no doubt that Gove’s policy will reverse the decline of British education. The only question is the speed of the change. The ‘free schools’ idea will not by itself win Mr Cameron the election. But properly executed, it could win him a second term. By the end of this decade, Britain should have a system where sink schools are obsolete — and parents are the ones sending text messages to schools with the imperial thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It would be a very Conservative revolution.
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