School reform is by some margin the best Conservative policy, but could it be better still? The Independent today runs a piece in which Michael Gove is told he’s making a “terrific mistake” by refusing to allow his proposed independent schools to make a profit. The comments come from Mikael Sandstrom, a state secretary (or spad, as we call them) but one of the world’s leading authorities on school reform. He is more than just an adviser and has written academic papers showing how much better the “free schools” (as they are called in Sweden) perform. Sweden has reams of data, thousands of students: it isn’t theoretical over there. It works. Sandstrom tells the Indy what he told me in February:
“If you’re a not-for-profit school, then the longer the waiting list the better,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot of trouble to expand, so they don’t. Also, profit-making schools have been shown to have less social segregation.’ And then he says something one would be surprised to hear in the White House, let alone the Rosenbad in Stockholm. ‘The question for me is whether we should abolish non-profit-making schools,”
But it’s not just him. Mention the Tory system to anyone education entrepreneurs in Sweden (yes, they actually exist there) and they sound at first enthused, then dismayed at the lack of a profit motive. For them, it’s the difference between it being a novelty or a phenomenon. A good example is Engelska Skolan. Set up by two women: one who believes in the profit motive and another who doesn’t. They split up, the non-profit maker kept her one school which has a long waiting list. The profiteer rolled out a hugely successful chain of schools, benefitting hundreds of children.
So what does Gove think? When I interviewed him recently, I asked him. There wasn’t space to get into it in the write-up, which was more a personal profile. But here is what he said:
FN: When you were in Sweden you would have noticed, as I certainly did, they must have spoken to you about the profit motive. I mean to me, I went to see the state secretary and he said it was a binary division. The schools that make a profit expand because they have the incentive, and the schools that don’t make a profit have longer waiting lists. If you want this project to succeed as you undoubtedly do, surely you need to allow profit-making? Not because you want people want to make lots of money, but simply because it means your programme will automatically expand?
MG: No. I talked to various people in Sweden on different sides of the debate. I talked to some people who had been responsible for setting up free schools. There are actually chains of free schools who didn’t believe that you needed the profit motive, and are themselves encouraging us not to go down that route.
FN: Why?
MG: Well they were worried basically about bargain basement schools where the sole aim was is generation of cash. They bring to their school business discipline but also idealism. They believe, and I am persuaded by it in their case, that whilst they are business willing to the souls of their shoes, and clearly top negotiators, what made them go into the education business was their passion for education. If they had wanted to make money first and foremost they would have gone into something else. There were others who argued ‘no, you need the profit principle because that acts as a financial discipline’. But when I asked all of them ‘is the point to return value to shareholders, to yield big dividends’, they replied: absolutely not. The point of the profit motive, as we see it, is to ensure that each head teacher knows that he has to be financially disciplined. So that when they go out to negotiate a tough deal on behalf of their students by ensuring that they can get the best possible deals.
FN: So what about expansion, then?
MG: Yes, one of the incentives for expansion, certainly on the part of people who talked to who ran a charitable foundation, is again the belief that what they are offering was something that they passionately believe in and that they want to give more people access to. I think it is important to ensure that you do everything possible to do encourage the maximum number of people offering a good education into the state system. But having talked to people here about whether or not you would need to be able to make a profit to enter the state system, it hasn’t been the case that anyone has said that it is. Indeed, one of the Swedish chains that is currently making a profit in is willing to come here and open schools in collaboration actually with the local authority [Kunskapsolan] without being able to make a profit here at the moment. Again one of the things about the success so far of the Academies programme is the number of people driven by a philanthropic desire to invest in state education. It has attracted people who are worried not about their inability to make a profit but by their inability to open schools where they wanted to, innovate in a way that they want to, secure the type of permission that they need and so on. It is primarily a set of bureaucratic obstacles.
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