What if Britain’s school results were as good as those of our former colonies?

It’s not often that M&G’s retail bond team link to education pieces; they tend to be more interested in inflation threats and sovereign defaults. But this morning, the guys at @bondvigilantes drew investors’ attention to research published in the current issue of The Spectator on the true economic cost of British educational failure. It makes more sense than you might think. Britain’s sluggish economic growth can, actually, be traced to the systematic failure of its state schools. We’re living in an era where ‘work’ is something done with the brain, rather than the hands – so a nation’s prosperity depends on how well those brains have been trained.

CoffeeHousers will be familiar with the moral scandal of the way state schools teach the richest best, and poorest worst (see the FT’s graph of doom). Every week, we see examples of this outrage. Just last week, Ofsted revealed the way that bright kids are being systematically failed by state schools who set mediocre homework and don’t push them towards the best universities.