It's not about the money
Five prominent indicators that £1.6bn may not be the right answer for state schools
This blog has focussed on the harms and unintended consequences of slamming VAT on independent schools. I’ve written about how the IFS numbers don’t stack up; it harms, rather than helping, state schools so the “pragmatic, gotta get the money somehow” argument fails. I’ve written that we should see it as it is - pure class warfare by people who are, ironically, out-of-touch. I’ll get onto where it fits into the culture wars another time.
Quick update: I’m here on X, formerly Twitter, as Mr Chips, sharing that platform with some of the worst, and best, of debate and repartee on the internet. Please follow if you can stomach it.
Today’s post is about why money isn’t even the answer. Five salient examples that thoughtful education policy should take account of….and are violently upsetting for both big-state authoritarians and for the class warfare crowd.
We just want good schools
A question that will arise in the forthcoming months: why are you opposed to spending money on state schools? That’s the quality of our national debate, the sort of thing that goes unchallenged on the Today programme. “I’m not sure about the NHS” goes as “You want to deny healthcare to poor people”. “I support private education” goes as “You’re responsible for starving state schools of resources”.
I’m just pro-good schools. If there’s a good idea to make state schools better, I support it. If all state schools came up to the level of the best, we wouldn’t have an issue, and the market would probably see off a great deal of private schools.
If only it was possible to have good state schools without spending more money on them…
Five case studies
If I wanted to improve state schools, I’d start by looking at the following:
Michaela. which has been the best school in the country based on measured “value-add” through secondary years….for two years in a row. That’s the most extraordinary achievement. They rank way above comparable schools by GCSE results too. I’d be looking at whether Britain’s strictest headmistress and her openly-declared small-c conservatism (boo-hiss) have anything to teach the rest of the state sector. I’d ask myself which is worse: that she faces death threats or that the Education Blob wants to tear down her achievements instead of learning from them.
The Independent Grammar School Durham which delivers private education for £3,900 per year. Per year, not per term - that’s about half of what we spend on state schools, per child. If it’s a typo, it’s theirs not mine….and I don’t think it’s a typo. On their website you can read that OFSTED report parents “can’t praise it highly enough”. Like Michaela, you’d expect educators in both sectors to be flocking in: how do they do it? What can my local authority schools learn? What can Eton learn?
The Beautiful Tree, a book by James Tooley who founded IGS, which is well worth reading and worth a blog review in its own right. Tooley spent decades studying private schools in poor countries, how affordable they can be, and why they outperform state schools. Spoiler: it’s about parental empowerment and better incentives.
Finland, where the education system is not, as some will tell you, a socialist paradise where the government showers teachers with gold. We’re going to hear a lot about Finland. It’s just a place that has a really good state education system, with many aspects that look more like Michaela than an average UK comprehensive. We should all note that:
Finland spends fractionally more than the UK’s state system, per pupil. £9.3k euros plays our ~£7-8k. And that’s excluding a further £3k or so per pupil, for £18 billion of Department for Education overhead (see page 29) which I’m sure is “really good value” for whatever it does.
Finland has private schools receiving state funding. 22% of basic education centres were private in 2019 and parents have considerable freedom to choose schools - with money following the child. It also has a small number of privately-funded private schools which are allowed to make a profit…and which don’t charge VAT, benefitting from the protection of EU state aid law.
Finland’s schools exist in a society that strongly supports family and education. As quoted here : “Most efforts to explain why Finland’s schools are better than others or why they do worse today than before fail to see these interdependencies in Finnish society that are essential in understanding education as an ecosystem.” To put it another way, it’s about family, respect and motivation.
Back to home, the UK’s top-performing state schools, many of which rub along on below-average per-pupil funding. Lower-income pupils benefit from the Pupil Premium, social deprivation (which covers 9% of school funding), low prior attainment *6%)…to which we can add free school meals and often free transport. There’s something going on there that’s not about money.
If I didn’t want to improve state schools, if instead I wanted class warfare for political gain, I’d ignore all the above. I would divert attention from them at all costs. I’d instead
pretend it’s all about money
shout about the unfairness of it all
demand attention for my ability to spend other people’s money
do anything to distract from my lack of ideas
I'm not an economist just a bemused techy, so my understanding of how VAT works in practice is, shall we say, a generous guess, but I always thought that all the VAT is collected into one large pot, together with other government income, and then later on is split up into departmental budgets: some for health, some for defence, some for education, some to pay the interest on loans, and so on (meat in, sausage out). According to the IFS currently 4.4% of tax income ends up going on schools. So unless Labour change the sizes of the funding slices for each sector then only 4.4% of that £1.6 billion would end up in schools' pockets, no? Or is HMRC able to track where each penny of VAT income goes so the chancellor can ensure that all the VAT from private school fees all goes to schools?