News from the New Party

It's official: Education is a lottery

The Times today tells us that "hundreds more parents are considering private school after the allocation of state school places by lottery in Brighton." £14,500-a-year Brighton College was apparently inundated with admission enquiries after Brighton council announced plans to assign places to over-subscribed secondary schools by luck of the draw rather than the traditional catchment area assignment.

So if, as David Green writes in The Telegraph today, underlying the introduction of a school lottery system is an egalitarianism-driven "malice towards private schools" an ensuing middle-class flock to the private sector looks rather like an own goal for the government. If spreading the opportunity to go to a good school via a school lottery is to be the emphasis, rather than improving all schools, then instead of greater social class mixing the greater likelihood is a resultant two-tier system where the poor go to poor state schools and the richer go to private schools.

It would indeed be ironic if the consequence of the government's determinedly socialist education policy were a two tier system of decent private education for the better off with poor quality state education for the rest. In other words, it would be the creation of precisely the kind of system that socialists endlessly (and falsely) portray economic liberals (such as the Thatcher government) as wishing to create. Unfortunately the Conservatives seem to be unwilling to defend the honour of their former leader. In an uncharacteristically fatuous remark, Conservative education spokesman David Willetts has pronounced that the only solution is for all schools to be good schools. This blindingly obvious truth does not come with a prescription for ensuring that all schools are good schools. The new Conservative leadership does not have a record of supporting radical public service reform, and it seems likely that the reluctance to see any privatisation of the Health Service will be repeated in education. In other words, the Tory solution will be to continue to pump money into the sinking ship of state education, whilst half-heartedly rearranging the deckchairs.

The solution to the education crisis is not to pursue bizarre quasi-Maoist plans to create identical schools with an identical student profile across the whole country, and neither is it to attempt to shore up the existing system of selection by postcode. The way to ensure that all schools are good schools is to honour the concept of consumer choice and market freedom, and let parents and children vote with their feet: the poor schools will either improve or go to the wall, and the good schools will compete with each other to get better. Let government pump money into education vouchers and let the schools go their own way. This is the way to a better education system for all our children, and not just those whose parents can afford to pay for it.