I wonder how outraged this £20,000 earner would be when the government stopped taking their taxes, but then closed down all the public schools, stopped building and maintaining roads, made them pay for whatever surgery they need. Stopped collecting the bins from their home. This "taxes were 3 times lower a century ago" shit is completely farcical when you consider no sane person wants things to be the way they were a century ago. The problem with cutting taxes and government services is that you quickly find out just what your taxes did and that your life won't function without them.
The post was in relation to the inefficiency of monopolies, of which Governmental departments are top of that list. They have absolutely no competition and when the going gets tough, they merely allow service levels to drop and complain about a lack of funding, rather than become more efficient and innovate. My example about every single Government department saying they are under-funded, despite total spend being 105% of revenue is pertinent. How can we be spending more than we earn, but also under-funding every single department? The answer is we can't and it's the inefficiencies of departments and the lack of incentives to improve that causes the funding gaps, not a lack of money.
The solution to this is to create competition within the public sector to drive efficiency and to root out the inefficiencies that cost tax payers tens of billions. This would not only drive down costs, but would drive long term innovation and planning, rather than putting a short term plaster onto every problem as there is no incentive for management to think long term. Why as a public sector manager would I work tirelessly to reduce costs and increase efficiency when there is no personal benefit to doing so? I wouldn't - I'd merely be striving for the easiest life possible. I've experienced this attitude numerous times when dealing with the public sector and have taken full advantage of their apathy.
The overriding point is if increased competition improved efficiencies by 5% across the board, that would be an £42 billion saving to the exchequer, which could be passed on to the lowest earners in society.
Parents already can do all these things, the issue is outstanding schools have a maximum that they can expand to. So once you hit 60 places, no one else can get in, it's called oversubscription. If they're not oversubscribed and an outstanding/good school you should get in. But guess what every aspiring parents wants to send their child to the outstanding school. So only the children who live nearest to the school can get in.
Can you imagine a private sector business saying "unfortunately we have too many customers", it's complete nonsense. This is exactly my point about trying to increase competition in the public sector. If the Government paid Schools per pupil, gave people ultimate freedom (abolishing catchment areas) and allowed anyone to open a School, whilst also allowing incentives to management... You'd soon see the best Schools expanding and the worst Schools retracting, as people would vote with their feet.
Schools who're oversubscribed would quickly invest in expansion in order to meet demand. There would be no maximum as to how much they could expand and Government would not interfere.
The whole shutting down poor/failing schools has already been done by The Torries. Shutting down failing schools and building very expensive new acadamies. Guess what happened? All the kids from the failing school went to the new shiny school. They had the same attitudes and the same lack of parental support, so what do you think happened? Yes they went back to failing.
It's not about "shutting them down", this is completely arbitrary and naturally results in failure as you mention. It's about organically allowing great schools to expand and poor schools to organically close. The great schools will continue to be good, otherwise the freedom of parents to choose will result in the School losing customers and retracting in size and the incentives to headteachers would similarly retract.
The result over an albeit lengthy period would be that because Headteachers are financially incentivised to increase the size of their Schools; the only way to increase the size of your School is to attract more customers (children); the only way to attract more customers is to improve educational standards; and the only way to improve educational standards is to work harder and become more involved. This might involve sacking poor staff and head-hunting better staff who will demand a higher salary and becoming more efficient by drilling down the prices of consumables in order to pay the higher salaries that better staff will demand.
None of this can be achieved with arbitrary pay bands for teachers and heads.
You can have outstanding schools in areas of deprivation as my partner teaches in one but the discipline needs to be regimental. My partner taught in inadequate schools and she said 'I couldn't teach properly in those schools because I was constantly managing behaviour'. In the outstanding school they have a behavioural management system that allows her to get the trouble makers out of the class, bolloked/detensions etc and there's consequently better behaviour. The Asian countries you quoted I'd assume have better discipline and better parental attitudes to education.
Absolutely. If the headteachers and teachers themselves had clear financial incentives to put those structures in place you'd soon see schools with incompetent management quickly failing and schools with great management flourishing; with their salaries flourishing to match.
You're correct re: Asian schooling; they also are in school many more hours per week so will inevitably learn more. Judging by my experience instead of being in the classrooms, our schools are increasingly setting much, much more homework to compensate; but there is no substitution for class hours in my view.
BTW if you think you can cut school funding and get equal/better results I'll tell you now my partner already can't photocopy/print anything like as much as she'd want to for class resources because of budgetry constraints.
I think this is the fundamental problem with the way budgetary restraints get passed on. As there is no incentive for a headteacher to be innovative and efficient budget cuts just get passed on to ridiculous things like photocopying; as this is a simple, albeit ineffective means of "cutting costs".
I can guarantee if you drilled down into how to optimise staffing levels, procurement, cleaning contracts, maintenance contracts, capital investments; there are huge efficiencies to be made. I supplied doors to a School 4 weeks ago that cost over £1,000 per door, replacing 40 doors... That will be the same School that is telling its teachers they can't photocopy as much as they want.
Again you're assuming you'll get in, if they're oversubscribed you won't. If they're underscribed you can get them in.
If you want to get your kid into a good/outstanding school you can put them on the waiting list for schools that are good/outstanding in your area and when a place becomes available you can send them there. Another tip is if you can find a school that is inadequate but it has excellent results it's likely to be a good school that's either been cheating the SATs or not ticking a box. Also if your children are yet to goto school start going to a good C&E schools church, you can get in on the church places allocation. Same with Catholic Schools. You'll need to get them baptised. Usually there are a few outstanding C of E or Catholic schools, so worth looking into.
Personally I'm currently in the process of moving to an outstanding school area at much expense for the reasons I've outlined. Ideologically I'm not completely comfortable with the inequality and elitism but on the other hand I want to give my kids the best life chances.
Again over time the best schools will expand to suit consumer needs. No business in the long term turns away custom. If you only have one choice of school in your area and it is poorly run; a headteacher or maybe your partner would realise the area is prime for opening a new school. They'd have personal incentives to make it efficient and they'd give parents a choice. If their school was well run they'd increase in size quickly like any other business. Fundamentally though any selection process would not take into consideration location.
I'm in a similarly uncomfortable position in that I don't agree with having to pay for education via taxation and then having to pay again if I want complete choice - as previous I believe we can have a system with ultimate choice through taxation. However even though I don't plan to have children for another 5 or so years, I've bitten the bullet and am saving every month to allow me to send them to private school if I feel the school(s) that are being forced upon me aren't up to the standards I'd want.
