Cameron at least has been clear that _his_ free schools won’t be allowed to make a profit. Clegg has left this issue unclear (deliberately?).

In Sweden the free school system does allow private schools to make a profit, has been going for 16 years, and has finally got to the point where 10% of pupils are being educated privately.

If free schools are banned from making a profit, that obviously closes the door to free enterprise, and limits it to charitable foundations and the like.

So if 0.625% growth per year has been achieved in Sweden with the help of the profit motive, what on earth do people think could be done in Britain without the profit motive? Precious little, obviously. A few charity schools in the East End, and one or two other deprived areas, maybe.

In the emasculated form Cameron and Clegg are proposing, this is nothing more than a political gimmick.

Of course, we have to point out where the state sector is ineffective. Our job is to work out how to improve things. But we never criticise teachers, just the mechanisms under which they are forced to work and the resulting academic outcomes. Others may choose disingenuously to characterise that as an attack on teachers, but it is not. We actually discuss this tactic here: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/resultsgeneration.pdf

I totally agree, which is why it so counterproductive to insult them. Civitas and Reform just can’t seem to resist throwing words like “lazy” and “ineffective” into their arguments about the state sector, for all the world as if they were afflicted by a form of libertarian Tourette’s syndrome. It’s unecessary and only serves to alienate those who should, as you point out, be your natural allies. Why do it?

Well, it is the truth. If teachers find that insulting, that doesn’t make it any less true.

But I would personally be a bit offended if my profession was treated as a collective bloc: “state school teachers” – as if all are one. And, of course, it is in the interests of teaching unions to treat their membership that way. But, as individuals, state school teachers have an awful lot to gain from school choice. Salaries tend to rise since collective bargaining gives way to schools trying to attract the best teachers. And teachers gain more opportunty to work with schools that agree with their particular ethos or pedagogy. Most importantly, they are treated as professionals and left alone by the central bureacracy.

If I were to suggest to you that statements like this are likely to be perceived as profoundly insulting to state school teachers, I’m guessing you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Yet it’s just this sort of insensitivity that prevents liberal policies gaining greater acceptance.

Ah yes, but I would. That you won’t is your choice and that I will is mine. Some people won’t entrust their lives to a doctor at all and that is their choice too. I don’t want there to be ONLY for-profit commercial schools and there won’t be as many would rather not send their children to one. That is fair enough, so long as they are there as an option to demonstrate what can be done with the resources available. In Sweden, the state schools adapted to improve what they had to offer once private schools were allowed to open. There was no need for a change of ownership of the schools. That effect is the most important aspect of school choice.

“My partner and I were reported to the County’s Educational Welfare Department by our daughter’s school. I had every confidence that the democratic checks and balances in the system would ensure that we had nothing to worry about. I spoke to my County Councillor about the problem and the school quietly dropped the case.”

Now it is my turn to be horrified as that first sentence fills me with dread. I am glad that the threat to your family from the state came to nothing, but I must say you strike me as a fairly politically astute and articulate individual. You knew exactly what to do when a threat from the local government was posed: you knew exactly who to approach and how to speak to them to get whatever it was dropped. I think an awful lot of people wouldn’t have that capability. Many others would have panicked or been ruined by such a situation. So I don’t think it was so much “democratic oversight” rather than your own knowledge of the system and ability to engage with it that saved your daughter.

Also, as you must know, compared with other European countries, the UK still retains a very strong right of parents to home-school their children (At Civitas, we have spoken with many home school families over the last couple of years). That is an important right, though currently under threat from the Labour government, as it ensures that if a state school system is simply too dangerous or too ineffective for some children, the parents have a right of exit.

I am just about prepared to concede that, in extremis, I have to entrust my life to a member of the medical profession, but I am certainly not going to allow a private company of self-appointed ‘educationalists’ and teaching professionals (teachers?) to take charge of my children’s education without any form of democratic oversight.

My partner and I were reported to the County’s Educational Welfare Department by our daughter’s school. I had every confidence that the democratic checks and balances in the system would ensure that we had nothing to worry about. I spoke to my County Councillor about the problem and the school quietly dropped the case. I do not see democracy as a ‘restraint’: it is an (imperfect) method of ensuring that everyone in our society is treated with equal dignity and respect, and surely that is an essential aspect of liberalism.

And as I say, Tesco has its detractors, but no country has ever banished systemic hunger without offering a market in food. Least worst.

On the other hand, our education system currently does leave a hefty segment of the population (mostly those on low incomes), intellectually starved. And it is not because of a lack of resources being targetted at them. Just looking in one area, learning to read, we looked at how over 50 years, state education hopelessly succumbed to poor teaching strategies. There was plenty of bureacratic and democratic oversight but because there was no “right of exit” for lower income families, they were failed by state education, and it took generations of MPs and voters to even notice:

http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/readytoread.pdf

They are still trying to tackle this problem today.

My point above about Tesco and Stagecoach was not that I think they would be likely to run schools (although who’s to say?), but that they are typical of large corporations whose eyes are fixed on the bottom line of the balance sheet: certainly they will respond to customers if that improves their profits, but try getting them to do something because you believe it is right that they should do it and see where that gets you. One small example: my partner has tried to persuade Stagecoach to make their drivers wear name badges, so that at least passengers could know who was being rude to them, and has been totally ignored. If you think that these putative educational corporations would behave any differently to any other large corporation then you have a very rose-tinted view of capitalism.

Thanks, I googled a bit more and found the controversy surrounding the quote’s attribution. I still think the point it makes is apt, however, whoever said it first.

Thanks for confirming that this is a leg-pull – a cursory Internet search shows that no one has succeeded in tracing your bogus Franklin “quotation” earlier than the 1990s!

“A word to the wise …”

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1759

There is a very important distinction between democracy and liberty. Without respect for individual rights, democracy will turn to tyranny. What free schools advocate is introducting more individual choice to address the balance of what has become a democratic AND bureaucratic tyranny in education.

Most of the real liberals in the party may be too young to remember what it was like to live under socialism, but of course we’ve read about it in the history books and we know we don’t want to go back to three day weeks, power cuts, heaps of rubbish in the streets and piles of corpses at the cemetery gates. That was what it was like when the state ran everything.

I am not so sure about that. I have found BT to have pretty poor customer service and to be a complete rip-off in any area where it still has a monopoly (in setting up a new phone line for example). I wasn’t around during the 80s but if that was who you were dealing with exclusively back then, then I am glad those days are over. I have few problems with any other telecoms companies (not perfect obviously but improving year on year).

Having said that, the government could lower the costs and improve competition rather more if it stopped regulating and licensing the radio spectrum as it currently does.

However, I certainly concede that the consequence would have been a much slower rate of innovation, and that is the point that I have been trying to make about education: the means of provision is less important than the diversity of content, but democratic accountability is also essential and that cannot be maintained were businesses to run our schools.

Yuh, absolutely, God forbid our liberal party be in any way influenced by a liberal philosopher.

Regarding your point about “democratic accountability”, by this logic pretty much any or every part of the economy should be provided by the state monopoly and elected officials.

We can have politicians and bureaucrats running the phone networks, for example, a new Portable Telecommunications Agency to work under the Public Communication Devices Office.

Never mind lack of competition, if a person doesn’t like their Public Portable Phone they can just change their vote at the next election. Brilliant.

The stifling of professionalism in education comes not through the system by which it is delivered but by the government dictating how education should be delivered – i.e. the national curriculum and all its associated targets. A liberal educational system should be to encourage as much diversity of provision and content as possible while still maintaining democratic accountability to the community, and that should be via local government, not monopoly capitalism.

Excellent post.

Of course, the point about rail services is that there’s no real competition, because the market isn’t truly open.

This is exactly the kind of problem with Cameron’s and Clegg’s anaemic “free school” proposals. The providers would be hamstrung by all kinds of rules and regulations about admissions policy and what fees they were allowed to accept.

To say nothing of the nonsense of some quango deciding who is allowed into the market and who isn’t. Ridiculous. The market will soon take care of that – investors will be far shrewder judges of potential providers than bureaucrats, for obvious reasons.

And congratulations for having the guts to ask what’s so liberal about democracy. That question really needs to be asked.