I’ve talked about removing choice from the healthcare system as a way of improving patient care, but the anti-choice ideal can be applied to education, too. Most people say they want to be able to choose what school they want their children to go to, but really what they want is for their children to have the opportunity to go to a good school. If all the schools were good then there’d be no need to make a choice, you’d simply go to the school in your area.

Removing the grammar school system has not been the panacea that many (including Thatcher, of course) hoped it might turn out to be. Bringing all schools to the same level as each other seems not to have brought them all upwards to the standard of the best. Rather, with a crushing inevitability, it seems to have gradually brought the majority of them down to the level of the worst. The former grammar schools are still good schools, but property within their catchment areas has risen in value so catastrophically that the outwardly socialist comprehensive school ideal has had stunningly capitalist consequences, leading to a situation where the best education is reserved for the rich.

A new approach is definitely needed. One commonly cited proposal is the voucher system, whereby parents can choose which school to send their children and schools are given funding based on the number of pupils they accept (in a nutshell). My understanding is that this brings the free market to the education system, allowing private academies and even groups of parents to spring up and provide education services with government funding. Competition ensues within the education system, with schools constantly improving or facing the loss of parental interest.

While this idea of free market education is appealing to the capitalist inside all of us, I worry that it seems to have several flaws. In order for the competition to get off the ground, you need a number of good schools in the area to pick from. Leaving aside rural areas where there may only be one school, many inner city areas have a severe dearth of schools that reach even average standard. There would need to be a significant initial investment in bringing these schools up to a level where they can sensibly compete before the voucher system could even get started. In the case where a good school is in an area with a number of poor competitors, the good school will be inundated with applicants and needs a way to select which students to accept. In this situation, it seems the initial plan has backfired. Schools aren’t competing for pupils, pupils are competing for school places. The below average schools will still get just as many pupils as they do now, and so will have no incentive to improve.

Incentive seems to me to be the key. Personally, I do think we need a two-tiered education system. Selection by ability helps to level the playing field, allowing brighter children to rise regardless of their social status. Bright, hardworking kids are easier to teach, though, not harder. These kids are not the ones we have to worry about. I think the system of funding should therefore be biased towards the kids who have more difficulty, since they are the ones who are going to need it. Schools which are not selective should get the highest level of funding per pupil, allowing them to have more and better teachers and to pay for better and more useful equipment. The selective schools get the brightest and most hardworking students, but they get less state funding. Everybody has an incentive to do well. We’ve also removed some of the stigma of not getting in to the selective school.

Of course the system has problems – what system doesn’t? What’s important at the moment, though, is removing the weights that we are tying around the ankles of the children going through schools at the moment. The brightest kids are not being allowed to excel, and the least able kids are being left even further behind. It’s not clear to me how a ‘voucher’ system helps provide for them. Choice just isn’t the answer.