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Business could do better

Digby Anderson

THE following document has come into InY possession and is published here in the public interest. Confidential memorandum to the chairman Ref DV/E This working party was asked by the chairman to establish possible fields for diversification by the company in the com- ing five years. We were asked to identify existing markets which were being poorly served by existing suppliers. The working Party is unanimous in recommending one such market. The education market is dominated by just one supplier, the state, which has 94 per cent market share. The other six per cent is held by a number of small charitable and non-competitive orga- nisations. Both these and the state supply education via a system which has remained largely unchanged for 50 years, schools. Neither has to seek to persuade customers to use schools for education since they are more or less compulsory under the 1944 Education Act.

Though it contains reference to provi- sion 'otherwise', this Act is used to compel parents to send their children to school for a period of 15,000 hours and a wider Population of taxpayers is compelled to Pay for the schools provided by local Councils. We have searched thoroughly and can report that while these two obliga- tions on the consumers are strongly en- forced by law, there are no, we repeat no, contractual obligations on the supplier. It appears that children can leave schools after 15,000 hours and after taxpayers have paid out some £15,000 each with next to no qualifications. Some 40 per cent leave with no batch of academic qualifications. Re- cent research reports that more than five million adults are illiterate or innumerate and a recent survey found,

More than half the teenagers questioned (52 per cent) could not understand a simple fire notice, while 44 per cent could not read and understand a bus timetable. One in four (25 per cent) had difficulty filling in a simple application form correctly, while 23 per cent could not add up the cost of a simple cafe meal. More than one in four (26 per cent) could not work out 10 per cent of £2.

— all this after 10 years of coerced state schooling.

There are reported to be some two to three million adults who are functionally illiterate after attendance at schools. They not only cannot read Dickens: they cannot read street names. The schools appear to be allowed to describe themselves without any controls too. Thus many purport to develop character or provide for future citizens but when deliquency, drug addic- tion, teenage pregnancy and venereal dis- ease rates soar, are not accountable in any way. They blame 'the parental back- ground'. However little they teach, how- ever a child develops, even if he knows less when he leaves than when he enters, the consumers, the parents have no right to compensation. There is no record of a state school being sued for negligent education.

The quality of the schools varies enor- mously. Within some 'local education au- thorities' the best school may achieve more then five 0 levels or CSE grade-1 passes per pupil; the worst, less than one. We suspect similar variation in primary schools over, for example, reading, but this is not proven since there are now no standard public external exams for such schools. Education is supplied without any such appraisal for as much as ten years (ages 5-15). Thus we cannot say how bad the product is. The situation is worse than that: the suppliers allow no quality control or public standards assessment. Obviously parents are aware of these variations and it might be wondered why bad schools re- ceive any customers. That too is contrived by law. If the school choice of parents disturbs the numbers the suppliers see fit to allocate per school, the parents are simply forced to send their children to the bad schools, often justified on grounds of proximity. Indeed, just how much repres- sed demand there is for good education can be seen by the lengths such parents go to buy houses in the catchment areas of good schools.

The state schools are managed in a way we have never before encountered in any company. The head teacher appears to be the manager but is not allowed to manage resources. All the studies show that the quality of the teacher is the most important determinant of good schooling but there is little provision for payment to reward good-quality teaching and no instance of teachers being sacked for bad teaching. Teachers teach subjects which have an external market value: computer teachers can earn much more outside schools than sociologists. But there is a standardised pay system which ignores such crucial differentials. This means that certain sub- jects are short of specialists and the pupils suffer. Attempts to change the pay system

EDUCATION SPECIAL

to one which is more market-sensitive and thus likely to supply better teachers, have been fervently opposed by the teacher unions who appear indifferent to teacher quality if it inconveniences themselves.

The product of the schools, the curricu- lum, is not set by what the consumers want but by what the suppliers decide. As with choice of school, there is consumer choice only if it does not disrupt the establishment of suppliers. This extraordinary state of affairs has been illustrated recently by parents' demands to remove their children from lessons teaching 'positive' attitudes to sexual practices the parents find perverse. `Educationists' and indeed politicians argue that parents have no such rights! The suppliers have also established an incredi- ble procedure, again, we think, unique to the field: once a consumer has bought one item, say history, in one school, he must buy all his educational goods there, French, English, maths, the lot, and keep buying them there. It's rather like the greengrocer refusing you an apple unless you agree to buy pears, tomatoes, grapefruits, indeed all your greengrocery and fruit from him for the next few years. Also bizarre are the opening hours which don't fit the needs of working mothers. And at certain times of the year, for no apparent reason, the schools just shut for weeks on end.

There is, as we mention above, a small private sector. Certainly some schools in it exhibit high standards but we think it true that there is as much variation in this sector as in the state sector. More important, it is most unenterprising. Its institutions too are comparatively fossilised and it seems very content to cream off the top demand of six per cent, competing within itself but not aggressively against the state sector. Inevit- ably at six per cent its institutions are compelled to follow curricular and other fashions set by the state schools and it like they has these curious 'terms' and 'holi- days', indeed even longer 'holidays'. Some such schools are however beginning to amend their day to fit consumer demand, though none, to our knowledge, fails to apply the package rule that consumers must buy all their educational needs from one supplier. This sector seems to do well out of being just six per cent and we suspect that it would oppose wider private education as much as the state sector. However it does compete within itself and is that much more sensitive to consumer wishes as the growing number of consum- ers trying to escape to it from the state schools shows.

In summary. The state schools vary as we say, but overall, there is as much chance of them meeting this demand as there is of British Rail ensuring the future transport of the nation. Nor are the private schools likely to meet it. There is an open- ing for this company.

Before we describe this opening, we should note that the shortcomings of ex- isting suppliers have been identified by others. Intellectuals of a certain political persuasion regard the school system not only as an educational business but as a means of social engineering, for re- distributing access to higher jobs and in- comes and achieving what they term 'a more just, equitable and fair society'. But for two decades their research has found that the system was failing to do this. They blamed first the `tri-partite' system of grammar, technical, and secondary mod- ern schools and the '11-plus' for perpetuat- ing class divisions, then when these divi- sions continued after state-forced compre- hensivisation, they blamed 'streaming'. When it continued despite the favoured `mixed-ability' teaching, they blamed teachers for streaming pupils in their heads, for having socially determined pre- judiced expectations of different classes and races and sexes of pupils. The teachers must be sent on courses to have their prejudices adjusted.

Such intellectuals have been quieter of late, their revolutionary imperative to criti- que the system having been overcome by the stronger imperative to show solidarity, not with the oppressed working-class pupils, but with the suppliers of the system. Yet though they see each failure of the 'schools to engineer equality as evidence of the need for greater and more systematic effort, others who will draw different, even opposite conclusions, should at least note their overwhelming evidence that state schools have failed in their supposed 'so- cial' function. They have also failed educa- tionally, argue critics, from a very different viewpoint. In some cases standards have fallen, in next to none risen and in most dropped in comparison to countries such as Germany. There are also criticisms of inefficiency, maintaining value systems which are not only irrelevant but hostile to wealth creation, risk-taking and enterprise, and, most fundamental, a sustained con- tempt for the wishes of parents.

So, since we are not alone in our detection of faults, we must ask if the system will be reformed and become more efficient. We think it unlikely. We have explained how it is dominated by its suppliers, that is, teachers, educational bureaucrats and politicians at central and local level and, on past form, this very fault of the system will prevent it being changed. There are too many vested interests in its preservation. And we have seen nothing in the current Secretary of State for Educa- tion's plans to change that view. Indeed the reverse. We therefore conclude we should enter the market. How? Past failure to increase the market share of private education cannot be put down entirely to the unen- terprising character of private schools. It is also due to their offering a product which is as inflexibly packaged as that of the state schools. The parent must buy a whole private education or nothing. Such a pro- duct is too expensive for many parents: But many could and would afford some private education if it were offered. Already they are keen to buy the service of `crammers and have started to use the private schools, strategically entering their children for crucial years, perhaps for two years before 0 levels then putting them back into the state system, or using private education to help one of their children over a difficult patch. They also use privately marketed books and technology to help their chil- dren. The demand then is for less than a whole curriculum.

We can compete here by offering some- thing that the vast majority of schools obstinately refuse to offer — the achieve- ment of pre-specified results or the custom- er's money back. It is quite possible to establish mean learning times and costs for pupils of different abilities to achieve certain standards in many if not all sub- jects; certainly in those which worry so many parents — literacy and numeracy and then, later, the exams of 15-16. Obviously, pupils differ and pre-tuition assessment is necessary, but variable risks are part of many businesses and there are a variety of actuarial and offsetting techniques avail- able. The techniques for achieving stan- dards would also vary from face-to-face tuition to 'distance' learning methods. For- tunately, the schools' attachment to a bizarre and massively foreshortened work- ing day and uniquely generous holidays provides ample hours when pupils could study on our courses. There is a host of opportunities to develop services tailored to parents' and pupils' needs and purchasing ability which we will discuss in a future report. But the key attributes of any educational product supplied by enterprising business rather than schools will be, just that, a tailoring to customers' requirements and pockets, the provision of education in unpackaged units that a majority, not six per cent of the population, can afford and a guarantee of results or adequate compensation. It is not just that state schools have exploited their tax-funded status: schools in general have exploited their position. It is time for business to show it can do better and make a substantial return on its investment.