NO END OF A LESSON

Palmerston's government tried to introduce

compulsory tests in schools. It didn't work in 1862 either, argues Terence Kealey HERE are two quotes, separated by 126 years:

I find in schools, if I compare them with their former selves, a deadness, a slackness, and a discouragement which are not the signs of progress.

We feel stifled off learning. It puts us off.

The first quote was from Matthew Arnold's report, as Inspector for Schools, for 1867, the second was from an unnamed schoolboy in the Times of the 7 May of this year, but each was bemoaning the same policy — the attempt by the gov- ernment of the day to assess education.

The first attempt was made by Robert Lowe, a member of Palmerston's cabinet, who in 1862 introduced 'payment by results'. Previously, the Education Depart- ment had simply calculated its grants to the schools on the basis of their enrol- ments and their pupils' attendance, but in 1862 Lowe made government grants dependent on annual examinations in reading, writing and arithmetic. For each child who passed, the school received 12s a year. For each who failed, the school only got 4s. For each child who failed and who also played truant, the school received absolutely nothing at all.

Oh, the lamentations! Payment by results publicly revealed what the teachers had previously hidden, namely that a third of children were failing. In 1861, the last year of unconditional grants, the Education Department had paid out £813,450 for the education of 855,000 children. By 1865, the numbers of pupils had risen to 1,016,500, but they only earned their schools £636,800 in grants.

Critics of the Education Department were thrilled by the savings and by the exposure of the teachers' pretensions, yet payment by results was a dubious blessing. Not everyone agreed that the best way to improve schools in 1862 was to cut their budgets, and not everyone agreed that the teachers' response to payment by results, which was savagely to drum the 3 Rs into their pupils, necessarily improved educa- tion. Nor should it have been surprising that some children failed the exams — any exam of value will produce failures (mod- ern educationalists please note). But the educational establishment's standing had been damaged by scandal, and the teach- ers' protests were ignored (the Education Department had recently been exposed for doctoring the reports of the schools inspec- tors to present a false picture of the success of their policies).

Payment by results survived for 28 years, long after the scandals had been forgotten, because the Education Department found it unexpectedly useful in a nasty little power struggle. The years 1870 to 1890 wit- nessed a unique episode in British mass education — genuine competition. Before `I suppose this is just social climbing.' 1870, the state had not owned any schools; the churches educated the people. The church schools earned most of their income from fees and donations, but the Government did give them grants to help. After 1870, however, the state started to create its own schools and the two systems, church and state, competed for pupils.

The Education Department, of course, favoured its state schools, and it constantly raised the standards for 'payment by results' in the hope that the church schools would not get the results and so would be forced to close. But, to the bureaucrats' dismay, the church schools grew ever more popular and ever more successful. 1870- 1890 were the golden years of British edu- cation, as the two systems competed for parents' choices. During those two decades, schools in Britain actually strained to provide parents with the educa- tion they wanted for their children. The schools were polite, clean, disciplined, wonderfully responsive — and effective; by 1890 literacy amongst 11 year olds, nation- ally, approached 100 per cent. But in 1891 the church schools were nationalised. It was the end of good mass education in Britain.

The church schools were nationalised circuitously because the bishops in the House of Lords defeated every bill for direct nationalisation sent up from the Commons; but in 1890 Parliament approved the bill that became the 1891 Free Education Act. This simply abolished fees in all primary schools. Since the schools could no longer raise money directly, this forced them into dependence on the Education Department's grants. Nominally, the Act was designed to pro- vide the poor with a free education, but since the churches had never charged the poor fees, its real purpose was to force the schools under the control of the Education Department.

Now they had direct responsibility for the church schools, the bureaucrats no longer wanted to threaten them with pay- ment by results. They no longer needed to publish objective statistics on examination results or truancy; so the data they had once meticulously collated to blacken the church schools was quietly buried, and payment by results was abolished.

A century later, the Government is try- ing to reimpose assessments. It cannot succeed. It will always be resisted by the educationalists who, as ever, will promote their own interests. Consider the rest of the quotation in the Times by that unnamed schoolboy: 'There's other ways of doing Romeo and Juliet: we'd have liked to talk about it, write a poem about it, instead of going over and over the words.' Of course there are other — and better ways, but the teachers will not use them. Like Robert Lowe in 1862, John Patten never intended his new tests to distort education; both ministers only intended their tests to be tagged on to the end of the academic year to monitor the work. But some teachers, concerned primarily with their own careers, will degrade educa- tion to ensure that their pupils pass. They will embrace rote learning, going over and over the words, because rote learning enhances the chances of pupils passing the tests. Thus will the current tests impose the same damage on the schools as pay- ment by results did during the 19th century.

The schools were saved between 1870 and 1890 from the worst effects of pay- ment by results because the free market forced teachers to respond preferentially to parents' demands. But there is no free market in state education today. By not understanding the pressures he is placing on the teachers, Patten reveals that he does not deserve to succeed. Like Gor- bachev trying to make Communism work, he is trying to avoid fundamental reforms. He has fallen for the latest political fash- ion, the vogue for citizens' charters and for Osborne and Gaebler's trendy Rein- venting Government. But those are merely attempts to justify the intrusion of politi- cians into areas of society which would work better without them. We know from the experience of 1870-90 how to transform British education — competitive privatisa- tion. It was not payment by results that inspired 19th- century education, it was competition.

The state schools should today be left free of political interference, and parents who are happy with them (there are sur- prisingly many) should remain at liberty to use them. But, to provide the state schools with real competition, we should recreate a thriving private sector that is affordable by millions. One simple measure will do it: the Treasury should give money to parents who transfer their children to the private sector — the same sum that the Treasury would otherwise have spent educating those chil- dren in the state schools. By returning the taxpayers' money to the taxpayers, we will recreate a market for private education, one which new schools will spring up to sat- isfy. Existing state or church schools, too, might opt out — into the private sector.

The teachers and the Department of Education and Science will squeal at the loss of their power, just as the old stalinists in Russia today are squealing at the loss of central planning; but let us take heart from Edward Baines's speech to the Commons during the 1840s: 'Civil government is no fit agency for the training of families or of souls . . . Throw the people on their own resources in education as you did in indus- try; and be assured that, in a nation so full of intelligence and spirit, Freedom and Competition will give the same stimulus to improvement in our schools as they have done in our manufacturers, our husbandry, our shipping and our commerce.' Some- where in Parliament we will have to find an education minister with that vision — and that sense of history.

Terence Kealey is a lecturer at Cambridge university.