LESS WILL MEAN BETTER
Stephan Shakespeare defies the
general view that state schools need more money
IN THE CITY of London there is a little state primary school that has all the resources it could possibly want. The local council (in the form of the vastly wealthy Corporation of London) showers it with largesse beyond the wildest dreams of the most profligate Old Labourite. More than £4,000 is lavished per child, and that does not even include the additional money spent by the council on administration and support. Just imagine if every school in the country could be like that.
Well, just imagine. That school still has 30 children per class. So where on earth does the money go? A neighbouring private school has class sizes of 15, and would give you £1,000 change. Meanwhile, in Belgravia, that kind of money buys you a class size of 14 and a three-week, all-expenses-paid trip to Switzerland with ski-ing or mountaineer- ing courses thrown in. You can drop your children off from 8 a.m. and pick them up any time between 4 and 6 p.m., and super- vised homework time is supplied for those who want it. Before objecting that I am not comparing like with like, let me point out that all the schools are non-selective, and the Belgravia school, like the City state school, has a large proportion of children for whom English is the second language.
The government last week announced a cash bonanza for schools which had them cheering in the aisles. Even the Conserva- tives conceded that more money for schools must be a good thing. But that is a dangerous attitude. We don't really under- stand the role of money in our education system. What will a million pounds buy for our children? Could extra money actually make things worse?
As we have no way of measuring the quality of education, we cannot put a price on good schooling. Of course we have exam result league tables, which have been cheap and effective: the inner-London comprehensive at which I was a teacher felt the shame of having our poor exam results published, and we quadrupled our exam passes in four years — without get- ting any new money. It doesn't cost a penny to change your teaching methods. Indeed, it is obvious from the Audit Com- mission report 'Education Performance Indicators 1996/7' that there is no pre- dictable relationship between the money spent by an education authority and exam- ination results. Some of those which spend the most have the worst results.
Of course we can't be sure that a school with better exam results is necessarily a better school. The children may be less happy. They may be educated too narrow- ly, learning only what it is useful to know for exams. The children may have been cleverer to begin with. Exam results and league tables are useful for comparing schools when combined with a little local knowledge — and this, of course, is how parents do use them — but they provide no real evidence about the quality we get in return for education spending.
It is quite possible that increasing spend- ing on education is harmful. For example, if the money is wasted on dubious projects, good teachers are taken away from the `chalkface' where they are most needed. Schools are forever awarding favoured teachers with 'responsibility points' on their salary and a few extra hours at their desk to develop pointless policies that will never be implemented. Such wastage is rarely tempo- rary: it quickly becomes embedded, and the bureaucracy grows, so that in the state sys- tem now a head-teacher of a medium-sized primary school may not teach any sched- uled lessons, while the equivalent in the pri- vate sector is likely to teach at least half a day. The more competent the teachers — in theory at least — the less likely they are to teach. In that sense, we already have 'per- formance-related pay': the cleverest teach- ers find themselves paid not to perform. With less money around, they would be forced back into the classroom.
The more money that is available, the more energy is diverted into deciding how to spend it. When I was 'head of special needs', I spent most of my time teaching small groups of children with learning dif- ficulties how to read. My literacy project was praised by Ofsted, and when last year the Labour government announced its new summer schools project, it was my school that was honoured as the venue, partly because of our literacy work — except that by then I had left, and the literacy work had been terminated. The new special needs teacher was concentrating his ener- gies on trying to get extra support from the local education authority. That is a full- time job in itself, involving five stages of meetings and reports for every child that may or may not get help. If the LEA decides to provide support, yet more effort will have to be spent on cross-departmental liaison meetings and developing 'multi- agency action plans', with adequate time set aside for monitoring and evaluating. All the while, what those children really need most is someone to teach them to read. I estimate that for every hour of paid profes- sional time the child might receive about 20 minutes of real help.
Instead of giving children the immediate help they need, we turn them into case studies. So wasting money on bureaucracy is not just unfair to the taxpayer, it directly harms children. Until we have a way of measuring efficiency in education, I believe that this is bound to happen more and more. I have already suggested that we cannot measure the relationship between money and the quality of education. We do not know whether it is best spent on decreasing class sizes, on paying more for better-trained teachers, or even possibly on better monitoring, liaison and inter-agency action plans. Perhaps it would be best spent on surprise inspections and sackings. We can only guess.
But whatever the problems with measur- ing the quality of education, there is no dif- ficulty with measuring the quantity. We can easily find out the number of hours each employee in the education system spends actually teaching children. The Audit Com- mission could then do a more useful study. Instead of measuring spending simply by 'classroom costs', it should measure the entire cost of providing a state education, including all the administrative costs and support services, even including the cost of the National Curriculum Council and out- rageously expensive Ofsted inspections (which more often than not provide 'glow- ing reports' for second-rate schools). And, in addition to reporting exam results, it should report in detail on the benefits that our children actually receive, including the amount of time in direct teaching.
The Audit Commission should finally carry out a similar examination of indepen- dent sector schools. That would allow them to do something really controversial: they could make a direct comparison on effi- ciency. Which system supplies the best value for money? My guess is that, once all the costs have been taken into account, we would find that spending per child in the state system is very close to the cost of a private education.
Pound for pound, which provides the better service? Only when we have devel- oped some indicator of 'value for money' in public services will we know whether, and by how much, we should increase or decrease spending.
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