I've just got back from attending a lecture entitled "Setting Schools Free" organised by the Adam Smith Institute and given by Damian Green, the Shadow Education Secretary, i.e. the Conservative opposition chief complainer about education. It was given within walking distance of where I live and was just about worth the walk, if only to give me something to write about here.
Green said that there is too much state central control of Britain's state schools. The government should stay in the business of funding education, but should reduce its central control, and instead allow parental control to increase and school managerial autonomy to increase with it. Instead of schools being disciplined by a stream of central diktats from the Department of Education they should be disciplined by the fear of competition from other schools which parents might prefer.
The essential change Green proposed is that consortia of teachers, financiers, whoever, should be allowed to set up new schools and compete with the existing ones. The money would follow the choices made by the parents. Education vouchers without the name "education vouchers" attached to it all, in other words.
The government would still be deciding what a school is, and under mild cross-examination from the floor it turned out that Green's understanding of that is probably very different from what the readers of this would like it to be. Hundreds of children all being polite and studious, as in a "good" school now. A bit of hippy-ness would have to be tolerated here and there for the sake of school autonomy. A primary school would need to have a minimum of about fifty children at it. See Holland for the sort of rules he favours.
Damian Green is a new name to me. Based on a few minutes googling during which I encountered the initials "TRG" (which stand for "Tory Reform Group"), it would appear that he is a member of the "wet" wing, the "one nation" wing of the Conservative Party, and accordingly I probably have Conservative acquaintances who regard this man as the spawn of Satan, for being insufficiently rabid in his support for the free market. For being, that is to say, not as rabid in his support for the free market as, to name someone totally at random, me. And indeed I favour an educational world far different from the one that he wants to set about contriving. Professor Dennis O'Keeffe made a little speech from the floor favouring a much more free market approach, from which Green of course deftly distanced himself.
But I can't get very worked up about this fact. It was often the case during the Thatcher years that "wet" cabinet ministers were better at moving towards a free market in whatever it was they were dealing with than were their more overtly ideological and "Thatcherite" rivals, not least because a self-proclaimed Thatcherite ideologist alerted the opposition to the threat being posed, whereas a wet could just get on with things more quietly, while emitting bromidic (is that a word? – it is now) speeches such as the one I've just been listening to. In practice, one step in the right direction is the most that you can ever hope for from these people, and whatever future steps they once dreamed of taking when they were starting their climb up the greasy pole really don't matter that much.
At the beginning of his lecture, Green quoted Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in support of his support for the principle of state-funded education, and revealed a gaping hole in this alleged support which I didn't previously know about. But I'll deal with that another time.
Not a word was breathed about home education, home schooling, or any such radicalism, which I also cannot find it in me to regret. Ask a man like Green about all that and you never know what might come out of his mouth, and once he's said it, he might then want to tbe consistent.
