I've just done what I hope was a big plug over at Samizdata for the new Stephen Pollard blog, and while digging around there, I realised that it is now as easy to read Stephen Pollard back catalogue, and link to selected items, as it used to be difficult.

For the purpose of this blog, then, you go here, and start at the top. Go down a bit and you find that on August 11th, Pollard had a education piece in the Evening Standard:

… Money may be going into the "education budget", but most of it is not – and rarely ever has been – going to schools themselves. It goes instead to Local Education Authorities, who then pass it on – in theory – to schools. And that is the nub of the problem.

When you go to a supermarket, you go directly to the checkout. You don't wander outside, find a middle man, give him your money and wait while he buys on your behalf. But that is precisely what happens to the education budget. When LEAs get hold of the money they then, to use the supermarket analogy, say not only that they have discovered a far better product than the one you asked for, but that they need to take a proportion of it themselves to pay for the administration of this essential service.

There is only one sensible way of spending the money: abolishing the wasted bureaucracy and political point scoring of LEAs, and instead handing it over to the people who are in the best position to decide what they need and how they should allocate their money – schools themselves.

Forceful, opinionated, and better informed than most of the stuff you'll read here by me, but no agonisings about whether compulsoriness is, or is any longer, a good thing to unleash upon generation after generation of children. For Pollard, the only question is how to improve the unleashing of it. Nevertheless, well worth a trawl back.