Our priorities on education

In a speech to the Labour Party Conference some six months before Labour won the general election, Tony Blair famously said that his three main priorities for government were “education, education and education”. After thirteen years of Labour being in office, has the mantra rung true? And more importantly, would a change of government bring about a better policy?

While the biggest proposed reform in the education policy for a half century outlined in the Tomlinson report published in late 2004 was shelved by the then Education secretary Ruth Kelly mainly because of political cowardice; Michael Gove, the Conservative spokesperson for education, has suggested, in the run up to this year’s impending election, that “sitting in rows and learning by rote” is his idea of a 21st century education system.

The question here, however, is not how to reform the schooling system (if at all it needs to be reformed) but rather how to deal with the increasing cost of educating a pupil at university. A solution would be that if a pupil is not in state-funded education (or won entrance to a fee paying school based on scholarship) for three years prior (excluding a gap year or mature/estranged students) to university admission then full fees should be payable to the university. In this way, state funding can be reduced whilst actually increasing the number of places available for state school pupils and the extra money can be put into secondary education.

Effectively, parents who choose to opt out of state education should be held to account for that decision and not be able to obtain a place at a top university for their child, funded by the state; at the expense of a similarly or more intelligent but disadvantaged individual. It doesn’t matter that these people still pay tax – it didn't worry them when paying for private education, the same should go for university.

A just system would be where state school pupils don't have to jostle for places with pupils who can just buy their way in through expensive education. People can exercise choice, but they should have to experience repercussions having made that choice. It is important, however, regardless of route, the total funding received by a university for a student is the same - to ensure that universities don't go after private school pupils like they have for international students.

Surely, you ask, it would be better to simply fund state schools to ensure that their students can compete for places at top universities, give admissions tutors information on how much they're taught and class sizes, and let those experts - the tutors - decide who is most worthy of a place? Though this would be looking at the problem the wrong way around: where would the said funding come from? The sad reality is that those educated in the state sector will always be at a disadvantage: this policy merely tries to reduce the disadvantage for the majority of the nation’s pupils.

It’s a wretched circle: to get people to stop spending money on fees, they've got to be attracted to the state or comprehensive school in the first place which means better standards overall. In order to improve the state sector, what is needed is the re-engaging of parents with the will and care to act to improve the state education system rather than just opting out. (Of course, the choice of the parents to send their children to fee paying schools is maintained, but it comes with consequences). And while the very wealthy will always be able to pay the price to get their children ahead, there is very little that can be done about it without banning private education outright. State schools that do well usually have an active parent body holding the school to account and supporting their activities (to the benefit of all pupils at that school).

Since teachers are the experts, they need to be given more freedom and more resources in order to impart the love of learning to their students rather than be confined to assessment objectives set out in the National Curriculum (devised by a bored bureaucrat in Whitehall who has no understanding of the system of education).It is interesting that one of the big attractions of private education is that you do not have to study the official National Curriculum, and perhaps an abolition (or at least a wholesale reform) of it would attract some parents out there who have seen both sides and have chosen private over state for this reason. It is high time that teachers were treated like the professionals that they are, given the authority to teach in a style that they feel comfortable with, makes the subject interesting while at the same time covering all the essentials that are necessary to pass the exams.

If education is as important as Blair said fourteen years ago, then merely saying "state education and schools need improving" is not enough. It has to be far more radical than that: the middle classes need to send their children to the comprehensives, be actively involved to prove that the middle classes really do care about improving the quality of education in the state sector. The government also needs to take make sure that proper investment ensure a radical reformation of the state sector in order that it provides a high quality education that everyone deserves. Until then, those who are born into less well off families will continue to face difficulties because of their background – something which should be unacceptable in modern day Britain.