Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

The Times has just released the most recent school league tables for A-level and GCSE results, and the verdict on Labour’s achievements in the field of education is truly damning:

Of the top 50 schools with the highest scores at A level, all but three were in the independent sector.

And those three?

The three state schools to make the top 50 for A-level results were Latymer School in Enfield, Kendrick school in Reading and Henrietta Barnett School in North London. All are grammar schools.

In other words, for all Labour’s bleating about the resource asymmetries that disadvantage comprehensive schools relative to the private, public and grammar alternatives, they have done NOTHING about changing this in nearly 13 years of virtually unopposed government. All they have done, and here current Schools Minister Ed Balls is a primary culprit, is produce “an initiative a week” to increase the ‘accountability’ (read: enslavement) of state schools and limit the freedom of action of independent schools. Such as the Mandarin and Arabic lessons primary school pupils are now supposed to be given amid yet more ineffectual spending pledges and empty guarantees. And the academies – where a frankly pathetic 0.9pc of pupils achieved more than 5 A*s at GCSE.

Spend, spend, spend – but on what? Ringfencing the education budget – but what happens with it? It clearly doesn’t go on the wages of teachers in the public sector – which have yet to even get close to the levels in the private sector – and anyway, no-one in their right mind would choose to work in an underpaid state job with rebellious and often violent pupils who they cannot punish for fear of being labelled child molesters, when the alternative is the private sector without all the crippling regulation and with pupils who come from a pro-education family culture, or even outside education entirely. All that Labour has done in a cynical attempt to equalise education levels has been to drag down the wealthy and the intelligent to the level of those unable or unwilling to put as much time/effort into education.

Here’s an example of the sort of meaningless measures that have dominated education policy since 1997: the recently-published primary league tables show that 900 primary schools are failing to teach children the basic skills of  accurate reading, writing and arithmetic – so OBVIOUSLY the ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION is to tell 1400 primary schools to improve so that at least 55pc of their pupils have these skills. Where does the 55pc come from? What about the other 45pc who think that 2 + 2 = 5 and that the alphabet is just a mysterious collection of dots and lines? And why 1400 schools – by what criteria are the extra 500 schools borderline cases? And of course, how is telling schools to improve their results going to result in them doing so? Threat of closure? Great – less kids getting any education, more teachers on the dole. And of course closing the school implies that somebody or something FAILED somewhere along the line – and to Labour there is no such thing as failure, merely ‘deferred success’… and bourgeois intransigence on the part of critics who need to be Told the Truth. So the initiative collapses amid another spending splurge in the classic socialist hope that throwing money stolen from rich people at a problem will just make it go away.

The Conservatives and Lib Dems both seem to agree that cutting the nonsense regulation and federalising education provision to the local level – independent state schools, crackdown on bad behaviour, increasing teacher-to-pupil ratios, school vouchers for parents – is the way to go. Competition over centrally-driven homogeneity – yes. No more top-down empty targets – also yes. But until teaching becomes an attractive profession again, and teachers are treated less like childminders and more like knowledge communicators, even these policies won’t be enough.