Common Endeavour

chalky, coloured, but not in a Jim Davidson way

If you want to understand Conservative schools policy, read
this, by Conservative PPC Charlotte Leslie:

A lady approaches me at a meeting. She's incandescent with rage. Turns out she'd spent an extra £10,000 on a house they couldn't really afford, to move into the catchment area of the new -and much sought-after - Redland Green school. Except that after she moved, the council changed the catchment area criteria. Now she's stuck, probably about to sell her house making a loss, to move to an area where there is a school she's happy for her child to go to.

She's not alone - over a fifth of Bristol parents refuse to send their child to a Bristol School (the highest proportion in the country, outside London Boroughs.) But telling her this makes things no better of course.

So a middle-class parent attempts to play the system by flashing large sums of money, and the system beats her. Her children are in the same position as those who don't have her money - and this makes her angry. By the way, think about the logic of "over a fifth of Bristol parents refuse to send their child to a Bristol school". Are they all teaching them at home? No. A good proportion (not a fifth, but a decent number) of Bristol parents can afford to send their children to private school - the same is true of London - and so they do. This fact simply can't be used uncritically as evidence that Bristol schools are crap, just as the fact that David Cameron went to Eton doesn't demonstrate that in the late 1970s Berkshire was full of sink comprehensives, and that his poor parents had no alternative.

Charlotte Leslie explains the Conservative "solution" to the "problem":

The best I can do is to tell her that under a Conservative Government, parents like her would be able to club together to work to get a charity or trust body to set up a school in their area. And we'd remove the obstacles that currently hinder this happening. She's amazed-in a good way- about the possibility.

And this is indeed what the Conservatives want to do. If you're not satisfied with the schools in your area, you can set up your own. On your bike.

Now, this isn't quite a libertarian fantasy world in which dissatisfied users of public services complain to the state, and the state says "Do it yourself". It's real taxpayers' money, £6000 per pupil, that the Conservatives plan to give to people who want to set up their own schools in response to the problem that an area's existing schools aren't good enough, or white enough, or creationist enough, or whatever.

Click here for Fraser Nelson's classic Spectator exposition of the policy as operated in Sweden, in which Fraser gets terribly excited about the whole idea and decides that the fact that no Swedish voucher schools have been closed down after allegations of abuse and religious extremism is a vindication of the model rather than, as the Spectator would no doubt conclude if the same happened here, evidence of a once-great nation's supine capitulation to militant Islam in the education system. He also notes the Swedish criticism of the British Conservative version of the idea: so far, the Tories are not prepared to allow these new schools to make a profit. Give them time.

As things stand the policy, set out here, is funded by a plan to cut £4.5bn from the Government's Building Schools for the Future programme, which is in the process of rebuilding or renewing every secondary school in England. There isn't any free money lying around, so if the Tories want to spend, they have to cut first. And there's no obvious way of ensuring that the redirected money will be spent in the areas that need it most, because there's no obvious way of ensuring that the people who want to set up new schools are the people who live in areas with poor schools. They might. They might not. Here's Steve Richards:

Even one of the Conservatives' heroes in this current government, the former schools minister Lord Adonis, has his doubts. I am told Adonis fears that under the Tory plans new schools will be set up expensively in leafy suburbs and, as there will be no overall increase in funding, there will be a redistribution of resources away from the poorer inner-city areas.

The policy would only work fairly with a big increase in spending, yet Cameron remains the only leader in the western world, with a chance of being in power soon, who calls for an overall cut in public spending plans.

On the Spectator 's Coffee House blog last week, even Fraser Nelson raised some concerns that schools won't be very interested in using the new freedoms they'll be granted, and that, even now, "even the City Academies don't, in the most part, use powers to pay different teachers differently". George Bridges, a former Cameron aide, is aware of this line of criticism, but chooses to respond to it not with argument but with willy-waving about the National Union of Teachers as "the enemy within", and "just as Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the NUM decided our economy's future, David Cameron's battle against the NUT will decide the future of our children" - which is presumably designed to appeal more to the kind of people who really enjoyed the miners' strike than to those who didn't.

This ambivalence about devolving power - a key theme across Conservative policy in general - leads to the absurdity of Shadow Cabinet members simultaneously promising more local control for headteachers and promising that "A Tory government under David Cameron would encourage state schools to introduce the blazer as a key element of their dress code".

By the way, that Daily Mail article contains the words, "The Tories would also monitor the price of blazers". Remember that, next time you hear them complaining about government waste.

About the author:  ZaNuLieBore is a one-eyed Scottish idiot. Read more from this author