The Conservative Party is trying to introduce a free market education system into the U.K. In this Spectator piece Fraser Nelson examines the success of the Swedish reforms. A fragment:
This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.
…He would, in short, seek to bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain. When Mr Cameron first promised to do this at the Tory conference in Blackpool (along with Wisconsin-style welfare reform), it sounded a rather abstract idea, the stuff of think-tank seminars rather than everyday life. Yet in the last five months Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has been carefully designing a blueprint which would enable the establishment of a new breed of local independent schools, funded by the state but not run by it. It is potentially a plan of huge significance.
…Today one in every eight schools in Sweden is a so-called ‘free school’ — some 900 already, with a further 1,550 applications granted last year. That said, Hultin also points out that most of these applications do not result in new schools. ‘Many applications are by parents wanting to pressure a council which is threatening to close down a local school,’ he says. So of course, if the council backs down, the application is unnecessary. This tactic is hard to comprehend in Britain. Swedish parents don’t protest against school closures — they simply apply to open a rival school. This prevents councils from amalgamating good small schools into ever-larger educational warehouses.
Part of the Conservatives’ problem in selling the policy is trying to get across the idea of a system where pupils choose schools, and not vice versa. Where parents on council estates are inundated with leaflets from schools competing to educate their child. And where fee-charging private schools might revert to the purpose they served before the comprehensive era: social clubs for the richest.
The first question you might ask is: how would people find the buildings? This question takes as its premise the Grange Hill model of a secondary which has, alas, become the norm in England. The average English school here now has a roll of a thousand pupils — whereas the new breed of Swedish schools averages just 180 pupils. So new schools can, and usually do, open in a former office.
Per Ledin, head of Kunskapsskolan group, which owns 25 schools, explained the process to me. ‘Most office buildings are constructed in a way that it’s no big deal to tear down a wall and make a classroom.’ But don’t the council schools put up a fight against their new competition? ‘Of course,’ he shrugs. ‘They say, “We already have 500 surplus school places, so please, no more misery.” But it doesn’t work. The 1992 Act says new schools can only be blocked on very specific grounds.’
This is the secret to the system’s success (which the Tories would replicate): a central body granting planning and financial permission. New schools cannot be blackballed by jealous local authorities as they are in Britain. Mr Blair could only look on and weep last year when councillors in the deprived borough of Tower Hamlets rejected Goldman Sachs’s offer to open a city academy. Even now Lord Adonis, the schools minister, is being dragged into the High Court by groups trying to stop the government opening new schools.
The second charge is that this funding system creates educational apartheid. If money follows pupils, won’t a socially damaging segregation between the best and worst schools be a natural consequence? Were it not for the evidence of the Swedish model, it would be easy to imagine any such proposal being still-born in this country. But there is now a mass of academic studies — one surveying 28,000 pupils — showing that such fears are unjustified. In education, a rising tide really does lift all boats. The older schools improve as they are galvanised by the pressure of the new: shape up, or lose pupils and money. It works.
What is perhaps most surprising about these new schools is their Spartan appearance. In the south of Stockholm I visited Enskede School, which could not strike a greater contrast with the flagship city academies I have been shown around in England. There are no trophy buildings, interactive whiteboards or other gizmos. There is an Ikea-style simplicity at work. The classrooms have tables and chairs, but not much else. Playgrounds are converted car parks. But no one seems to mind.
…Yet there is one part of the Swedish system which is too openly capitalist even for the Tories: allowing schools to make a profit. In the Prime Minister’s Office in Stockholm’s old town, Mikael Sandström, a state secretary for the Moderate party administration, explains why the Tories are wrong. ‘If you’re a not-for-profit school, then the longer the waiting list the better,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot of trouble to expand, so they don’t. Also, profit-making schools have been shown to have less social segregation.’ And then he says something one would be surprised to hear in the White House, let alone the Rosenbad in Stockholm. ‘The question for me is whether we should abolish non-profit-making schools,’ Sandström says. I am not at all sure he was joking.
I visited another school which illustrates Sandström’s point. Engelska Skolan, which teaches primary children in English, had two founders who disagreed whether to seek profit. They went their separate ways. The original school still stands, on its own in a trust, six applicants for every place. The profit-making version is now a chain of eight English-speaking schools. If the waiting list grows big enough, they open another one.
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