The Tory school voucher
scheme seems plausible but could bring a socially disastrous
process of selection, writes Donald Hirsch
Once again, the issue of school vouchers is back on the
political agenda.
The Conservatives have been calling them "pupil passports"
and focusing on how they could widen choice in state-funded
education.
Yet if some privately-run schools were given state-level
funding for each pupil, a crucial issue would be whether
parents could "top up" vouchers with fees. Last week shadow
chancellor Oliver Letwin wondered out loud whether this might
be permitted, for relatively low-fee schools serving
modest-income families, but not to subsidise children
attending Eton.
This may at first glance seem a fairer way of supporting
private education than fully-fledged vouchers subsidising all
families who pay for private schools, including the extremely
well-off 7 per cent who do so at present.
Letwin's idea appears less socially unjust in terms of
transferring money to the rich. In fact, vouchers allowing
limited top-ups are particularly dangerous in their potential
social and educational consequences. Imagine a future in which
the state gives £3,500 per pupil (the cost of state education)
to any school - public or private - provided it does not
charge fees above a certain limit, say £2,000. And suppose
that under such a system the main consideration for parents
was class sizes, which were roughly proportional to per-pupil
spending.
In this case, different tiers of schools would serve
different markets.
Some might charge £1,000 to modestly well-off families keen
for their children to have a little more teacher attention
than in a "bog-standard" school.
Other schools might aim themselves at a more affluent
clientele able to afford £2,000, which would perhaps buy class
sizes of 19 rather than 30. Both markets would be much bigger
than the small group which at present buys private education
without state help.
Crucially, the no-fee sector could gradually deteriorate
into a refuge for the poor to serve only those families with
no spare resources to top up the quality of their children's
education. Is this scenario far-fetched? Experience in
Australia shows that it is not. In the 1970s, a tiered voucher
system was set up to rescue private Catholic schools, most of
which served relatively poor communities and charged minimal
fees. Each private school was given something, but less if it
commanded high-fee income.
The result has been a steady growth in independent schools
with modest fees which appeal to middle-class families who
want to escape the public sector but cannot afford the full
cost of doing so.
Independent schools have been boosted lately by more
favourable subsidies introduced by a conservative
administration. Today, a third of Australian children attend
private schools, up to 40 per cent in the secondary sector in
some states.
The slow but relentless growth in the market share of
independent schools is steadily demoralising the public
sector, not helped by recent experience of more generous
funding for private schools while public resources stagnate.
For all the travails and crises facing state schools in
this country over the past 25 years, the percentage of
students going to private schools has remained stable at 7 per
cent. That has helped to keep the improvement of state
education a nationally shared priority.
Of course, the Conservatives will claim to retain that
priority, and any help for private schools will be presented
as a socially progressive measure focused on improving options
for relatively worse-off families.
Yet however it were designed today, this could be a first
step towards helping those who can afford it to buy their way
out of state education rather than remaining and improving it.
Small steps towards segregating students can so easily be
followed by larger ones. When the Tories introduced specialist
schools in a 1992 White Paper, they allowed them to select 10
per cent of pupils on aptitude, and said this was not about
reintroducing wider selection.
Four years later, the Conservatives produced another White
Paper allowing specialist schools to select 30 per cent, grant
maintained ones 50 per cent, and any school 20 per cent of
their pupils. Had these proposals been put into practice, they
would have marked the end of comprehensive education.
One reason we have escaped vouchers for private schools in
this country is that they could be extremely expensive. Today,
as in the Thatcher era, rebating the cost of a public
education to existing fee-paying parents would be tough for a
party committed to cutting taxes.
Now, a clever shadow chancellor is considering a version
which would avoid that expense - by denying vouchers to
today's expensive private schools and aiming them principally
at those already being educated by the state.
This financial feasibility makes the idea of top-up
vouchers a particularly alarming threat to state education.
Donald Hirsch is the author of a wide range of
international studies of school choice for the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development Another voice 22
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