Cost of Education - 2

Nearly two weeks ago Daniel Hannan, in one of his usually excellent postings on the Telegraph Blogs, included some startling figures.

He compared the current cost of education in private schools with that in state schools. The average cost for a "day" pupil, that is removing boarding costs, at a private school emerges as £9,069. There are no overt charges for state schools, but taking the total cost of state school education at £77.7 billion in 2007-08 and dividing by the number of pupils educated in state schools gives an average of over £9,000 per pupil.

There thus would seem to be little difference between the two in average costs, this despite the generally accepted smaller classes in private schools and better facilities. It is these differences which raise the fury among those on the left.

How can we explain this unexpected similarity in costs. Are teachers in private schools paid less, a situation they accept because they enjoy the ethos of public schools? I am not aware that there is any great difference, and some schools actually observe and use salary scales negotiated in the state sector.

Hannan suggests, and he is surely right, that it is the very high non-classroom costs in the state sector which keeps that state average up to the private level. We have another illustration here of the cost of centralised bureaucratic provision of various services.

Bureaucracies have levels - Whitehall and regional in the case of health, or local council in the case of education, which require compliance from the school or hospital. Instructions are sent down, and statistics and other material are sent up, the chains. Every link has the possibility of misunderstanding and even deliberate obfuscation, every link interprets as best they can what comes from above and summarises what is going up to their own advantage and protection.

It is not just the vast number of bureaucrats, who need wages, pensions and materials, it is also the cumbersome responses and late appreciation of what is happening. Resources are devoted to monitoring and compliance. All these are unnecessary in an organisation which has local autonomy. It is significant that large businesses have "solved" this problem as they have grown very large by divisionalisation and local autonomy.

If this analysis is correct, and there is plenty of evidence that it is, then as Hannan remarks, "...most of the education budget budget never gets near the classroom."

Those on the left are right to point out that class sizes, performance and outcomes do differ between state and private schools. The problem is that they would wish to bring the whole private sector under state bureaucracy. It is levelling down, at great cost, to serve some egalitarian ideology.

The better solution is surely something like that promoted by Gove and Cameron, - to have much more autonomy at local level, to have monitoring done by parents, and to have potential competition whereby good schools threaten bad ones and compel change in the latter.