Too many comprehensives fail to offer separate sciences at GSCE level and ensure pupils take rigorous academic subjects at A levels suitable for entry to read STEM subjects at the top universities. No wonder public and grammar schools continue to surge ahead of comprehensives at gaining places to read STEM subjects at top universities. Britain has greatly increased the number entering higher education since the 1960s yet we fail to educate enough people in STEM subjects.

Historically engineering and sciences were areas where bright pupils from working and middle class backgrounds could enter the professions. As Dyson pointed out we produce 22,000 gradutes a year in engineering but need 37,000. Sending working class children to read art and huamnities degrees at ex- polys resulting in them accruing debts of £10ks will not greatly reduce social inequality as they are unlikely to obtain well paid employment. Sending a working class pupil to read engineering such that they obtain employment and become a chartered engineer will reduce social inequality. Ensuring a working class pupil has the GSCEs to obtain an apprentice in high value manufacturing or construction will reduce social inequality.
The great disaster of the last 15 yrs was that even with the boom in construction not enough pupils left schoool with GSCEs in maths, physics, english and technical drawing such that they could be employed in the construction industry: this is why so many immigrants were employed.
Germany has a sucessful manufacturing and construction industry because schools produce people with the right education and attitude for employment.

Too many in the education world lack any technical education and experience of the commercial world. Schools set up by the Quakers and Non- Conformists in the 18 and 19 centuries were designed to produce people with the skills for industry and finance which enabled the Industrial Revolution to occur. After all the schools were set up people who were creating the Industrial Revolution so they knew what was required of the pupils to obtain employment in finance and industry.

Thank you again for your comments. I’m not sure that I agree with the SNS report, which claims that “The empirical evidence showing that competition is good is not really credible, because they can’t distinguish between grade inflation and real gains.” The report I cited was comparing test scores in-year between municiple and free schools, so grade inflation should be irrelevant.

I also don’t agree with Vlachos that “It’s very difficult for people to make an informed choice of what’s a good school and that’s not conducive to a well-functioning market.” This information asymetry argument is regularly used by producer interests to argue that consumers are unable to exercise informed choice and so should not be allowed to exercise free choice. In fact, markets develop extraordinary ways to enable people to make informed choice in very complex areas. For example, I don’t need to know anything about engineering to know whether Fiat or Mercades make better motor cars.

The segregation is a more complex one, and in a sense is unavoidably ideological. There is no objective answer as to whether one should corral people together or allow them to choose their own relationships, but personally, I do not believe that education should be an exercise in social engineering. Anyway, state schools are often extremely segregated due to the close links with geographical area, and the fact that house prices reflect the quality of local schools.

Incidentally, while I know that ProCivitas is a free school, it was not clear to me on what basis Kunskapsgymnasiet was founded but it is clearly being run very badly: despite the rather odd statement from The Observer that “This has nothing to do with the schools’ managements”, it is patently apparent that it is the school leadership that decide whether teachers have to wear suits and whether students can smoke on the premises (which were issues the article chose to focus upon). As Peter Connée notes, “Fifteen years ago in Sweden, we had segregation based on where you live, now it’s based on ambition and ability.” In a society where wealth dictates where you live, there is the risk of far more damaging segregation.

As for Vlachos’s statement that “the free schools actually have a profit incentive to reduce quality”, this is simply untrue for the reason that I explained above. If they reduce quality they destroy their brand and so make a loss – a powerful incentive which their municipality-run rivals would not share if they still had a monopoly.

It is interesting that you refer to the “sharp elbowed middle classes” – I refer you to my comments in the fourth paragraph of my article. Why is it that ambition for one’s children is portrayed in such a negative light? Why is parental ambition such a bad thing? Anyway, as I go on to note, it is the very fact that it is ambitious parents who primarily benefit in a not-for-profit (and, indeed, a state monopoly) situation that is the main argument for profit-making free schools: they will seek to help poorer children whose parents are not mobilised.

What is so intersting about your closing paragraphs is that it is only in an environment where free schools operate that “the experience, knowledge and advice of the professionals who serve and have served as teachers, heads, lecturers, administrators in education [can be taken] over politicians”, because in such an environment they are able to set up free schools, outside of political control (I refer you to my earlier reply with regards political control – in as much as the free school policy represents not privatisation but nationalisation of education, I agree that it is a recepie for political interference, which I oppose). It is worth noting that several of the existing 24 free schools were set up by teachers. They would not have that freedom under the old system.

Just one correction, my example about the £1 is that in the free schools the £1 is profit, even though the proprietor takes his wages before the profit. But in the maintained school, there is no profit–the wages of the headteacher (in a similar role as the proprietor) takes no actual profit, just his wages.

The problems with free schools is that they will never provide a sustainable model to drive improvement across the system, and all the evidence is that it is the sharp elbowed middle classes or religious groups, or groups with some type of agenda who are opening them, merely causing social segregation.

How can accountability being determined by parents be the answer when not all parents are equipped with the same skills, background and knowledge to assess either the market or accurately interpret performance data? Such a system will only ever create winners and losers. And it is easy to see who the winners will be.

I find the last paragraph of your comment above completely off-beam, I am afraid and I do not accept your “final word”.

It is all very well throwing political theory at education, but I would take the experience, knowledge and advice of the professionals who serve and have served as teachers, heads, lecturers, administrators in education over politicians every time in devising sensible systems for what works. Interestingly enough, they have done it for no profit over many years, with one of their main obstacles being the level of political interference, sometimes at a micro-level, which is is simply not on. Not all schools have done well, unfortunately and we must continue to work to ensure that this is not the case–but free schools working at a profit will simply not solve this problem, particularly where they create extra school places in certain areas, creating a recipe for sink schools. (And remember, that is a cohort’s life chances as the school literally withers on the vine through having low numbers and not enough money to resource the school effectively.)

I am not ideological, just practical and working in any way that will promote equality of opportunity for all. I would de-politicise education tomorrow if I could and have politicians only work in a scrutiny function–not specifying and dictating content and structures as part of their ideological master plan, only for this master plan to be turned on its head in a few years’ time when the other lot takes over! It is simply not sustainable and not in children’s interests.

Thank you for your comment. Profit is only “a dirty word” because many people persist in questioning whether profit is moral. For liberals, this is particularly odd, as the whole basis of liberalism back to David Hume and beyond focuses (as I think I noted in the article) on enlightened self-interest: by pursuing one’s own ends one creates a better society for all. Note the distinction between self-interest and selfish-interest, which is one that reactionaries have consistently and deliberately blurred.

In fact, the pursuit of self-interest often goes hand-in-hand with forms of conduct that we consider desirable and virtuous. “The habits of economy, industry, discretion, attention and application of thought are generally thought to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and are at the same time apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody.”

In your specific example, the mistake is to see profit as wasted expenditure. Rather, it provides the important incentive to improve efficiency and effectiveness; to both drive down costs and drive up quality. Surely, “the best return on [your] £10” is not dictated by the how much is spent on the children as opposed to on the profit, but purely by the quality of the education that the children receive. Note the crucial point in the article: “for-profit schools significantly out-perform local authority-run schools”. How can it be wasteful if the children are being better educated?

Incidentally, I find your distinction between the school that spends £1 on profit for the head-entrepreneur and the school that spends £1 on wages for the head-employee to be artificial and without justification. We may be able to blame Adam Smith for that one: I sometimes wonder how valuable the distinction between profit, wages and rent really is. If you think about it, the children still only get the £9 spent on them while both the head-entrepreneur and the head-employee spend £1 servicing their mortgage, putting petrol in their car, buying beer or whatever. Where does this profit-bad-wages-good idea come from?

Now let’s be clear. Nobody (apart perhaps from the Mail) is suggesting that all state education is bad. There are many excellent state schools. However, to suggest that “Our focus should be, like a forest of spinning plates, to keep all the plates spinning” is to suggest that we cannot do better. The evidence from Sweden, Chile and other countries is clear: we can improve on the education provided by the state monopoly schools by allowing alternative providers to compete, and for-profit schools are a valuable ingredient in that. Please don’t let ideology stand in the way of improving children’s education.

As for accountability, I agree with everything you say except that it should be determined by experts. It should be determined by parents. And the most powerful tool of accountability is the ability to withdraw your custom and go elsewhere. Just try moving your child to a different state school if you are unhappy with the quality of education. Unless you are rich enough to move house – and probably to change local authority into the bargain – you will get nowhere. Without the ability for parents to choose and change school, there will never be proper accountability.

Interestingly, the report I cited was specific in stating that it was not suggesting that “free schools operating for profit offer any kind of panacea”. There is no panacea. But they do improve outcomes, especially for the poorest children. That should be our only concern. I also utterly share your concern about “a powerful … Secretary of State who can change the parameters for success and can divert resources to favoured structures”. My biggest concern about Michael Gove’s policy is that he is not marketising education but nationalising it! But free schools for profit in a free and competitive market (as opposed to in a corrupt, crony market, which is what results when politicians get involved) are the best defence against Tory efforts to centralise and nationalise education.

I’ll conclude by saying again: the evidence shows that free schools offer better education than state schools, and for-profit schools out-perform not-for-profit schools when teaching kids from families with low educational background. That really ought to be the final word on the matter.

Let’s assume I represent all taxpayers, and I am paying you £10 to run a free school. You aim to do it more efficiently, and in so doing you spend £9 on educating the children and running the school (including your own wages), etc, and then pocket the £1 as profit. The maintained school up the road spends all £10 on educating the children and running the school (including the head’s wages). Currently, the maintained school may not do it as efficiently as you, but if it can, I, as the taxpayer, would always favour that type of arrangement to a wasteful arrangement, such as you represent, where £1 of my tax is frittered away on a non-core (to education) activity. I want to see the best return on my £10, want it spent efficiently and want to see that it is all spent on education and related activities. In a sense, free schools could never actually spend the money more efficiently (and certainly never more efficiently than a well run maintained school), as some of my hard-earned taxpayer money would be wasted on profit.

Some may argue that the£1 is a necessary cost of running an efficient school, and as such that I the taxpayer must swallow it, even though I do not like it. But this rather ignores the–literally–thousands upon thousands of schools that are doing a really good job (don’t believe the hysteria of the Mail and Express which assume that all state education is dire–it’s actually in its rudest condition of health ever–just that no-one ever talks about it, especially not Gove–why would he when he is forcing through an ideological schools revolution?). Our focus should be, like a forest of spinning plates, to keep all the plates spinning, whilst picking up the ones that are wobbling or have fallen, and to make sure that we do not waste resources in so doing, so that all our resource is targeted on what counts –children–and where the overall need is greatest.

The issue that Liberals should be concerned with is not profit but accountability. It seems that profit and the market is the only response ever proposed where state provision is found to be not efficient. But it is not a simple “either/or”. It is a case of developing a framework of accountability (independently determined by experts, not politicians) that drives the best, most efficient use of state resources in furtherance of high educational outcomes (and I am not just talking about league tables and exam results here). This will vary from area to area and school to school –as well as from time to time–as a myriad of different factors take their effect.

I do not believe that free schools operating for profit offer any kind of panacea to patchiness in education provision. Indeed when you add to the mixture a powerful (and getting more so in terms of centralising ever more powers to himself) Secretary of State who can change the parameters for success and can divert resources to favoured structures, how can you trust the “government” measures of accountability or what we are told are the most successful schools? We end up believing what we are told, despite what the independent evidence (not easily accessible to the vast, vast majority) clearly shows.

It strikes me that free schools for profit more than anything else prop up a system that rewards cronies and allies with profits from taxes that Conservatives bitterly resent paying in the first place, but actually does nothing (nor is, I suspect, its real motivation) to improve the educational experiences of children.