Adam Smith Institute

According to a survey of 3,000 people commissioned by UKTV Gold, a satellite TV channel, Britons are increasingly confusing fact and fiction when it comes to their historical knowledge. While 58 percent believed Sherlock Holmes was a real historical figure, 23 percent believed Sir Winston Churchill was fictional.

On seeing the results of this survey I assumed that I had overslept and woken up on April 1st but, alas, no. It appears to have been a real survey of real people – something which, humour aside, is very worrying indeed.

Education reform, anyone?

9. "It is wrong to allow bright children to go to special schools. This deprives the ordinary schools of their beneficial influence." 

If you regard children as the property of the state, existing to serve it, then it is explicable why the bright ones should be regarded as a scarce commodity, and rationed accordingly. The idea of allocating their "beneficial influence" equally through society follows from the same twisted logic. It is a pity that this is only applied to intelligence. Why should not the good-looking children be shared out equally, so their peer group has equal access to the pleasant sight of them? Perhaps the kind ones should be spread so that all may benefit equally from their sweet disposition?

The vicious notion is that children, whether bright or not, should be regarded as the instruments of the ends of others, instead of ends in themselves. Children do not exist to serve the purposes of the state, it is the other way round. The concern should be with what is of benefit to the individuals concerned, rather than with how they can be made to serve some ideological view of society.

Behind the idea often lurks the doctrine of egalitarianism, and the feeling that children really ought not to be brighter than each other. With this comes the determination that nothing should be done to encourage it. And this involves the rejection of special schools where the bright children can feel the competitive challenge of their peers, and be pushed even further.

Not only is the view a malicious one to the children concerned, it is adverse to the betterment of society. It is very often the bright children who go on to become the achievers, and develop the new products and processes, and the new ideas that benefit the rest of society. By holding them back when they are young, we may prevent the development of that ability.

My true love sent to me: seven swans a-swimming. In the song, this could refer to the seven sacraments, or the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which include things like teaching, service, and leadership.

Teaching, of course, is another of those things where there is far too much government, and far too little service and leadership. As in health, it is not that the staff are bad - but they are just badly managed, and the sector is too centrally run. The top-down Stalinist way of running things didn't deliver in the Soviet Union, and it doesn't deliver in health, education, and other public services. So we end up with sink schools from which parents and kids - usually those in the most deprived areas - have no escape.

Now, though, the world is building up experience that decentralization actually works. Instead of the state running every school, give parents and teachers money to run their own. That has led to a flowering of new schools in poor, often black areas of America where the state schools had been overwhelmed with drugs and violence and underwhelmed with learning and achievement. Now Sweden has a similar system - the money follows the choices of parents, not bureaucrats, so it tends to be spent better: and all sorts of new education providers are springing up as a result. A model for the UK? Well, we certainly think so.

The New York Times ran an article a few days ago lamenting the decline of tenure track positions in American universities. While frustratingly indicative of a fall in teacher quality and a high turnover of part time and non-tenure-track university professors, advocates forget that a high number of tenured professors probably will not improve teacher quality.

Teacher’s unions fight for tenure because it supplies the ultimate job protection; after teaching for a given number of years a teacher simply cannot be fired. Visiting professors might only stay for the year but can carry the hope and the incentive to do well, in case they might be offered a tenure-track position. Tenure-track professors will work hard too because they are faced with the incentive of increasing their rank and achieving job security. Tenured professors, on the other hand, have lost all incentive to perform at a high level. University professors are also different from teachers in lower education; many, especially at larger institutions, enter the profession not because of a drive to teach, but often because they had completed advanced study in an area and needed a job. Once offered tenure, these professors might stop teaching all together in favour of their research or publications.

Adam Smith said that teachers must have proper incentives of pay and job security in order to properly instruct students; anyone whose pay is not linked to their work will necessarily under-perform. The ability for improvement and the threat of pay cuts improve any profession, and teaching is no different. Professors must always have opportunities to advance, not a position which completely removes the incentives to do their job well.

In his most recent announcement on education, Conservative leader David Cameron pledged to provide of 220,000 new school places by allowing independent organisations to set up schools that would receive state funding on a per pupil basis. Under the Tory plans, a legal presumption that any "fit and proper persons" should be able to set up their own state-financed schools would be created, and planning rules would be shaken up to release more land for educational purposes.

All of which is excellent, and could make a real difference to our ailing education system. Supply side reform like this, which harnesses market forces to create good new school places, is vital if demand side reform (i.e. school choice) is going to be effective. Indeed, the proposals are very similar to those in our recent education report Open Access for UK Schools (which popped up again in the Guardian this week).

Unfortunately though, I worry the Tories still haven't quite 'got it'.

The whole point of establishing independent schools within the state-funded sector is that in return for greater accountability (the school sinks or swims on how many pupils it is able to attract) the schools are given operational independence. This is the surest way to raise standards. Yet the Conservatives seem unable to move beyond the idea that when public money is being spent, the government has to regulate. Thus these new 'independent' schools would have to stream pupils by ability and teach synthetic phonics, and so on. Of course, these requirements may be sensible ones, but surely such decisions are better left to parents and to teachers? As soon as you allow government to regulate, the rules start piling up and you're back where you started – city academies are a shining example of this.

All in all: good, but could do better.

The Conservative Party’s latest idea on ensuring that all children are able to read by the age of seven is noble. Yet they’ve once again slipped into the idea of measuring standards through centrally set testing. For the vast majority of children in Britain they face repeated testing throughout their days at school, and most of this is merely for the whim of the politicians.

As Michael Gove MP told the Andrew Marr Show on the BBC: "We want to introduce a simple test which means at the end of two years of primary school we know whether or not children have mastered the skills they need to read.” It is rather shocking to read that a Conservative MP wants to know whether a child can read or not. This type of nannying interference is typical of the politics of the moment, and as an opposition party the conservatives should be offering an alternative not aping it. The over emphasis on the state to monitor (by turning the exam and test results into statistics) the development of children has removed this role from the parents. The most important people in a child’s education are its parents and they need to become more involved and not further alienated.

The Conservatives should be focusing on removing the state from the lives of children and allowing the teachers the freedom to teach the children in their care how they best see fit. It is noticeable, after all, that children are not only different but they develop and learn at a range of speeds. A teacher should be endowed with a wide range of skills so that these disparities are equalised in the way the children are taught.

Progress has been sufficiently impressive that the Broad Foundation declared New York the most improved urban school district in the nation... Graduation rates are at their highest in decades.

The ONS reckons that in the decade to 2006, overall spending increased in real terms by 25.3% (technical aside- regular BOM readers may wonder why that's less than the 60% quoted here: essentially it's because the ONS has deflated cash spending using a specific index of educational input prices, whereas we simply used the Treasury's GDP deflator: in other words, educational input prices- especially salaries- have risen much faster than the general price level... another Simple Shopper triumph).

The Taxpayers' Alliance have been making waves with Peter Cuthbertson's report on university 'non-courses." Widely covered by the BBC and major newspapers, the report highlights 401 such courses, which it says cost £40m a year to run. For its top five it picks out
 • Outdoor adventure with philosophy, at Marjon, the College of St Mark and St John in Plymouth
 • Science: fiction and culture, at the University of Glamorgan
 • Equestrian psychology, at the Welsh College of Horticulture in Mold, Flintshire
 • Fashion buying, at Manchester Metropolitan University
 • Golf management, at UHI Millennium Institute, based in Inverness.

Author Peter Cuthbertson says that political priorities have driven governments to increase the numbers attending university, and "As a result, there has been a massive expansion of 'non-degrees' of little or no academic merit." His findings have been attacked by Universities UK, who report that the so-called non-courses were provided in response to demand, and are in fact over-subscribed. Well, yes, but could that be because they are easier? Just as some students are going for less demanding A-levels, might they not also be choosing easier degree courses?

If university courses were not subsidized by public money, students might be reluctant to take on huge debts to gain degrees of dubious worth.