Education spending and equality

This report (pdf) from The Primary Review claims that "£500m  was spent on the National Literacy Strategy with almost no impact on reading levels."
This isn't an isolated failure of New Labour. Spending on schools is often unproductive. In this paper (pdf), Erik Hanushek estimates that increased spending on schools around the world for years "have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement."
One interpretation of this is that structures matter more than money; it's competition and autonomy that raises standards, not resources alone, as Ludger Woessman describes here.
But there's another issue here for the left: how best can we improve the life chances of children from the worst families?
It's not obvious that these will benefit from school choice alone, as bad parents  (by definition) won't make the best choices for their children.  And the data shows that throwing money at them isn't guaranteed to work.
So, could it be that there's a tight limit to what the state can do to increase equality of opportunity?

Comments

[Bob B]

In Britain, we urgently need to address this stark finding of IPPR, the Blairite think-tank:

"Britain's teenagers are among the most badly behaved in Europe, a study by a think-tank has suggested. On every indicator of bad behaviour - drugs, drink, violence, promiscuity - the UK was at or near the top, said the Institute for Public Policy Research."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108302.stm

[tolkein]

Could just be they're wrong. The teaching establishment (NUT et al) has leapt on the conclusions to support their desire to revert to the old days when nothing and nobody was/were measured. That was such a success in the old days for state pupils, wasn't it?

But the evidence seems to contradict the survey conclusions. The Guardian this morning showed that English children had indeed shown significant improvement in literacy and maths. Some of the conclusions in the review turn out to be made of smoke, on further examination. For example, the Graun had a conclusion that 1 in 3 results for SATs were wrong. It turns out that the review said that

The reports document research showing that up to one in three pupils is given the wrong mark at the end of the tests. Short papers with questions that have a narrow range of possible answers mean that pupils' skills are not rigorously tested, leaving a wide margin of error.

"It is estimated that for the end of key stage tests in England this means that as many as one third of pupils may be given the wrong 'level'," the report says. "Only an increase in length of test beyond anything that is practicable would materially change this situation. Thus there are limits to how accurate the results of tests can be."

Estimated, may. And what about evidence rather than prejudice?

[Bob B]

I'm certainly willing to consider the possibility that the finding of the report out today on literacy standards in primary schools could be flawed in several respects, especially in the light of a finding in another report that:

"In reading, English primaries are still in the top group of countries, outperforming France, Germany, Italy, and the US. In maths, there has been significant improvement from 1995 to 2003, with England surpassing schools in the United States, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Norway and eight other countries. In science, English schools were also among the top performers in the world."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article2789010.ece

[Bob B]

However, that still leaves us with the IPPR finding that British teenagers are among the worst behaved in Europe "on a broad range of indicators" and this finding of the OECD:

"Last year [2004], a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that Britain came seventh from bottom in a league table of staying-on rates for 19 countries. Only Mexico and Turkey had significantly lower rates of participation for this age group. Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Slovakia have marginally lower rates."
http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/story/0,16086,1555547,00.html

. . . as well as:

"Only half of those on apprenticeships in England finish them, the chief inspector of adult education has found. Although standards of training had improved dramatically overall, David Sherlock said low apprenticeship completion rates were 'unacceptable'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6169843.stm

The consequences are predictable and verifiable: an accessible piece in The Economist for 26 August 2006 reported that Britain is unusually well-endowed with low-skilled young people compared with other major European economies and America:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7843638

[Shuggy]

"The teaching establishment (NUT et al) has leapt on the conclusions to support their desire to revert to the old days when nothing and nobody was/were measured. That was such a success in the old days for state pupils, wasn't it?"

Now everything and everyone is measured. And that's been such a success, hasn't it?

[Matt Munro]

The biggest determinant in the sucess of a school is the socio economic profile of it's pupils, closely followed by the ability and motivation of the teachers. Putting in more money, building shiny new "academies", fiddling with teaching methods, curricula and test regimes makes little difference. This means that poor, bright kids will always be crowded out by poor, stupid kids in any "comprehensive" system. Selection and streaming are the only way to provide (some) equality of opportunity in education.

[Jonathan]

Why is it the job of the state to educate children in the first place? Rather than repeatedly observing miserable outcomes of various failed state policies why not question the logic and values underlying state provision of education in the first place.
Can you imagine the kind of food selection (and price) we would now enjoy if the government had decided to nationalise that other essential, food?

[Bob B]

Matt: "This means that poor, bright kids will always be crowded out by poor, stupid kids in any 'comprehensive' system. Selection and streaming are the only way to provide (some) equality of opportunity in education."

Which is one of the reasons why the Attlee government after WW2 backed 11+ selection and the grammar schools which did so much to promote social mobility for that generation.

Among the problems with that structure were that the chances of getting a good schooling depended on the number of accessible grammar schools in any locality as well as parental motivation. A structure in which some 70+ per cent of 11-year olds on average didn't make it wasn't going to be politically sustainable in the longer term. By the early 1970s, Caroline Benn and Brian Simon could write their book on the switch over to comprehensive schools: Half-Way There (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

Btw I believe that the major fault lines in schooling in Britain are in secondary education, not in primary schools. There is evidence to support this claim in so far as black youth achievement is on parr in primary school but starts to lag in secondary schools. We also have research showing: "One striking fact is that poor white students are the lowest performing of all groups at age 16, showing a substantial deterioration in their relative scores through secondary school."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5051850.stm

"White British boys from poor families perform worse at GCSE than almost any other racial group. Official figures show that only 24% of those entitled to free school meals gained five or more good GCSEs last year, compared with 65% of the poorest Chinese boys and 48% of poor Indian and Bangladeshi boys."
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_ion/2007/01/the_bnp_and_the_white_boys.html

Blunkett though he had an inspired answer: Homework clubs at football stadiums. Tough on girls, of course, and a charter for paedophiles.

[Bob B]

Jonathan: "Why is it the job of the state to educate children in the first place?"

State intervention in schooling via the Act of 1870 was relatively late coming in Britain and was a response at that time to a situation where schooling in Britain was lagging behind much of the rest of western Europe because a combination of faith-based schools and the so-called public (fee-paying) schools was not up to meeting the challenge.

"We have noted a substantial body of original research . . . which found that stagnant or declining literacy underlay the 'revolution' of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . Britain in 1850 was the wealthiest country in the world but only in the second rank as regards literacy levels. [Nick] Crafts has shown that in 1870 when Britain was world economic leader, its school enrolment ratio was only 0.168 compared with the European norm of 0.514 and 'Britain persistently had a relatively low rate of accumulation of human capital'."
Sanderson: Education, economic change and society in 1780-1870 (Cambridge UP, 1995) p.61

[Shuggy]

This (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article1832196.ece) is one of those rare things - an article about education where one actually recognises what is being described.

Money quote:

"It is also true, on the other hand, that comprehensive education in Britain has been a failure. But this is not because we have segregated a small talented minority at the top. It is because we have refused to segregate an even smaller disruptive minority at the bottom."

This seems to make much more sense than returning to a system that writes off about 70% at the age of 11. I don't understand where this enthusiasm for grammar schools comes from. Why does a kid from a poor background have to be bright in order to quaify from a school life free from disruptive fuckwits?

[Mark Wadsworth]

Vouchers.

[Matt Munro]

"Among the problems with that structure were that the chances of getting a good schooling depended on the number of accessible grammar schools in any locality as well as parental motivation. A structure in which some 70+ per cent of 11-year olds on average didn't make it wasn't going to be politically sustainable in the longer term. By the early 1970s, Caroline Benn and Brian Simon could write their book on the switch over to comprehensive schools: Half-Way There (McGraw-Hill, 1970)."

The only problem with that stucture was the left wingers who couldn't live with a system that aknowledges the reality of individual differences unrelated to social class (far too much "nature" for the left). So they dismantled it, screwing up education for at least 3 generations of working class kids, with the failed "comprehensive" experiment whilst sending their own kids to private school. Unless you outlaw private eductaion you cannot by definition have a "comprehensive" system, as the cream of the crop has already been skimmed off.
I totally reject this idea that rewarding the most able 30% with an education they are equipped to take advantage of somehow means that 70% "didn't make it" - as though not being academic is, in and of itself, a failure. We are short of plumbers and bricklayers and overloaded with burger flipping media studies graduates because of that particularly pernicious form of snobbery.

[Bob B]

"I don't understand where this enthusiasm for grammar schools comes from."

Canvassing political support in the early 1970s on a council estate with a good reputation in Leicester, I came across a resident of close to retirement age and a life-long member of the Labour Party.

At that time, with no children of my own, I was a passionate advocate of abolishing 11+ selection and changing to comprehensive schooling according to the model of the Leicestershire Plan - and, incidentally, Leicestershire County Council, a high-Tory authority then, was one of the pioneers of comprehensive education in Britain, approving a policy of switching in 1958, that's 49 years ago.

The guy chided me. His grandson, who also lived on the same estate, went to one of the local grammar schools in the county borough of Leicester, where the council was usually Labour controlled. His perception was that the local grammar schools were the one route for escaping entrapment in the education values of neighbourhood cultures.

Come local government reform in 1974, and the County Council took over responsibility for education in the city of Leicester. Henceforth, the grammar schools were abolished. However, the County Council deferred to the majority wishes of city councilors and approved a (predictably disastrous) structure of secondary comprehensives for 11-16 year-olds and sixth form colleges. This is in marked contrast to the Leicestershire Plan structure of primary schools and then junior high schools for 11-14 year-olds followed by senior high schools for 14-18 year-olds - the crucial difference being that there is no natural break in schooling at 16.

What really turned me against comprehensive schooling was the result of personal experience with my children in Yorkshire in the 1980s where the effective policy was very much one of dumbing down. I now live in a London borough where my son went to the maintained secondary school down the road, which happens to be one of the remaining 164 grammar schools in England (there are none in Wales and Scotland) - only after he left to go to uni did I learn that this was the school Chris Woodhead (a notorious chief inspector of schools) had attended.

This London borough has retained a cluster of outstanding maintained (non-fee paying) selective secondary schools and it regularly ranks near or at the top of the annual league table for local education authorities based on the AVERAGE achievement in local maintained schools in the GCSE exams. The clear and indisputable implication is that the presence of the cluster of outstanding local selective schools is to raise AVERAGE attainment throughout schools in the borough. QED.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6250433.stm

[ad]

"It's not obvious that these will benefit from school choice alone, as bad parents (by definition) won't make the best choices for their children."

They do not have to make the best choices, as long as they make better choices. Deciding between schools A and B, even a tossed coin will get it right half the time. If the poor parents do better than that they will, on average, move their children from worse schools to better ones. And the worse schools will then have to improve, or close.

[Max]

I was talking this through with a policy wonk who's been seconded to the quangocracy. He says the reports comparison of literacy levels 50 years ago with present literacy levels is misleading. Mainly because it does not compare "like with like". Children 50-60 years ago only had a more limited range of entertainment. Whereas now, for children, literacy is less important compared to hand-eye co-ordination, etc. for computer gaming.

[Bob B]

Matt: "I totally reject this idea that rewarding the most able 30% with an education they are equipped to take advantage of somehow means that 70% 'didn't make it' - as though not being academic is, in and of itself, a failure."

It happens that Professor Sir Peter Mansfield FRS, who was awarded a Nobel prize for his crucial contributions to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners, failed his 11+. He left school at 15 to become an apprentice book-binder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mansfield

I really can't understand why 164 grammar schools, specialising in an academic curriculum, are "unacceptable" while 345 secondary schools specialising in sports aren't.

"There are currently 345 Sports Colleges in England operating as part of the Specialist Schools Programme. In addition, a further 12 schools have been designated in combined specialisms which include sport and 14 schools have Sport as a second specialism."
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/specialistschools/what_are/sports/

Btw "GCSE performance in arts, business, languages, mathematics, technology and science schools is no different from other state secondaries, they said. They found that only schools specialising in sports showed any difference, with slightly lower GCSE results than other schools on average."
http://education.guardian.co.uk/newschools/story/0,,2164505,00.html

What if the local school in your area specialises in sports and your sibling doesn't care for sports because his/her interests are academic? Is that fair?

[james higham]

In education, it always comes down, finally, to quality of teacher.

[Dipper]

"It is estimated that for the end of key stage tests in England this means that as many as one third of pupils may be given the wrong 'level'"

Now as I understand it the purpose of SATS was to test the school not the child. So to calculate the error in measurement of the class from the error in the measurement of the pupil then, assuming the pupil-measurement errors are independent, normal etc then one should divide the individual error by 1/root(30), which I suspect gives a low error and an accurate measurement of overall class ability.

But there has been scope creep, and now Andrew Adonis says the year 6 SATS should be used to identify pupils for the Geeks and Toffs program (sorry Gifted and Talented). So now it is an individual test not a school test, and individual error matters.

[Dipper]

... sry divide by root(30), not divide by 1/root(30) ...

[Bob B]

James: "In education, it always comes down, finally, to quality of teacher."

Attracting and retaining good teachers may be a necessary condition for providing a productive educational experience in schools but it certainly isn't a sufficient condition with the likelihood of challenging problems of classroom discipline arising from disruptive elements in some schools. The IPPR finding that British youth are the worst behaved in western Europe, on a broad range of indicators, suggests that we have such an unusual scale of pervasive youth problems that this can hardly be laid at the door of just teachers.

Besides that, it is recognised that there are continuing shortages of teachers with specialist qualifications in science subjects and maths:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6722653.stm

- Overall, at least 76 per cent of teachers deployed to teach mathematics and 93 per cent of teachers deployed to teach science were specialists, either they had a maths/science-related degree or had specialised in maths/science at initial teacher training (ITT).
- Conversely, 24 per cent of teachers deployed to teach mathematics and 8 per cent of teachers deployed to teach science were non-specialists or were predominately teachers of other subjects.
- For the science teaching population, there is a large imbalance in the representation of school sciences. In total, 44 per cent of all teachers who taught science had a specialism (ie, holding a degree in the subject or specialising in the subject in initial teacher training) in biology compared with 25 per cent who were chemistry specialists and 19 per cent who were physics specialists.
- There is inequity between schools in the qualifications of staff teaching mathematics and science. Maths teachers who were not specialists in the subject were most often found in the lowest attaining schools, those serving areas of socio-economic deprivation and those with an 11-16 age range.
-In science, the imbalance in the representation of biology, physics and chemistry specialists was unevenly spread across schools. For example, 26 per cent of 11-16 schools did not have any physics specialists.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR708.pdf

[Peter Risdon]

Shuggy: "Why does a kid from a poor background have to be bright in order to quaify from a school life free from disruptive fuckwits?"

Bang on.

My tuppenceworth: corollary benefit. If a school is improved through the selection decisions of good parents, it is improved for all its students, including those with parents who don't make careful decisions about their children's education.

[Peter Risdon]

Hit enter too quickly. corollary benefit 2: if a school closes because it is poor, and children have to go to a different, less poor school this benefits those whose parents weren't responsible for the decisions that led to closure.

[Blissex]

«The only problem with that stucture was the left wingers who couldn't live with a system that aknowledges the reality of individual differences unrelated to social class»

The problem is that the differences in individual abilities is much smaller and less important than the difference in social class.

There are very few people who are abnormally bright or stupid; so the idea that that there is a scarcity of talent to be selected for by Oxbridge and its feed system is just a way to justify the privileges of the few on supposed innate ability rather than the ability to purchase access.

What is wrong with UK education is not that too few lower social class people are admitted to the schools and universities that grant a virtual automatic class to entry in the upper class elite, but that such intake is so small and the entry is granted almost automatically.

So the problem with Oxbridge, public schools and grammar schools is not that too few working class people get into it, but that getting into them is in practice a meal ticket for life.

As to anedoctes I was greatly impressed that a coworker from Chesterfield who went to a 1,200 strong school and he was reckoned to be the only one that had any chance of getting Oxbridge entry (he did get it). It is unbelievable that in any broad sample of 1,200 children only one is "bright" in the same sense that over 50% of public schoolboys are "bright".

In effect the grammar/public school/Oxbridge system is the wonderfully hypocritical system by which the upper classes have granted themselves hereditary elite jobs as a class rather than individually; that is the children of a professional or a mandarin don't necessary inherit his exact job, but most in effect inherit the educational curriculum that all but guarantees an equivalent job.

Grammar schools belong to this system; they simply give a very tiny minority of the able, bright lower social class pupils a shot at being of the token outsiders permitted into a closed shop.

The issue is eliminating the closed shop more than making tokenism a bit less miserly.

[Planeshift]

Out of interest, do supporters of vouchers advocate extending the principle to adult education and re-training?

[Shuggy]

In education, it always comes down, finally, to quality of teacher.

Methinks the quality of the *student* may just have a teensy influence here.

[Blissex]

«In education, it always comes down, finally, to quality of teacher.
Methinks the quality of the *student* may just have a teensy influence here»

The quality of the student is a small factor -- most people are of average ability, rich or poor.

The quality of the student's *parents* (that is their income and education level and culture) matters a great deal more, as someone else pointed out. Check out the performance of poor chinese and indian (or japanese or jewish or italian) kids and their parents...

This said, in extreme cases (that is exceptional funding and effort) schools do make a difference; some study i read about some time ago showed that public schools in the UK make a difference on average of a full grade level at examination time (mostly I think because non-public schools are not that awesome, rather than because public schools are especially good).

[Blissex]

«challenging problems of classroom discipline arising from disruptive elements in some schools. The IPPR finding that British youth are the worst behaved in western Europe, on a broad range of indicators»

That's in part because those youth have low quality parents. But in part because of culture; in other countries parents are legally responsible, as guardians, for the behaviour of children, and go to jail if the children commit crimes.

[dearieme]

I think that the Bolsheviks clearly demonstrated that in education, it always comes down, finally, to quality of teacher, and machine-gunner.

[Bob B]

"Grammar schools belong to this system; they simply give a very tiny minority of the able, bright lower social class pupils a shot at being of the token outsiders permitted into a closed shop."

ROFL! The big social divide in Britain created by education is the result not of grammar schools and Oxbridge but because of the differentially high drop-out rate from training and education at 16 compared with almost all peer group countries:

"Last year [2004], a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that Britain came seventh from bottom in a league table of staying-on rates for 19 countries. Only Mexico and Turkey had significantly lower rates of participation for this age group. Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Slovakia have marginally lower rates."
http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/story/0,16086,1555547,00.html

. . . as well as:

"Only half of those on apprenticeships in England finish them, the chief inspector of adult education has found. Although standards of training had improved dramatically overall, David Sherlock said low apprenticeship completion rates were 'unacceptable'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6169843.stm

I don't think anyone truly understands the social forces in Britain which result in the differentially high drop-out rate from education and training at 16 but my guess is that George Orwell had an important insight when he wrote: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In some places, not much has changed since in the social values of some neighbourhood cultures:

"The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly."
http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html

S&M here is hardly from a social background glowing with upper-class privilege. Applications for the (grammar) school down the road which my son attended were declining at the time. He got to Oxbridge from there on the basis of a college entrance exam plus A-level grades but I've had senior colleagues who were Oxbridge graduates themselves but whose siblings didn't make it so they had to go to other universities: so much for upper-class privilege and having the "right" contacts.

Me, I'm from "red brick" and a decade before Robbins when only 4 per cent of my age group went into higher education. Both my parents had left their schools at 14 and had to make their respective ways in the job market of the 1920s around the time of the General Strike. As late as the mid 1970s, half the adult workforce in Britain had no educational qualifications at all. By the mid 1990s, that proportion without qualifications was down to a quarter.

[annieb]

If you look at the particular headings under which the UK teenagers were rated "badly behaved", they were actually few (with high ratings in other areas) and are much more about individual liberty than antisocial acts (teenage pregnancy may be regrettable, but isn't in the same category as committing GBH). It is certainly arguable that many of the good qualities of the "typical Brit" adult may be products of a more self-reliant teenage experience.

I remain amazed that anyone should think it fair that the only comprehensive school serving a rural area should be allowed to declare itself a specialist school in a particular topic -- tough luck on the rest of the pupils. But the funding is structured so that schools are encouraged to do so to access extra money.

[Bob B]

Update with Sunday's news:

"A law raising the school leaving age to 18 in England will be included in the Queen's Speech on Tuesday."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7077399.stm

[Matt Munro]

Why can't people get it into their heads that you cannot prevent the wealthy from buying an education, any more than you can prevent them from buying rolls royces or private medical insurance. Prevent them from doing it here and they will just go somewhere else. If grammar schools can buy even one working class kid a place in that closed shop, saving him from the factory floor or worse, then they are a good thing. The alternative - excluding the bottom quartile of ignorant dispruptive fuckwits from mainstream education - is far too close to the zeitgeist of the 1930s for any modern political party to even think about.

[Bob B]

One of the great perennial mysteries is why is Britain so well endowed with fuckwits compared with other west European countries?

[kpli]

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