BOOK REVIEW

GOVERNMENT control of education in the UK is greater now than at any time since the founding of a state system of education in 1870. Government, in the shape of the Department of Education and Employment, controls the supply side through grants made directly to grant- maintained (GM) schools and indirectly via local authorities to the rest; it regulates supply by closing schools where demand is falling and controls the quality of supply by means of a national curriculum, national tests and Ofsted, its militant inspectorial arm. Demand is held constant by enforcing compulsory school attendance to the age of sixteen. It is a monolithic system and it is in crisis.

How can we loosen the stranglehold of the state and open up our bureaucratic and inward-looking system to experiment and innovation? James Tooley has some answers in his thought-provoking book Education Without The State. Dr. Tooley is currently Director of the Education and Training Unit at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The I.E.A. is the direct descendant of the Mont Pelerin society founded by Hayek in 1947 to combat socialism and Hayek was the founding father of the economic liberalism of the New Right, the driving force behind Thatcherism. With such a pedigree behind him, it is difficult not to label Tooley's book one of the last gasps of Thatcherism. For what he has to offer is the market solution to our educational problems.

Tooley advocates the privatization of schooling - the usual formula for free marketeers. Eventually all parents would pay fees for schooling - and they would be able to do so because of the great reduction in taxation that would result from the privatizing of schools - and where the very poor were concerned, there would be a "safety net" of government money.

Tooley suggests that as a first step towards privatization the school leaving age is lowered to fourteen and at that age every young person is given a voucher worth £4,000, which would be invested in their Lifelong Individual Fund for Education (Li FE). This could be opened at any time and supplemented by parents, friends, businesses or trusts. Tooley believes that such an arrangement would liberate the demand side of education. Young people would no longer be kept in school against their will, forming part of a "culture of delinquency". Instead, their "purchasing power would enable them to shop around for specialist courses or learning experiences that would be tailored to their needs, and this in turn would encourage groups within the community, including innovative small schools, to spring up in response.
The voucher argument is persuasive but ultimately founders on the equity issue. I fear that a market system in education would see the working out of the old adage "to those that have shall be given." Those students and families with what is known as "educational capital", who know their way around the system, would very likely flourish, as they do now.

VOUCHERS ARE NOT the only means of liberating demand and stimulating experiment and innovation. In the famous East Harlem experiment of the 1980s levels of achievement in a poor black community rocketed as federal funds were poured into a network of small alternative high schools. These schools were founded in response to parental interest and demand and were sustained by committed administrators and creative teachers. They were specialist schools: a school for the performing arts, a technology school, a mathematical school, a talented and gifted school, a creative learning community - offering real choice to parents and real opportunities for students. Debbie Meier, the inspirational principal of the Central Park East Schools in East Harlem, has written a stirring history of the experiment which flourishes today. She is a fierce defender of public education, seeing it as the rock on which a democratic society is founded. Giving up on it, she says, would mean leaving the nation's children in the hands of unknown babysitters with unknown agendas. In the States these words carry a warning, since the use of voucher schemes has led to the founding of "schools for profit" - schools run by corporate business, incorporating business values and practices.

In New York and Milwaukee, the public education system is being reexamined root and branch as parents and community groups begin to imagine that they too can found schools and that these will be state schools of choice. Why in Britain is it not possible to fund directly specialist schools that are meeting the needs of parents and diverse communities? These may be small, parent-run schools, schools embracing a particular philosophy or way of teaching and learning; they may be ethnic schools, Muslim schools or Christian schools. Pluralism is a fact of life in late twentieth-century Britain: it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Tooley believes that the competitive forces of the market will release schools from the stranglehold of state control. My sympathies lie with Debbie Meier. The kind of community involvement and empowerment essential to democratic society can best be achieved by trusting local communities to identify and provide for their own educational needs. It is the state's responsibility to fund them.

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Mary Tasker has been a teacher and a teacher educator. She is currently Chair of Human Scale Education.