Going Dutch on education

In a piece that must be music to the ears of Tory education spokesman Michael Gove, Nikki Schreiber, who has lived in The Netherlands, describes in The Independent some advantages of the Dutch education system.

Education in the UK, she says, does poorly in international tables. "The country that came top of the Unicef report and did consistently well in the international league tables was the Netherlands."

She claims that they spend less on their education than we do, but the big difference between the systems is choice. And she makes their system sound appealing.

Each pupil, she says, has a price tag, and the cost of educating a child goes directly to the school that the parents have chosen, state or private, from the Ministry of Education. "Not all the price tags are the same; they're weighted according to a child's socio-economic background, so that the child of an asylum seeker who doesn't speak any Dutch will have a relatively larger price tag to account for the extra services he or she might need."

The administrative rules are that all schools have to be approved by the Ministry of Education, but as long as that approval is gained, a group of parents can set up a new school knowing that all pupils come with a price tag and the local council will provide the school building. The government controls staffing levels and pay. Schools are inspected and and the national curriculum must be taught and exams taken.

But how the curriculum is taught is up to the school and a staggering 70 per cent of children attend independent schools. Well, they call them independent schools but it doesn't have the same meaning as in the UK. For a start they cost a fraction of the price, because of each child's right to a price tag and the provision of the school premises; most independent schools in the Netherlands charge about 500 euros a year per pupil, and there's no equivalent to Eton. This means that there are a lot of different styles of schools: Steiner, Montessori, international/bilingual (generally more expensive) and faith schools. There really is a great deal of choice and no such thing as a catchment area.

So parents are the market that decides which schools will flourish.

Not being constrained by catchment areas also gives parents more choice – in the Netherlands it seems to work along the lines of, "if I can get there by bike it's an option". But what it really means is that parents don't snare themselves in mortgages to get into catchment areas they can't afford, or pay expensive school fees or face the humiliation of having to rediscover a lapsed faith. They can choose whichever school will suit their child best. Not all parents make an active choice but enough do to influence the standard of schools everywhere.

She makes this pattern sound immensely attractive.

Away with state control of where your child goes. Away with the state bully threat that your child's educational future may be decided by a council lottery. Away with detailed control by Mr Balls and your local authority.

Obviously there must be issues within the Dutch system. For instance, what of the child no school wants?

And there would certainly be issues about how we get to there from here.

But imagine you want to go down in English history as a great reforming education minister - not a mean ambition to have. Imagine you have that ministerial post for the full term of a government.

Imagine a government moving steadily toward such a régime - perhaps piloting it in one area and then rolling it out nationally.

Imagine the huge changes in society which that could start to bring about.

Of course there would be problems. For instance, such arrangements might increase educational segregation; governing bodies might be captured by religious purists or politically correct activists. Conservatives probably have two years before an election to air such issues and test such policies.

But imagine how exciting and huge such changes could be. Slashing slavery to Whitehall, and probably slashing educational bureaucracy too. And as a by-product exposing Mr Balls as the obsolete, grey, statist control freak that he is.

Of course Dutch society is different from English society. But this template has to be worth a close look.

The state we're in

What sort of state do we want the English state (for we now have devolved government) to be?

Surely no one except David Miliband could have failed to enjoy John Humphrys' trussing up of Ed Miliband on Today, while wondering how such an inept debater could rise so high. And at least once Miliband volunteered himself to be tied in knots. The Tories, he said accusingly, believed in a small state. Ah, said Mr Humphrys, so you believe in a large state. No, no, protested Mr Miliband feebly. Humphrys gave him a couple of chances to get out of the mess he'd made for himself, but it was too easy sport so he moved on.

Michael Gove in today's Telegraph returns to the role of the state from a different angle. In a quite nicely written piece he is taking on the government's flirting with allocating school places by lottery. At the core of the article is the excellent Conservative proposal to empower parents in their school choices.

Gove sugars the pill with populism which is so incoherent that it would be tedious to dissect it. To take just one example, we should, he says, be "asking why, after 10 years of massive spending, there still aren't enough good school places". But there will always be some schools which are better than others. Unless you label them all "good" (which would make the term pointless), most parents will want to send a child to a school which is "good" (in the sense of the best locally available). So parents will always want to be able to choose.

Nor does he choose to explain how his proposal would work.

We aim to give all parents the right that currently only the rich have - to take their child out of a failing school and place them in a good one.

Suppose the school doesn't want the child? Will the good local school want to take a disruptive bully? And what if no schools within travelling distance want to accept a particular child?

However, the core policy is right, and Mr Gove is right in seeing the lottery proposal as a politically juicy target. It's an idea which could only appeal to a doctrinaire bureaucrat or politician. It would disempower people in one of the key decisions of their lives.

So is the state there for us, or are we there for it? Titter ye not, the question isn't as daft as that bald formulation makes it sound. For example, Labour tries to justify its claim that there's an economic gain from high immigration by focusing on the increase in the overall size of the economy, rather than on any effect on individual incomes per head. Of course it's harder to make the case that the indigenous population benefit economically as individuals from large-scale immigration (and some poorly paid people clearly don't), but the emphasis is on the collective rather than the individual.

So for education the Labour thrust is to make parents passive acceptors of whatever The State chooses to provide, with no say in its provision - in Gove's words, passive playthings of the system. "We just have to wait and see what we're given by the bureaucracy."

This is a curious contrast with Labour's bizarre slogan of creating a personalised health service, where the individual will be able to make choices. But not in education, apparently.

Under Conservative proposals, says Gove, parents, not bureaucrats, would have effective control over the money that is spent on their children.

That would create a real incentive for schools to listen to what parents want, instead of making parents feel that the only way they'll have control over their children's schooling is if they're rich enough to pay for it.

Note for Ed Miliband: the state would remain the same size. Its services would just have to give people on the ground what they wanted, rather than what the anonymous, unaccountable, faddist bureaucratic "experts" decreed to be the latest thing to be good for them, whether it was a French exam with no oral, compulsory schooling for restless teenage boys until they were 18, or the film of An Inconvenient Truth containing convenient lies.

A revolution in draft

What happened to Michael Gove's comment piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph? Is he a victim of crude sub-editing, or was his article really so disorganised?

Of the three columns the first is just an introduction (though stylish). We get to the meat in the second column -

The great unwritten story of the Brown Government is the intellectual exhaustion at its heart. Central to what Brown calls his vision are three things - rhetoric about aspiration linked to housing, an emphasis on education as a route to greater opportunity, and a promise to strengthen Britishness as an identity that underpins our security. Yet in the past week his Government has disappointed in each area. Because its approach, far from being genuinely visionary or far-sighted, is shaped by an outdated bureaucratic mindset.

His housing critique is strange. He criticises Brown for not "reforming the planning system to allow local communities to promote house-building". This fits his thesis of Local Good, Central Bad. But Brown's aim is to build more homes, especially in the South East, the country's economic powerhouse. Gove writes as if local authorities were keen as mustard to throw up more developments, while central government was holding them back. The opposite is true. What local authority in the South East got elected because of a promise to build on more green belt land?

His paragraph on education makes more sense, and so it should as he is shadow education secretary. Then he moves to his third theme, Britishness....

Well, actually, no he doesn't. The EU makes a surprise guest appearance, while Britishness is never mentioned again. His general thrust, though, is surely sound, that

Dominance of the future rests with those who understand that excellence comes not from state diktat or ministerial fiat but the creation of a virtuous dynamic with open, competitive systems that empower individuals and reward innovation.

Hence, he says,

British Conservatives are learning from the best examples of how other countries have generated improvement in public services and we propose that, as in Sweden, all parents should have the right, which currently only the rich have in Britain, to take their child out of a failing school and be able to choose a good school place instead.

The economy, and science and technology, appear in his conclusion, but the final point of interest is what is not there.

The NHS - with its underperformance and its democratic deficit - gets no mention at all. Commentators such as The Business are keen to see the Opposition move to a new strategy for the Nationalised Health Service. But there are two political reasons why silence is golden. First, the performance of the unreformed NHS regularly brings Labour bad headlines and they have no strategy for reversing this trend. So the Conservatives can follow the lead of Robin Cook when he was shadow health spokesman, keep quiet about health and accept the political dividend of the government's ineptitude.

Secondly, if the Conservatives did start to spell out a radical strategy for the NHS, Labour would surely use it to scare off voters. So the Tories are right to keep silent about the NHS.

Meanwhile, it might be interesting to read what the scots Mr Gove has to say on the subject of Britishness if his sub-editor permits, whether that sub-editor is an anonymous Telegraph employee or Andy Coulson.