Council tax and new ways..........

It works for pretty much every other service and product that we buy.

No. The value would be what is spent per child today.

No. If they are providing a good education that parents want to choose, then they will increase their income.

Wrong way round. The school should concentrate on and would have more freedom to provide quality education that people will select. Today that is done through Ofsted, who can only make a limited look at a school. By empowering parents, the good schools will excell and others would have the oppotunity to improve.

These were certainly a better solution in the past than the present comprehensive system because it permitted financial independence to a degree. However, either way I think that the national curriculum should be dumped as well.

Not really true. If you take a look at how an independent school in the private sector runs, there is very, very little bureaucracy and very little admin overhead. Quite often, it's a full time and a part time secretary and a part time bursar and that' it. Parents want their fees spent on teachers and facilities.

So am I. Having the government out of the picture in terms of actual running and policy of a school would enable that.

I think better for everybody.

No they won't - they'll have more choice. FOr example, there doesn't have to be a geographical boundary or school catchment areas. If people don't want to pay additional money for their education, they don't have to. That's no different to today.

I've sadly seen a rather different side to this with demotivated teachers and all the rest of it.

One more time. Nobody said anything about a reduction in its budget. If it's a good school, then it will be able to attract more pupils and increase its funding.

Yes, they do. I don't want the State's Health Care, I'll provide my own, thanks. So, I'm not paying some proportion of my taxes. The State's response will, eventually, be violence.

Nope. I don't troll.

And compulsion to pay for the State provider whether you want it or not.

There is merit in the argument, but the devil's in the detail. Unfortunately parents don't always select schools on grounds of quality of education; some choose "faith" schools because of religious affiliation. Many more will chose exam results over "real" education.

This might work in urban areas but in rural areas there is usually only one school - and that might be 10 miles away. And in urban areas, "successful" schools might be tempted to accept more pupils than they have facilities for, meaning that although the academic education is first-rate, subjects such as PE suffer.

Owain

And I have no need to revise my comment. I am not inconsistent. Your criticism is crap.

OK?

He's lying. There are services where for various reasons it is not appropriate to offer a choice of provider and in those cases it is also inappropriate for them to be under the control of a private company. Such services include those where it would be stupid to provide multiple access points - eg gas, electricity, telephone, water, sewerage - those where multiple provision would raise costs, cause disruption, or produce conflict - eg fire, police, ambulance, coastguard, trading standards, registrars - and those where competition would remove a community provision - eg post, buses, trains, health, education. Other consideration eg safety may also come into play.

State services are generally very good and cheap - but this is rarely appreciated until privatised. ;-(

I couldn't agree more. Look at the privatised, money grabbing mess that some well run nationalised industries turned into. A disgrace.

There is really no need to resort to this kind of accusation.

Such are very, very few.

These are all obvious and I already illustrated them in an earlier post.

All of these can be quite easily operated outside of state control and benefit from being so.

They are almost always poor and very expensive when all costs to the taxpayer are taken into account.

and the improvements are realised.

Not really.

I didn't make any criticism at all. I simply pointed out one way that you can influence the behaviour of Tesco. Someone else pointed out another which is where one chooses to shop.

These are simple enough. Why do you have difficulty with the concepts?

OK. However, that is their choice.

But then what is "real" education? It means different things to different people and in different environments. For someone with high academic skills it could be an academic education; whereas someone with practical skills would find it in that area and so on.

People choose on the basis of exam results because they believe for right or for wrong that these are the passport to future prosperity and happiness. It may or may not be true now and may or may not

I agree that there is always going to be an issue of choice in rural areas because the trade off becomes between what is on offer and travel time. OTOH, it would certainly not be worse than what is available today and with greater freedom of funding, more options by way of residential courses on some subjects may become practical - i.e. rather than attempting to teach woodwork with one lesson a week using inadequate facilities, why not create a regional centre, really well equipped, aavailable for courses once a year for a given school?

Well..... i wasn't restricting thinking just to academic education. It can be as broad as the imagination wants to make it. Facilities for more advanced PE (as an example) can easily be provided more effectively if several schools participate rather than replicating at a second rate level in every school.

Matt, lies are lies.

Matt, it is crap.

And it's "society" who have to deal with the consequences of prejudice or illiteracy. I think education's too important to be left to parental whim, not that the govt is doing a better job.

Some Scottish schools are now teaching Latin by video-conferencing.

Owain

The message from John Cartmell contains these words:

The milk snatcher could probably be blamed for many of our current ills but not that. The legislation that forced grammar schools to merge with secondary moderns or go private was passed in 1976 and MT was totally opposed to it.

Most of it was done by Margaret Thatcher. Have you checked the numbers?

The message from John Cartmell contains these words:

You mean she personally required education authorities to go comprehensive? No chance. It was the loony left that did that in 1976. As there are (or were until recently) a few real grammar schools left in the state sector I suspect that the legislation that gave parents the vote on whether schools switch was her attempt to limit the damage when she came to power in 1979. Trying to reverse the changes already made, or even those in progress would have been too daunting even for her.

I mean more schools went comprehensive under her watch than anyone else. Ceck the numbers.

As my children suffered under the system and I have taught in one of the local grammar schools I do know about it. My authority is one that has what you would call 'real' grammar schools but that's not quite true as it doesn't have 'real' secondary modern schools; the worst aspects of the grammar/sec mod system have been modified by putting more money into the 'high schools'. It's still not a solution but is nowhere near as bad as the old version - except for the problems of the 11-plus examination.

More likely she wasn't interested.

The message from John Cartmell contains these words:

That may or may not have been the case but the responsibility for the change rests squarely on the shoulders of the loony left and the significant date is not when they went comprehensive but the date the decision was made to comply with the law and take them comprehensive.

Selection on the grounds of intelligence makes a good deal more sense than the current system of specialist schools where they can have selection for just about any ability apart from intelligence.

That old system if more a figment of your imagination than the reality. ISTR that earlier in this thread you claimed that grammar schools got twice as much money as secondary moderns (or even more absurdly the vast bulk of the money).

That's just your prejudices surfacing again.

Oh please.

That's just playing with figures.

It's the same argument as saying that the UK economy has been moderately OK because of the efforts of Brown as opposed to despite them.

If you think I made an error there then please correct me. I'd be pleased to accept that it's very easy to find many ways of calculating the differences so feel free to use any you think is relevant.