Education vouchers (1)

One question on everybody's mind must surely be "How much 'should' the education vouchers, that are proposed by UKIP and some elements in the Tory party, be worth?"

I don't believe in 'should'; the issue is getting the most bang for the taxpayer's buck. I have rounded the number of pupils in the State and private sectors in the UK to the nearest million, and rounded the current cost per State pupil to the nearest £ thousand and arrive at the break-even table below, starting off with the current position where 10% of pupils are privately educated:
In other words, if the government/local council introduced vouchers worth £1,000, and at least an extra 140,000 pupil were to shift from the State to the private sector, there would be no net cost to the taxpayer. If this works, the government/local council can then try vouchers worth £2,000 - provided a further 190,000 move, then there is still no net cost to the taxpayer - but each time pupils move across, the overall quality of children's education goes up.

Of course, a perfectly valid viewpoint is that the cost to the taxpayer should come down as the cost to the parents goes up, but we'll come to that later.