Thanks to everybody who voted. The results are pretty clear: excluding the twelve people who already send their children private*, fifty-seven per cent said they'd send their children to an independent school if they were offered a £4,000 per annum voucher instead of a 'free' place at a State school. Only twelve per cent of people with children at State school were happy with it and thirty-one per cent still wouldn't be able to afford a private school.
So let's get out the magic fag packet and work out what this might cost the taxpayer. If 600,000 children already at private school took the voucher, that would cost about £3,000 each (assuming various other subsidies and tax breaks for private schools were scrapped as a quid pro quo) = £1.8 billion in total. But if fifty-seven per cent of eight million at a State school took up the voucher, that would save about £18 billion (assuming that the quangocracy could be culled pro rata, which brings up the average cost per State pupil to around £8,000, a £4,000 voucher actually represents a saving of £4,000 to the taxpayer), so overall, that would pay for a tax cut of around £500 per taxpayer. If we did this by hiking the tax-free personal allowance accordingly, then hopefully that would enable a few more parent to afford it, and so on.
Everybody wins. What's not to like?
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The results lead me to ponder a wider question, which is the subject of this week's Fun Online Poll. The question may seem unduly simplistic, but it is useful to spend a few seconds thinking about what the blindingly obvious answer must be.
* This makes the results slightly suspect, as only about seven per cent of children in the UK attend a private school, but hey.
Friday 3 April 2009
Fun Online Poll Results, policy costings
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12 comments:
What's not to like?
Well as a Dutchman I never thought about this matter, but one thing springs to my mind. If you introduce this system overnight you will have an enormous increase in demand, but supply will lag for years to come. So you will realize a subsidiced price increase for private schools, and still be paying for the public schools. See housing...
Brgrds,
Dutch_renter
Anon, indeed. Which is why (for example) the vouchers could be phased in (start at £1,000 and increase by £1,000 every year) or allow parents in each local authority area to nominate certain schools to be independent, starting in x years' time. Good teachers at State schools who have a rapport with the parents should have no problems setting up a new school and taking other good teachers and good pupils with them. And so on, It worked fine in Sweden, of all places.
Isn't this just an extension of capitalism. Don't get me wrong, I accepted the money to send my future children to private school, but this is an extension of thatcher's de-nationalisation (which I agreed with in principle also). My point is, what next: Healthcare, Welfare?
I think it benefits society (or at least those who earn their keep)....but you can probably see where I'm going with this
RB, it's got bugger all to do with Thatcher. The schools voucher idea has been tried e.g. in Sweden and works fine. Most European countries have some sort of health voucher scheme with private, competing providers and it works fine.
As to welfare, the way forward is CBI (we can argue over the level as a separate issue).
Mark, great poll. Not so keen on your next one though. The question is too vague.
Only producers, who are specialists, who understand their industry and all the facets of delivering a product or service to market can judge what the best use of the labour and capital is, and thus which goods and services to offer. This might be different to the ultimate desire of a consumer, ignorant of the complexities involved in production.
Though, of course, ultimately the consumer drives production as the final link in the economic chain, consumers do not generally conceive of goods or services until somebody has produced them first. That is the skill of an Entrepreneur - to judge the demand for a new product.
So depending on the underlying meaning the answer could be both Producers and Consumers. Government's don't get a look in since democracy is, at best, a diluted form of consumer preference and thus imperfect.
V, it's not vague, it's fundamental.
For example, I, like most people, find electricity pretty useful. Quite how it is generated is not my specialist topic, seeing as O-Level physics a quarter of a century ago is my only relevant qualification. So businesses only have to decide how to produce, but not what. If they misjudge the market, then they either shut down or try something different.
Would one need to regionally differentiate the voucher? I'm not sure I believe your £8k/per pupil figure really applies but there certainly is a huge disparity between the cost of education in London and Norfolk (more than in Sweden?). In the latter it would be easy for schools to go private (on mass) and have much more money than they do no, but clearly this be an additional burden to the taxpayer.
You could perhaps reduce the cost by making the voucher only applicable to schools that accepted a fees cap (which could be quite high).
M, a Big Fat No to 'London weighting', that just adds fuel to the fire and exaggerates regional imbalances. UK flat rate makes Norfolk a bit more desirable to live and London a bit less so.
Also 'No' to any sort of arbitrary cap on fees. Parents of kids at Eton are paying a shedload of income tax (to fund other people's vouchers) so it would be churlish to deny them it.
Thanks for replying.
I think the latter might be politically necessary, after all I think in Sweden the cap is the same as the voucher, no?
The finances still seem a bit off. Can you explain a little more this comment of yours from a year or so ago:
"If you want to argue that Teachers' Pensions in payment are sunk costs, then we could include the actuarial cost of the entitlements that are accruing to today's teaching cohort instead, which is probably double the amount of pensions in payment, which would bring the true average spend to £9,700"
Does this mean the current 400,000 odd teachers are getting pension rights of £50,000/year?
Maybe, it seems to work in Sweden though as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the numbers. The average pension being worth 50% of salary seems awfully high. This IFS report (note it is teachers only, not classroom assistants) puts it at 11% to 14%, or is that a different measure?
http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4452
Sorry, I meant to add,
"different measure as it seems too low given it is less than the annual payments?"
M, I've skim read the IFS thing and it does appear to say 15%-ish. My 50% is based on extreme scenario with swift promotion and early retirement.
Nick Silver of IEA reckoned about 30%. In which case where does the official cost of £10 billion per annum come from? Is that cash cost of already retired teachers (I doubt it as there are 500,000 of them getting £10,000 a year each = £5 billion)?
Maybe £10 billion is the accruals basis, in which case my fag packet is correct.
All very tricky.
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