Issue 1:
Gordon Brown has attacked the Tories over reports they plan to introduce "top-up fees" for nurseries in England. The prime minister said to demand more money from parents at the same time as raising the inheritance tax threshold for the rich was "simply not fair".
The Conservatives accused Mr Brown of hypocrisy, saying nurseries were closing due to Labour underfunding the weekly entitlement to free childcare. Representatives of non-state sector nurseries have backed the Conservatives' argument and say many will go out of business if current funding arrangements continue.
Indeed. It was the Tories who introduced nursery vouchers in the early 1990s and the system worked a treat (on a day to day level). But there are now bizarre rules which prevent nurseries from charging 'top up fees' (most do it, but they have to rejig their invoices so that it is not immediately obvious). If the government goes round taking a closer look, then a lot of them would be in trouble. Nursery vouchers are half-way to education vouchers - they just 'work', parents understand them and parents are happy to pay the difference - or happier paying the difference than doing without a nursery at all - sorted.
And I doubt whether nursery vouchers represent any great cost to the taxpayer either, remembering that they only cover about half the cost of nursery places - they allow mothers to go back to work, so the mother is paying income tax; the people working at the nursery are paying income tax; the nursery is paying more income or corporation tax on its profits. I'd guess that all those extra income taxes added together is roughly equally to the face value of the vouchers (it might well be more).
Issue 2:
Conservative plans to allow parents and charities to set up their own schools have been called into question by two senior Tory council figures. Paul Carter, leader of Kent County Council, said funding parents to start their own "free schools" would threaten the budgets of other local schools...
"Secondary schools [cost] around £4,000 plus per pupil. If 10%, 12%, 15% of that would be taken away from maintained schools and given to free schools and academies - local authorities still have statutory functions to perform. They have to arrange and organise school admissions, statements for special educational needs pupils - a whole range or services that need paying for. That can't be taken away from us and given to free schools or academies because they don't have the statutory duty to carry out these responsibilities."
For sure, Mr Carter. But it can't be rocket science to work out the marginal cost of a 'normal' pupil and just pay that over to a "free school", thus leaving some extra money with the council to deal for extra stuff. The Tories weren't suggesting using the police budget or the old age care budget to fund "free schools" either. Pointing out that local councils have to 'arrange and organise school admissions' is really scraping the barrel - firstly you won't have to worry about admissions to "free schools" and secondly this can't be such a huge item, a few hundred quid per pupil twice a lifetime?
I'm also surprised he admits that the cost per pupil is as low as £4,000, that gives us a good idea as to what level to pitch schools vouchers in future.
* I hasten to add that UKIP's policies are even simpler and better than what the Tories propose.
Put On Your Big Boy Pants, Maybe?
22 minutes ago
14 comments:
To balance the budget totally free services like the NHS are going to have to change to partly free. This would bring in an element of responsibility by the user. It works for the French Health services where only a percentage of health charges are covered by the government the rest by the customer usually through top up insurance. For the less well off it is totally free. There is nothing stopping this system being extended to education, pensions, welfare payments etc. When something is totally free it is open to far more abuse than when it is not.
Secondary pupils 4k a year in State system?Shows how much more efficient it is than the fee-paying competition.Ditto health care.The triumph of private sector efficiency best seen on the railways; great chunks of our privatised system now back under nationalised control (German and Dutch nationalised control that is).
Perhaps they're worried that these 'free schools' will encourage an influx of former private school pupils at a cost of 4k a head.
After all, the parents who would gladly avail themselves of the opportunity are almost certainly the ones currently struggling to pay the fees that keep their children out of underperforming comprehensives.
Anti, correct, that is about one-third of the MW manifesto.
DBC, exactly. So with 10 million state pupils @ £4k each = £40 billion, how come the total education budget is more like £70 billion?
McH, see Anti's comment. What's wrong with a £4k voucher for everybody? Of course 'rich' people will use it to part-pay their private school place - so what? Aren't these the people paying the income tax to fund the state school places for everybody else?
Surely the best way to do this is to give ALL the money to the schools, and then have the council charge the schools for those other services, individually. Then it would be transparent how much the councils were spending on their LEA admin.
State School is efficient only at being a crèche, not education.
I'd make parents pay for their own childrens education, and health-care for their own bodies.
Of course there'd be a large citizens dividend to make that possible.
I think one has to approach these "who is being honest or not" issues with both eyes and both ears open. Today I have heard, probably 4 times, spokesperson for various parties whilst explaining how they intend to address the deficit explain "how they are going to 'save' £x billion by making efficiencies, but then divert the £x billion to 'protecting' spending on something else'! I.E, because we can't think for ourselves and religiously spout the briefing drivel issued by party HQ I have just told you we intend to switch £x billion from A to B, and at same time register that as " a saving" too. Am I surprised the head of Kent education thinks that spending part of the Kent education budget on schools outwith his direct control is somehow "robbing the Kent education budget" - of course not ! Am I surprised that the same person is content to spin a line that suggests that by taking the say 2000 time the provision per pupil based on the overall budgets out of his control means the puplis in schools will have a provision per head which is lower - of course not. Uttering plainly nonsensical falsehoods seems part and parcel of "the game" - and what is even worse - the "main stream media" printing it up and attaching an air of "he is right you know!".
@MW My hazy recollection of education figures is that the 4k relates to running costs per pupil
(as might be on current account)while the rest relates to capital.(New Labour has rebuilt every single secondary school in Northampton plus the FE College in the last couple of years.)This is the problem with the Tory plans for parents starting schools (apart from the type of up themselves parents who might have the time and self-importance to get involved ).Its easy enough to direct the 4k revenue stream nutter-parents wards but they still have to be provided with a building which the 4ks won't stretch to.Mind you the Conservative Manifesto pledge to create staff co-ops in education would have got my support as an old Union trouble-maker.I don't think the Tories have thought through what might happen if a bunch of lefty teachers formed a co-operative and then slung out the old management from Headmaster downwards. Yok Yok
As long as the house location = school choice system is broken and parents are given a choice I favour any system that will do this as an improvement over the current disaster.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/a-model-school-flops/
My schools annual budget is just shy if 6million, 1204 children, so about £5,000 per pupil, just outside London, so Teachers get a fringe allowance, inner London allowance would add quite a lot.
75% or so is spent on teacher salaries, the rest on non- teaching salaries, rates, utilities, books, exams (100k) computers, minibuses, teacher training, etc.
The remainder is spent in LAs and DCSF, done directly affecting schools, including capital projects, much of it spent on inscruitible and probably unnecessary management. Ofsted, school improvement partners, becta -there is a huge education industry out there, much of it having zero impact on kids, IMNSHO.
"The triumph of private sector efficiency best seen on the railways; great chunks of our privatised system now back under nationalised control (German and Dutch nationalised control that is)."
The railways, for some reason, have been the haven for piss-poor management since before WWII. Fifty years of nationalisation made things worse. Privatisation was never going to change those attitudes in only twenty years, especially when great chunks of the system are still being propped up by the taxpayer.
If you follow the links from Dick Puddlecote's post here:
http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2010/02/give-it-rest.html
Funding in England per pupil is
Primary Education 3,780
Secondary Education 4,890
Bandying about figures that purport to show the cost per head of state school pupils is quite meaningless as they are based not on conventional accounting practices and do not reflect true costs. If they did is is thought that the cost per pupil would be many times greater than those derived from government data.
Perhaps the best way to achieve how a differently controlled state educational system cost per pupil would be is to equate them with average private school fees. Making allowances for facilities costs and teacher costs that are found in private education but not in state education.
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