Wednesday 10 October 2007

"£250m more for targeted learning"

According to this, they are going to spend £250 million more on 'targeted learning'.

Well, whoopie-f***ing-doo!

Seeing as nobody knows what 'targeted learning' is and how much they were spending on it beforehand, that is a really stupid headline.

More interesting is this, total education spending is going to be £75 billion this year, divide that by the number of children aged 5 to 18, you get about about £7,300 per child per annum. The average annual cost of sending a child to private school was £9,627, about £50 a week more*.
Having experienced the difference between the local state primary and local private primary schools, all I can ask is "When can we have vouchers for education please?"**

* After dividing by 52 weeks, I am not looking at cost per school-week, I am looking at how much parents have to put aside per week over the whole year.

** As suggested on page 7 of this.
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Update - Jock Coats in the comments reckons that the average spend in state sector and average tuition fees in private sector are both in region of £6,000, which strengthens my case.
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4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

WOAR, link fixed, top comment as ever (I haven't had many comments lately...)

The Remittance Man said...

WOAR,

Good points. They'd be even better if you were talking about a rational world. But we're not, we're looking at politics a universe that normal forms of logic and reason departed a long, long time ago.

Pols don't care about the custoer complaining. They can sit back and call them "fascists" or "selfish" before waxing lyrical how the system is a great leveller, fairer and free for all. They might even compare the National Hairdressing Service to the shocking state of affairs in the US where people without insurance wander around with unkempt locks. What they won't dso is fix the system or consider privatising it.

Why? Because then they'd have nothing to fiddle with, nothing to make them look important. And if that happened they fear that we, the source of fuel for their gravy train, might start asking questions. Things like: "Why do we keep paying for those muppets in Westminster?" or "Just who does that fat git think he is? Let's fire him."

Jock Coats said...

Hi Mark,

A few weeks ago I wrote about education and CI. Whilst I am sure you are corrent on a straight division of the education budget by number of kids, I got from National Statistics that we spent about £5,700 pa per state school place from early years through to A level as an average.

Also, whilst £9k something might be right for an average - I suspect that average includes boarding fees, because I found an average figure at the body that took over ffrom ISIS showing that you could get private day education for about £1,700 per term on "average".

So to my mind the cost differences are marginal, which is remarkable given that private education still only accounts for what, 8% of the market. If it were expanded 12x I am sure efficiencies would cut the cost significantly.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Ta muchly, Jock, I must admit I fired off that post in a bit of a hurry and both figures seemed to me to be on the high side

In any event, the mathematical average (i.e. mean) private school fees is bound to be way over the median, so whichever way we cut and slice it, spending per pupil in State sector is about the same as median private tuition fees.

Further, private tuition fees do not necessarily reflect spending per pupil anyway, you'd have to minus off profit element and add back charitable income to arrive at per pupil spending.