Devastating British education research

Last year, the Department for Education asked a firm of accountants to trawl its vast pupil database and find the secret of great state schools. Deloitte had access to the records of almost half a million pupils, factoring in everything from postcodes to ethnicity. It could examine the bizarre variation in spending per pupil, ranging from £4,500 in Lyme Regis to £10,000 in Salford. And the study would be useful in light of the Coalition’s policy for a “pupil premium”, offering £900 to help the poorest pupils. Or so it was assumed.

When the results came back, the conclusion was extraordinary. As one would expect, schools marked “outstanding” tended to achieve the best results. Poverty mattered, but not as much as Deloitte had expected. The biggest surprise, though, was the money: no matter how you split the figures, the amount spent didn’t seem to make the blindest bit of difference. “There is no correlation at all,” it concluded, “between the level of per-pupil funding and educational outcomes.” This was seemingly not what a cash-hungry department wanted to hear. The report was parked in an obscure part of its website, with no public comment.

The study’s conclusions are, of course, rather devastating to the Liberal Democrats’ flagship idea of pupil premiums. Pupils trapped in a sink school are unlikely to be helped by a bit of extra cash poured into a dysfunctional system. But the policy will go ahead because David Laws, the schools minister, is under orders to bring back a “win” for his party. His boss, Nick Clegg, wants applause lines in speeches boasting about the help given to poorer pupils. The Deloitte report, of course, confirms what is obvious to most parents: ethos is what matters most – and you can’t buy a good ethos. Head teachers who turn around a school are utterly priceless, in every way.

So it emerges that the whole premise of Labour’s education policy – that cash matters most – was false. A succession of Labour ministers stood behind a podium and boasted about “investing” in schools – and they did. Spending per pupil doubled. But still, Britain hurtled down the international league tables. Of the last 34 official studies into English state schools, not one looked at funding per pupil. Gordon Brown did not want to know. He had drawn a dividing line with the Tories and he wanted it hammered home: if you care, you spend. If you’re cruel, you cut. And did this actually help schools? Mr Brown didn’t seem to care that much.

The cost of all this is now hideously clear. The Labour years were an astonishing experiment in expanding the size and scope of the state. Over the past decade, the British government grew faster than any major administration, anywhere, over any other decade – apart from those preparing for war. The NHS budget more than doubled, transport and education spending almost doubled and the welfare bill rose by 50 per cent. Forget about the bankers. This was the madness that led to the worst economic overheating in Britain’s modern history and, ergo, the worst recession in living memory. The debt, which will take a generation to tackle, will be Brown’s only legacy.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).