On this page: Background | Benefits | Overseas evidence

Background

The history of post-war investment in education has been one of central government taking greater control of education institutions, first on the grounds of progressive modernisation, and then (when that failed) of trying to raise standards through enforcing strict protocols.

However, there is an alternative model for government-funded education to the one that has been pursued for the last 50 years and more. First proposed in 1955 by the economist Milton Friedman, the school choice model of state education allows parents and guardians to choose the school they would like to send their children to. The state, rather than founding and controlling schools from the centre, merely agrees to pay (via a voucher or tax credit scheme) schools on a per-pupil basis. These schools can be run charitably, as non-profit companies, or for profit. Essentially every school under such a system is an independent school, but the difference is that everyone has equal access to them regardless of their financial status. This allows schools to compete in a free market, with all the associated benefits of innovation and competition, while allowing every family to access the benefits of that market equally.

Pupil benefits

Higher standards

Parents will tend to choose the schools offering better academic (and other) opportunities for their children. With the right to choose also comes the right to leave and schools that are not performing well compared to their peers will be put under pressure to reform or close due to a lack of parents interested in sending their children there.

More diversity and innovation

Parents will not just choose schools that are better, but also schools that are better for their children in particular. In the current system, where targets are set centrally, schools can only follow a few narrow paths to have their success officially acknowledged by Ofsted and the government. If the main measure of success becomes instead that the school has enough parents sending their children there, then the school's management is free to pursue any model that parents would like to see. This means that some schools might be set up with an explicit religious or innovative educational ethos, while others might specialise in music or science or in having facilities for pupils with special needs. They will be judged not by targets but by whether there is parental demand for such a school.

Other benefits

This decentralised system has the advantage of cutting down on the need to administrate thousands of schools with an expensive central bureaucracy. The advantage to teachers and school management is that they no longer have to mediate between what parents desire and what the government demands. Since the government merely provides funding on the basis of what parents choose, parents become the only individuals that schools have to please. Essentially, although the school can be entirely government funded, the need to conform strictly to government policy has been eradicated.

School Choice, the British government and the overseas evidence

• Read an overview of Trust Schools introduced in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, and the government's attitude to the overseas evidence in School Choice in the UK and Overseas (PDF)

• Read the full account of the overseas evidence in School Choice and Equality: Overseas Evidence (PDF) (media information available here)

School choice is not just a model for an independent, government supported, education sector. It has also become something of a buzzword in political debate. The idea of empowering parents is a popular notion, regardless of the sound economic grounds. As a consequence, many of the Labour government's education reforms have had aspirations of introducing school choice. The problem is that many of these reforms have tended to introduce the policy the wrong way: they feel that a parent's freedom to choose a school is an ideal that should be aspired to, but only once there are plenty of good schools for everyone. In other words, they see expanded school choice as an indication of better schools due to central government policy, rather than as a mechanism for making schools better and independent of government policy.

The reason for this approach is that many in the current government dislike an essential consequence of the model: parents having the unrestricted freedom to remove their children from failing schools. Their fear is that school choice will make some schools perform even more badly as they lose pupils and funding. They would rather force pupils to remain in a failing school and hope that additional investment and intervention will solve the problem. This misses out one of the important elements of a good school choice scheme: allowing new schools the freedom to open and enter the education market wherever there is demand. Instead, many tend to imagine that a school choice scheme will merely cause some schools to grow larger and others to get smaller, entrenching division rather than removing it.

Empirical evidence from other countries, where the school choice model has been tried, tends to refute this view. Indeed, one advantage of school choice is that it need not be associated with either the left or the right in the political debate. The most radical, and perhaps most successful, school choice model has been implemented in Sweden since 1992 under the Universal Voucher Scheme, a nation that is seen as a model of social democracy for the left. There the system of school choice has proven to be more than compatible with the pursuit of equality and social integration that Swedish society also pursues. Similarly, in the US, where the political consensus is far more conservative, smaller scale school choice schemes have often had their greatest benefits felt by the least well off in American society, especially those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.