• Latest publication: The Butterfly Book by Irina Tyk (release date: 28th September)

• On the frontline tackling state education failure: The London Boxing Academy Community Project

CIVITAS Education Research

• Our research seeks out an objective view of standards of education in Britain. By doing so, we aim to offer an improved perspective on how best to deliver equitable and high standards of education for all.
• We aim in particular to generate evidence-based policy, based on classical liberal principles. This includes a commitment to giving parents greater control over how government invests in their child's education, as well as supporting independent teaching combined with a flexible curriculum.

Background

Improving education has been an avowed priority for the Labour government since coming to power in 1997. The government's general strategy is one of increasing state investment in education, increasing inspection of the sector, increasing government control over curriculum and developing more stringent procedures. This attempt at reform by central command was not started with the Labour government (it shares many features of the Conservative government's reforms of the nineties) but it has been taken on with accelerated vigour. As a consequence educational achievement has been presented as a test of government policy. A government eager to set itself various performance indicators cultivated this agenda and the media has tended to accept this situation, treating the announcement of new exam results as a time for robust debate on the state of education.

Public examinations have come to be perceived simultaneously as tests of individual student achievement, teaching quality and government policy. Whether it is possible to treat one sort of exam as a reasonable test of all these variables, is very much in doubt. The tone of the debate, as a consequence, is often very unenlightening. Rather than discussing the nature of education and the state's proper relation to it, the argument has almost without exception become couched in the terms of the delivery of government funding and initiatives. In other circumstances, we would avoid this argument altogether. However, the government has set exams as its own performance indicators.

The rises (sometimes small, more often dramatic) in students achieving various standards in national tests have inevitably been the basis of optimistic ministerial pronouncements. Michael Barber, then Head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, was vocal in publicising the apparent gains, stating in 2002 that: 'After five years of urgent and determined progress with some hard evidence of improved outcomes, the evidence of progress is clear'. Hence, what these indicators appear to show and their usefulness as an indicator of genuine improvement has become a central issue.

In this respect, strong criticisms have been made. First, independent studies have not tended to present the same picture of performance as the government's headline results. Second, regardless of these different performance indicators, we should be concerned about the numbers leaving education having not reached a standard that provide for basic skills. The Government's own statistics show that around a quarter of 11 year-olds still fail to achieve the official standard, roughly half of 16 year-olds don't get five good GCSEs, and more than 7 million adults lack basic literacy and numeracy skills.

These shortcomings are found at a time when there has been enormous additional investment in state education. Since 2000-01, total expenditure on education has risen from £44.4 billion to an estimated £67.7 billion in 2005-06, a real terms increase of 35%. This amounts to 5.5% of GDP, higher than the European average. In the 2007 budget, Gordon Brown announced planned spending increases for the next three years that will bring total spending to £74 billion by 2010-11. Revenue spending per pupil has also increased. In 1999-00, it was £3,175 per pupil, rising to £4,190 in 2004-05. By 2007-08 it will approach £5,500.

It is by first accepting these shortcomings that we can discover ways of making sustainable improvements in education and making them available to everyone. Civitas works to make a real change to children being taught now, and also aims to encourage policy changes for the future. We do this through our reports and publications available here, through our Supplementary Schools project for children from underprivileged backgrounds, and through the New Model School Company that aims to make independent education affordable for ordinary families. We also publish books designed to support an effective and vibrant curriculum suitable for teaching in schools and homes.