The Butterfly Effect

nick cowen, 19 December 2007

Our recently published children’s reading and writing course, The Butterfly Book by Irina Tyk, has become a hit in the run up to Christmas. In the wake of one Daily Mail report, the office telephones have been positively buzzing with calls from parents (and grandparents) eager to offer the gift of literacy to young members of their family. We have reported before on the efficacy of books like the Butterfly Book. Simplicity is at the heart of this successful method. It is called ‘synthetic phonics’ although that is just a new name for a traditional method that has long been used to teach children to read. All it involves is teaching the correspondence between the 44 sounds of the English language and the 26 letters of the alphabet. One course is enough to teach the vast majority of the underlying principles of our language, giving children a toolkit of skills that allow them to unlock literature for themselves.

There is a wider lesson in the sudden popularity of this book too. It demonstrates how attuned so many parents in this country are to ensuring their children get the best possible start in life, especially when it comes to education. They are out there, listening and reading up on the options and pursuing all avenues for improvement. For many of these families, additional educational advantage, which spans from extra textbooks to help their children, to a few hours of extra tutoring all the way to sending their children to an expensive independent school, is a good that ranks so highly that it isn’t far off being essential.
The common sense view sees this as a brilliant feature of our culture. That these families provide not only the backbone of our economic development by raising the potential of what their children can do and achieve, but are also responsible for retaining the cohesion of our society: passing our rich literature and art down the generations. Yet this is by no means a given in the present climate. Indeed, some parts of the political establishment come dangerously close to presenting this virtuous behaviour as some sort of social policy ‘problem’.
In a recent speech, Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, described one agenda point for all parties to pursue:
Start a rational debate about the impact of private education
The pattern of private education in the UK is one of the distinctive features contributing to low levels of mobility. While it is easy for this to become a highly emotive, polarised debate, it should also be possible to have a cool and rational debate about the evidence, including the proportion of places at Russell Group universities which go to students from private schools…
… While many in the private education sector has traditionally taken a very defensive stance here, some recognise that it is in their own enlightened self-interest respond to these concerns. That has thrown up a range of proposals of a philanthropic nature, such as the sharing of resources with state schools. There is a serious policy and political discussion about what the threshold of public benefit should be, which the Charity Commission is currently looking at.
More radical ideas could be put on the agenda too. Putting VAT on private school fees could finance an opportunity fund to tackle educational disadvantage. It is unlikely that the government would adopt that. But this should be a subject for debate in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. Or in all parties. (You never know when a Tory moderniser might want a bold eye-catching way to surprise us all!). Indeed, the Fabian/YouGov poll shows that 49% of the public support this proposal before any public argument has been made.
In this case, ‘rational’ appears to be code for rationing. The Fabians advocate increasing the cost of private education to families by nearly 20 per cent, enough to put it out of reach of some of those already stretched by high fees. At the same time the whole notion of education provided independently being a public good is undermined. As if young minds being challenged and developed in a tremendously successful way is no longer enough to count as a ‘public good’. Those young minds instead are to be considered the property of the state, and if they need encouragement to be re-deployed in ailing state schools, so be it!
The theory seems to be that greater social mobility can be achieved by simply coercing more middle class and high earning families into using the same education system as everyone else. But this is to mistake for a cause what is really more of a symptom. While access to private education certainly contributes somewhat to greater life chances, the more central cause (or ‘problem’ as some on the left define it) is the same thing that has caused this rush to get hold of the Butterfly Book: that successful families in Britain are tenacious, even relentless in their pursuit of better education!
The Fabians may imagine they can put a stop to this by blocking access to private schools. But they have barely even scratched the surface of this cultural phenomenon. If parents can’t send their children to an independent school, they will find a way to send them to a good state school. If they cannot do that, they will hire more tutors, use supplementary schools, buy even more textbooks and start teaching their children themselves. On the far end of this continuum is home schooling, which appears to be an increasingly popular option for many families.
Try as they might, these penalising measures will not distil this essence these successful families have and spread it around to the rest as if by osmosis. Not while the educational structures in place systematically fail those currently forced to use them exclusively. Meanwhile, these same families will just adapt and find another way to give their children a better start in life and retreat further from state provision. Policy should start from the assumption that resistance to this force is both futile and unnecessary. Instead attention should be turned towards making the state sector as responsive and adaptive to the needs of pupils as the independent schools. Only that way will social mobility be tackled.
Civitas is already involved in offering the same options for a good education to the less advantaged in our society. The Butterfly Book may be available to all as a self-contained reading course, but it doubles as one of the main tools used in our Supplementary Schools that are set-up specifically to teach basic maths and English to children being badly served by the state schools around them.