“EDUCATION IS FOR children, not for profits,” proclaims the National Union of Teachers. “It’s privatisation!”, chimes in Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT).

The teaching unions are upset about the Government’s flagship programme for 200 new Academies, supposedly “independent” state schools, and the new “trust schools”. To listen to the unions, you’d think nothing was in need of reform. Their complacency is staggering. To take one statistic at random, more than 80 per cent of children on free school meals fail to gain five decent GCSE grades. That’s failure on a grand scale.

Anyway, the reforms are hardly radical. To allow a few businessmen to donate a couple of million quid to gain a modicum of influence over a school’s ethos, that’s not privatisation. Real privatisation, however, is taking place elsewhere in the world with salutary lessons for us. And contrary to the unions’ moralising that privatisation must be bad for the poor, it’s happening because some of the poorest people on this planet are fed up with the failures of state education. In slums and villages that I have visited in Africa and India, parents are appalled that teachers often don’t turn up and, if they do, often don’t teach. Their children tell them of sleeping teachers and parents see that exercise books are rarely marked.

But these parents don’t sit by, waiting for their politicians to do something. Instead, they put their children into the burgeoning private schools. My recent research has shown that between 65 and 75 per cent of children in the poorest slums in Africa and India are now in private schools. These schools charge low fees, perhaps a couple of pounds per month. They are run by proprietors who are not heartless businessmen, but who provide free places to orphans and those with widowed mothers. When they tested large random samples of children, my teams found that these schools outperform the government alternative. And they do it with teachers paid a fraction of the unionised rates.

Unions here would be up in arms about this. Touchingly, the first concern of many delegates at the conferences is that private enterprise would cut teachers’ pay or make them work longer hours. But if in the free market, schools can find dedicated champions of children’s learning willing to work longer hours, or be flexible on their pay and conditions, then what is wrong with that, if it benefits children? In Africa and India the market has set its own pay and conditions. Even though teachers in private schools are paid less than their government counterparts, and work longer hours, they have higher standards because they know they are accountable to parents. Poor performance could lose them their jobs; in state schools, the unions make sure that nobody can be sacked.

Last week I was in a deprived fishing village in Ghana that boasts six flourishing private schools only yards from the state school. A fisherman with an understanding of economics that would put union officials to shame, who had moved his daughter from state to private school, told me that the private school proprietor needed to satisfy parents like him, otherwise he would go out of business. “That’s why the teachers turn up and teach,” he told me, “because they are closely supervised.” His wife, busy smoking fish for sale in the market, concurred. “In the state school, our daughter learnt nothing. Now she’s back on track.”

These parents understand what apparently baffles those in the unions, so used to the dependency culture of the West — that what is handed out for free is likely to be low quality. One father, living in the Kenyan slum of Kibera, summarised it like this: “If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, you know they’ll be rotten. If you want fresh produce, you have to pay for it.”

Real privatisation occurs only if the customers of education are empowered, if the educational providers are made accountable to them. We have found a very effective way of doing that over the millennia — it’s called the price mechanism. Only when people pay for something can they be in real control. Poor parents in the developing world recognise this with crystal clarity.

Importantly, in these poor countries, and in China too, the markets are now consolidating, with entrepreneurs creating chains of schools. These chains are starting to offer parents a brand name that they know they can trust. That’s real privatisation, too, when business men and women grasp the incentive of the profit motive to improve and innovate. When businesses are free to win customers from other competitors, to expand their markets, to find ways of making the system more effective, then we will see the shake-up the education system needs.

The unions are scaremongering. The present reforms are only toying with privatisation. To bring profit and fees into that system — now, that would be progress. What could it look like here? Gazing into my crystal ball, I see chains of learning centres carrying the distinctive bright orange logo of “easyLearn”, competing with those sporting the red “V” of “VirginOpportunity”. Competition between these players would make good schooling affordable to all, accelerate the pace of learning innovation, and end the system mired in complacency and under-performance. I guess the unions would be right to be worried then. But parents and children could rest easy, and grasp the new opportunities offered.

James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at Newcastle University

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