People with differing views often speak past one another. We see that all the time when market liberals debate with those who believe in the efficacy of monopoly state services. We speak about freedom; they speak about fairness. We talk about experimentation leading to innovation; they say that experimentation risks failure. We focus on the creative aspects of Schumpeter’s observation about the role of markets; they concentrate solely on destruction.
For this reason, it is always worthwhile taking the time to judge the effectiveness of a particular government intervention by the standards that the interventionists themselves set. After all, if they’re not even succeeding in their own terms, how can they possibly argue that their system is working?
Ofsted today launched their new report, Moving English forward, in which they argue that
English … standards are not yet high enough for all pupils and there has been too little improvement in primary schools… [O]ne in five primary pupils did not achieve the expected standard in English. Far more pupils failed to achieve this standard in writing and the report links this with weaknesses in the teaching of writing and gaps in the subject knowledge of some English coordinators in primary schools… [N]early 30% of students who are entered for GCSE English do not achieve grades A* to C.
The new chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has said that teachers must get specialist training in teaching phonics, the system of sounding out letter sounds and combinations.
This is true, but it’s far from new. 15 years ago almost to the day, the Education Unit at the Instituteof Economic Affairspublished Why Schoolchildren Can’t Read. In the introduction, Martin Turner, then Head of Psychology at The Dyslexia Institute observed that:
Given that the research picture… was essentially complete in 1967, the year of the publication of Jeanne Challs’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate, why, thirty years later, are we still having a ‘debate’ about the best way to teach reading, a question that has been decided in favour of traditional phonics and which has long ceased to be controversial within the research community?
The only thing that seems to have changed is that it has now been half a century!
What does this say about our system of centralised, state schooling? In the spirit of my opening comments, I feel that we should judge it in its own terms. One of the main reasons given by defenders of the State is that it can ensure that children are given good lessons. It is currently in vogue to cite religious schools that might spend more time teaching homophobia and anti-Semitism than English and Maths, but the whole premise of Ofsted is that it is also possible for the state regulator to drive up quality and ensure that the right lessons are taught in the right way.
Except it clearly isn’t. Ofsted was founded 20 years ago, and the teaching of phonics has been in and out of the news for as long as I can remember, and yet they are still failing to ensure that all teachers teach phonics. If the regulator of a centralised state system teaching a national curriculum cannot even ensure that effective literacy is taught in every school, one has to ask what the point of having a regulator, a national curriculum or state provision really is.
Ironically, it is entirely possible that phonics would be more prevalent under a market system. In a market, parents would be able to move their children away from schools that were not teaching literacy effectively and to schools that were. Phonics patently works and schools that teach it produce more literate school-leavers than those that do not. Over time, therefore, those schools that did not teach phonics would lose pupils to those that did, forcing them to either adopt phonics or close. By comparison, in a state monopoly, the schools could continue to teach literacy ineffectively, while the local authority continued to allocate poor, unfortunate children to the school through the bureaucratic admissions process.
If the state education monopoly cannot even ensure that children learn to read and write, and it cannot impose uniformity of schools, it is a failure even in its own terms. I suspect, if the monopoly persists, we’ll be back here again in 15 years’ time.
Tom Papworth
