British education: cuts and standards

Press, 23 July 1976, Page 12

British education: cuts and standards

From the ’•Economist,” London

Many of the cuts in government expenditure in 1977 78 and later years, which were discussed by the British Cabinet last week, will fall on education. There is a good intention that they will be both implemented and waideu off in the right way — by seeing that the State get* value for money, by a new thirst for measurement of the output of government Perhaps. Education has already suffered cuts: but they have so far la-.geiy been deflected — for everyone except aspiring teach -rs — by declining demand Parents have demanded fewer primary school places by producing progressively fewer babies for a decade. Adolescents have demanded less higher education than expected (only about 14 per cent of the age group are going on to it), so that the target for higher education places in 1981 has been lowered, since the late 19605, by over 200,000.

It is true that demand for nursery education has expanded, and not been met. And individual schools and individual areas have suffered some harsh cuts, as cash limits begin to bite on local authorities. If the cash limits are to work, there will be more of these “unannounced” cuts over the next couple of vears. But the real interrogation of the education system is only just beginning. The Education Department, equipped with a new and fact-thirsty permanent secretary, acts for both prosecution and defence. External demand for measures of the performance of the education service has bubbled up quite independently from the internal exercise in budget-protection, spurred erratically by such “scandals” as the results of the 1971 survey of reading standards, the inquiry into William Tyndale school, the Bennett survey of primary school methods, and the unpublished results of a schools-council-sponsored

survey of shifting standards in public examinations, leaked by a Tory member of Parliament last week. Within government, the pressures come from the need to prove to colleagues hunting fur cuts in someone else’s budget that conventional measures of “improvement” really do measure something: that, say, a change upwards or downwards in the teacher ratio does actually result in worse or better education.

Having set up the right stools for study, however, the Government proceeded last week to fall heavily between some of them. The Education Secretary (Mr Fred Mulley) announced a political ly-clever compromise on overseas student fees which wili have the wrong social and economic effects. Tuition fees are to be raised in 1977 to a level (£l3OO a year tor undergraduates) that will, cause hardship to students from poor countries without bringing them to the level that would enable Britain to break even on the education of students from rich ones.

Demand for what will still be a heavily-subsidised education will be checked by a quota for overseas students (whose numbers have doubled in the past decade.) The better, braver and tnore rewarding solution, charging something more like the true cost for sheikhs’ sons and increasing scholarships for students from poor countries, seems to have been killed by dons, who responded to rumours that the treasury was pressing for full-cost fees with an unacademically vague compound of arguments about foreign exchange, benefits to British students overseas and 'the goodwill to be gained from future rulers’ memories of the dreaming spires of Oxford.

The least attractive academic argument was that greater dependence on fee income would force universities tc pay more attention to whether they actually managed to fill their courses.

Then came the culmination of the schools council’s long debate over an exam system (theoretically for 16-year-olds), to replace the

General Certificate of Education Ordinary level and the Certificate of Secondary Education, with a final recommendation to Mr Mulley. This seemingly technical issue has been sucked into the debate on educational standards (to which politicians are beginning to react like Pavlovian dogs, which is at least some advance on reacting like blind monkeys) because of doubts that a single exam for 60 per cent of the ability range can discriminate sufficiently between able children, and so both stimulate them and provide a basis for sixthform work.

Politicians are showing increasing unease about the growth of examinations for which courses are designed, exams set and marks given within schools by teachers to their own pupils. It is difficult for the schools council, itself a body dominated by teachers’ organisations, to allay fears that teachers are accountable to no one but themselves.

The demand for accountability comes in a variety of ways: for a “pore curriculum” dictated nationally, for

schools to publish prospectuses and exam resuits, for new examinations to monitor the performance of primary schools. There is also an underlying confusion of demands for more central and more local control. The Government has two new weapons for resolving the debate. One is the assessment of performance unit, of which, unfortunately, too little has oeen heard since it was set up last year, but which is supposed to be designing ways of monitoring school standards. The other is the Taylor committee on the management and the government of schools, now taking evidence. That just might produce recommendations - which the Government should implement — to ensure that all schools have effective and involved governors and managers to whom teachers (and local authorities) should be accountable for the ways schools are run, lor what is taught in them and how their resources are being used. It should be bold, because the education secretary on past form, is unlikely to be.