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The free market works, but not when it comes to schools

Our education system is becoming an inefficient, socially segregated mess – all because central government stripped councils of their powers

The free market is the best way of allocating scarce resources in 90% of cases. The other 10% includes schools.

Britain’s headteachers today claimed the blindingly obvious. If the government funds private organisations to set up “free” state schools wherever parents do not like existing ones, provision will be “wasteful, fragmented and confusing”. There will be too many places in some neighbourhoods and too few in others.

That has duly happened. Half a million children are now in “super-sized” classes, while British schools are slithering back to the selection and social segregation of the old days. This has nothing to do with free schools and academies as such. It has to do with allowing them to expand – or not expand – at will, and allowing them to choose their pupils, which means choosing their parents. Ever since primary schools were supposedly “local” and secondary schools “comprehensive”, parents at least in city centres struggled to get their children out of unpopular schools. Local councils struggled to police the resulting competition.More...