In the 70's in Britain nationalised industries were a byword for waste and inefficiency. Every year it cost £300 for each British citizen to support the loss making nationalised industries. Now in the 90's privatised industries produce £100 a year for every citizen of the UK thus the privatisations of the 80's have meant £400 a year net profit to each citizen of the UK. That means your household if it consists of 2 persons has saved about £800/£1000 through privatisations. Bills on average are far lower now than they were once.
But how does this apply to education. The fact that privatised industries can do the same job cheaper or a better job at the same price means that if privatised education could be far cheaper to the end user for the same quality of education now provided .Alternatively a higher level of education could be provided at the same price. Education costs about £3,200 for each secondary age pupil ( in Scotland counting education department costs), if the same efficiency savings could be made here as were made with the privatised industries then each citizen of the UK could perhaps enjoy £500 more a year or more as a result of education being privatised that's about £40 a week in your pocket. Alternatively they would have the chance to provide a better quality of education for their children for no extra cost. In Cleveland, the public schools consume $6500 per person , the private schools only £2000 on average and yet do a far better job. (Economist Nov 29th 97)
The nature of modern society makes education privatisation necessary: (1) Economic resources in our society will increasingly flow to the knowledgeable and the particular knowledge that is needed will change frequently. For this reason we need a flexible education system that will have all the private sector energy in providing exactly what its customers need.
(2) The collapse of Communism has told us that controlling systems from the top is not a good way to produce results. Privatised schooling will enable schools to adjust more rapidly and take into account the needs of local industry .
(3) The globalisation of business means that businesses move to areas of low tax/ low spend governments. If taxes are lower due to education privatisation then businesses will locate in that country causing economic growth to rise. Additionally business want an educated workforce and like any private enterprise the school of the future will do this far better than the old state system.
Why is the private sector more efficient?
The reason the private sector is more efficient than anything run by the government is primarily to do with incentives. This is important to understand. The structure of how people are remunerated is completely different in a private system. In a private system costs are continually being squeezed, if they aren't then the owner of the business will make no profit. This is because in a competitive economy other businesses will be cutting their costs and cutting their prices so if any individual business does not cut their prices then all the consumers will buy from the ones that do cut their prices . Thus everyone is constantly trying to control their costs so that they can drop their prices so that they will get more business, so that they will make more money.
Alternatively they may be trying to supply more value for the same money, the process works in the same way . It is impossible in an environment like this to be complacent. You must constantly be trying to improve your service and lower your costs.
Government organisations are totally different. In a public school or a public British Telecom or British Gas there is no such incentives to control cost. A company makes a loss, the Government pays the loss. If the company makes a profit, the managers do not benefit. Not only is there the absence of a profit motive mechanism but there is the existence of another mechanism.
What happens is that the civil servant who has the biggest staff and the biggest budget is considered most important and gets paid the biggest salary. So there is an incentive for this government employee to expand his budgets and increase costs to justify increasing the amount of money that he should spend. The process for getting this extra money is very different from the process of selling more products. Instead it is a process of going to government and justifying an additional amount of expenditure or an extra cost. Furthermore if this cost becomes obsolete there is no mechanism for cutting that cost. There is nobody with an incentive to do so. Civil servants get paid more if they have bigger budgets and more staff. So we can see that anything in the public sector has an incentive to increase costs whereas anything in the private sector has an incentive to decrease costs and improve service. This is why businesses run far better in the private sector than in the public sector. This is why people like me and you can save hundreds and hundreds of pounds if important services like education are run by the private sector. Knowledge of how this process works is the key to understanding the benefits of privatisation.
The Lack of the PRICE MECHANISM in Education has had serious negative effects on our Economy
This is seen most clearly with respect to our higher education which has recently undergone a massive expansion at just the time in should have been contracting ! We have produced more graduates when it was clear before the expansion that the existing graduates were mostly not doing jobs with much relevance to their degrees.
The Institute for Employment in 1996 studies found that less than 50% of the graduates considered that the work they had achieved up to 3 years after leaving university required graduate level ability, 10% were in jobs previously filled by school leavers, 20% of humanities graduates were doing secretarial work, 60% said they were underemployed in their work , lacking stimulation.
This information was known in 1990 when the government report, Highly Qualified People : supply and demand came to the conclusion "Britain has already considerably more in the way of highly qualified labour than it can absorb in any capacity".
Now consider not just the insaneness of this vast waste of money but also consider WHY it has happened and what will happen in the free market of the future?
First of all people are price sensitive to education because they are paying for it themselves. Thus they weigh the costs and benefits of a university education. If they become aware that there is oversupply of highly qualified people and that the price (salary) is thus about the same as everyone else's salary then many people will not pay the cost of university and the number of highly qualified people will fall to the level that society actually needs.
Additionally, as a profit seeking business the university will have a strong incentive to find area where industry has not enough qualified people and recruit students into those area to help close the gaps.
This recent debacle is another reason why government should never be allowed to own and control any social institution and why such organisations should be privatised without delay.
Effect on Taxes
If education was to be privatised then probably the best way to do it is to give everyone who sends their children to school a tax concession. This would means that everybody with secondary age pupils would pay £3,200 a year less tax and National Insurance .Instead, they would have to pay monthly for their children's education. They would not have to pay as much however as they pay in taxes at the moment.
There would be other advantages to this system as some households would not pay any tax at all on their income. This would affect quite a large percentage of the population and many businesses would not have to calculate taxes for these people or file returns apart from very basic ones. This means business administration costs would be severely reduced. It also means that Inland Revenue costs would fall as monitoring these people would be less difficult. These savings could be passed on in higher wages and lower taxes respectively from employers and from government.
There are other benefits of having lower taxes beyond the educational ones. First of all if taxes are lower there is less incentive for people to cheat on their income tax. So if a household is getting most of their tax rebated because they've got children in education then they're paying a far smaller amount of tax and they are more likely to pay it without quibbling much or trying to find loopholes. This saves the taxpayer time, it saves Inland Revenue time which can be passed on lower taxes and it saves the Government time because they don't have to spend time looking for and closing loopholes in the tax system. The tax system can therefore be simpler and less complex. Less taxes and administrative costs for businesses also could bring unemployment down as businesses then have more money to spend on employing more people.
Other Incentives of State Education
There is another effect of having education run by the state and that is to distort the importance of issues. In anything run by the state there appears in time powerful unions that fight against the state. In education this is of course the teaching unions. Unions exist to produce benefits from their members and the teaching unions are no different. As a result the unions have managed to raise the school age on several occasions. The ostensible reason for this was to give children more education. However this also has the benefit of creating a need for more teachers. Many independent analysts now think that this was the primary purpose of the recommendation being made by the union. Certainly there is little evidence that this policy increases educational outcomes as much as other spending could have done. These kind of decisions and policies that state run organisations usually submit to, can provide a far higher cost of education than parents would otherwise desire their children to have. It is meritorious for some children to stay in education up to the age of 21 or 22 but doubts have been raised about whether other children might be better in a job learning an apprenticeship at 15 rather than being perhaps a disruptive influence on the classes that they do not wish to attend. Parents of such children sometimes would prefer a more trade based education rather than an academic one for such children.
Is Privatising education impossible?
Some people might plead that whether or not they agree or disagree with my hypothesis that this could never happen. I would reply to this that it will be impossible for any economy to survive the next 20 or 30 years that doesn't do this and that all major economies will privatise education in the next 40 years maybe long before. The reason for this is the increasing globalisation of world trade.
With the information age we now reach a point where companies can locate in different countries extremely easily. This means one of the main criteria for where to locate will be a country's national tax structure. Countries where businesses pay large amounts of sales tax and payroll taxes in all their employees wages will be less desirable than those with far lower taxes or even no taxes at all. It will become increasingly difficult to fund the expenditure of government from taxes and more and more things will have to be privatised. The alternative is far fewer businesses, far fewer jobs and far less prosperity. Pressures will grow.
Not just cost cutting
Let's look at how the dynamics of private schools would work. Many people confuse privatisation with relentless cost cutting experienced in government run institutions around the world. Although everybody complains about cost cutting in the National Health Service and the Education Department ,the expenditure in these services is actually growing at an alarming rate, especially in Health. It just seems that things are being cut.
However even if things were being cut cost cutting is not the whole picture. Private businesses also try to increase the benefits to their customers in order to retain business as well as simply cutting costs. It was once proposed to me that a privatised school would be trying to use old fashioned text books to save costs and use other cost saving measures that would affect the quality of the children's education. But this doesn't take into account the benefit seeking nature of a private enterprise.
In order to attract customers and keep existing customers ,businesses have to be constantly improving their service for as low a cost as possible. Any business that tried to use out of date techniques to save money would find this eventually showing up in newspapers and by word of mouth this kind of information would eventually get back to parents. Parents could then evaluate that information and decide whether it was important to them . They could then relocate their child if they felt it was necessary. Businesses tend to be fairly afraid of bad press and tend to change things as soon as it appears to have attracted press coverage.
Government departments on the other hand will get their money whether or not they use 1970's style textbooks or not. They are far less responsive then to parental views about using up to date methods. It should be noted of course that up to date methods are not always the best. If the 1970's style textbooks were defended as being far better for the job then of course there is no problem with using them. The issue is quality of education.
Closing schools
What if schools went out of business, what would happen then? Any provider of services has to provide the highest quality of service for the lowest possible cost. It is inevitable and beneficial to the consumer that some would try harder, work more intelligently and all in all produce a better effect than others. More places would then be demanded at that school for pupils and the school would expand. Other schools would not serve their customers as well and not provide a high standard of education. These schools would close or at least reduce in numbers. The most likely event is for schools to continue to decrease in numbers if they are not providing a good service and for the pupils to go to schools that are. Once the school reached a point where it was uneconomic another school would probably buy the premises and bring their school ethos on the old school. Its better management would then bring more pupils to the original school. This system ensures that the best management manages schools and that all schools therefore receive a better quality of management and a better service at a cheaper price. This is the way all business works and this is what guarantees us continual improvement in all areas of commercial life.
The Poor
What about children of poor parents, would they not suffer under this new arrangement? At a first glance it may seem this way but in fact poorer children would not suffer under a private society rather they would benefit. With lower taxes across the board the economy would grow quicker. This is a well established phenomena. We can see the dragons of Eastern Asia continually producing growth rates of 6% - 8% and these indeed are the countries which have the lowest percentage of the total income of the nation used by the government. So poor people would benefit from increasing wages if more services like private education were privatised and the taxes returned.
From an educational standpoint they would benefit also because with competition between schools, schools would be under far more pressure to provide a higher quality of service at a lower price thus poor people who were paying in VAT and the lower levels of income tax £3,200 per year for their child to go into education would only have to pay a far smaller amount for their child to be educated now. And ,as time went on, efficiency savings would bring that down again. So poor people whose money is worth the most to them would benefit more from a system of private education than others. In the United States the privatisation would be better still from the point of view of the poor. Schools are funded by property taxes with the effect that rich districts get richer schools and poor districts poorer so there is no redistributive effect that privatisation is reversing. Rather both rich and poor would pay roughly the same that they were already paying but direct to the school rather than through the tax bureaucracy.
The Cleveland experiment with vouchers has been targetted mainly at the poor, and they love the scheme since for them it gives their children the best chance possible. The number of poor parents expressing that they were very satisfied rose from under a third to more than two thirds after the freedom given by the vouchers was given. The children who went private saw significant rises in test scores (Economist Nov 29th 1997) For the very poor who couldn't afford education it is not necessary to have education in public ownership to help them. It is equally possible to provide a subsidy through the Social Security system to parents who can't afford even with the tax rebates to send their children to school. Thus we can ensure that even the poorest members of society are protected. Using the Social Security system is a far more efficient way of helping the poor than keeping education in the public sector since when education is in the public sector then everybody pays for it through the government even though a small percentage need a government subsidy to do so. The benefits of being in private ownership are achievable even if we want to continue to subsidise those on lower incomes. In actual fact I don't believe the subsidy would be necessary after a few years of free market growth.
Consumer Pressure
The fact that people pay for education out of their own pockets rather than via the tax mechanism produces the usual consumer effect. In other words people shop around for the best deals. Thus you have millions of parents looking intently at who provides the best educational value for their money either by providing a cheaper service or by providing a better service. Thus schools have an incentive to develop courses that parents want for their kids and so will pay for. They have a new incentive to develop the disciplines that parents want and to provide this at an affordable price.
They will get rid of courses that there is no demand for that no parent wants their child to study. Thus the benefits of price competition are applied to education bringing the best value at the cheapest price.
Increased Variety
As with all private sector markets competition increases the variety available to consumers. It is quite possible that certain schools would specialise in certain areas. There may be schools that are better at music, others that specialise in physical education others that deal with vocational employment, others that are geared to prepare people for university. Demand for these various types of services would determine the supply available. So instead of having a monolithic system that provides the same thing regardless of parental issues or the aptitudes of the various pupils, a private system would provide a great variety to tailor its education to the various pupils that go to an individual school. Obviously variety is not unlimited and depends on cost and benefit but if a particular area was of sufficient benefit to parents then clearly they would be prepared to pay more for it and they would have this freedom under a private system . They could choose the school that provides the best ethos and value system for their child.
The Halo Effect
It has been argued that education has benefits to society beyond those to the individual pupil. In other words that if society is educated then there is a better quality flow of labour to businesses which results in more productive workers. This is true but it is not a reason for education to be in public ownership rather it is a reason for it to be in private ownership.
This is why: As we have already discussed anything run by the Government produces less for the money than anything run by the private sector so to get a higher quality of education for business and industry we must have education in the private sector. Additionally if education was managed by managers who understood the private sector it would be more likely to prepare its pupils for life in the real commercial world. In education today most teachers have never been in the business world and so how can they equip pupils to deal with it. In a private society a private ethos and a realistic understanding of how the real commercial world works would prevail in the school and better equip pupils for life in the business world.
With parents providing the funds for education out of their own pocket instead of the service being apparently free to them they are more likely to ensure that it does provide an economic return in the long run to their children and thus ensure that the courses are geared for the real world. So having education in the private sector is likely to ensure that the society and economy as a whole benefit and thus this halo effect is a reason for privatising education.
Do parents care about education
Are parents unconcerned about their children's education? It has been suggested that in a private system where parents have control over their own children's education that they would not exercise this control and so allow their children's education to become mediocre. First of all let us note that in a private system even if 5% of parents are concerned about their children's education this would produce enough pressure on the school to improve standards. It doesn't take everybody to be militant, only that a vocal minority are pressing for improved standards of education and threatening to move their children. This is enough to scare most businesses into making changes because no business likes to lose money. 5% might well be the profit margin and if to lose 5% is to lose your whole profit then businesses are going to do something quite quickly.
But far higher than 5% of the population are interested in their children's education. The objection that parents are not interested in their children's education is usually raised by non parents or by parents thinking that they have an interest in their children's education but that there are people that don't. Inevitably there are some people who don't take any interest in their children's well being but these people are certainly a small minority and the concerned majority are more than enough to put sufficient pressure on the school.
Now remembering that it only takes a few parents to ensure that standards of education are continually increased ,with an undisputedly a large number of parents wanting their best for their child then this will ensure a high degree of pressure on schools to be continually improving. Far higher than the pressure from a once every 3 years visit from Her Majesty's Inspector. The scale of pressure is just simply not on the same scale.
Also remember parents feel they have no control over the education system at the moment because at the end of they day they can't vote with their feet and move their child to another school and feel they're actually damaging that school by doing so. Technically speaking there is a loss to the school when it looses a pupil even today but this doesn't effect the head-teachers salary. He has no real economic motive to keep children. With the owner of a private school however he has a strong economic motive to keep each pupil and to attract new ones and competition would be tough to the benefit of all concerned
The Freedom Issue
There is a fundamental issue at stake here that hasn't been addressed. The issue is: whose children are they anyway? For the government to decide regardless of parental wishes what happens to a parent's children is a fundamental violation of human rights. It is a parent's right to decide what happens to their children and governments are tyrannical in whatever respect they overstep their mark in this area. It is a returning of parents to their rightful place in control of their children's destinies that the privatisation of education is all about.
Minority Rights
There is also an issue of prejudice here also, what right has the Government of the UK to take money from all its citizens to educate them only in one way of thinking. What about children from Ethnic backgrounds that don't share these values. Why is money being taken from them to subsidise values that they don't agree with. Surely this isn't right?
This is fundamentally an issue of personal freedom. However it is also a matter of a value driven or valueless society. State schools by their very nature cannot promote one particular system of values be it Christian, Muslim or otherwise. This is because those who finance the education namely the taxpayers come from all kinds of different groups and wouldn't want to support a value system different from their own. The effect of this is that the school system has no values and the children as a result have no values other than those they pick up from home. This is why we see so much youth crime, teenage pregnancies and other such problems.
In the 19th century the average age of the criminal was 46 now it's in the teens. Most commentators put this down to the value driven quality of the education in the past, it took potential criminals years to shake it off. Privatising education would allow these values to re-emerge as its parental choice that is going to determine what values a school has rather than the state. Parental choice is not bound to represent all views equally as the state is . The state of course is aware that it is an impossible task to represent all views and no views in the end are put forward. The parental voice can set strong values for schools. This has job market implications as children with more values who believe that it is right to be hard working, diligent, honest, caring and so on are of more value to employers than those who have been taught through omission that values and character aren't important. Indeed, this is one of the halo effects of having education in the private sector.
This has specific benefits to Christian parents. Many Christian parents are concerned about the effect that state schools sometimes have on their children. Christian schools however struggle because those who send their children to Christian schools have to pay twice for education, once in their taxes and then again in private school fees. This makes it very difficult for Christian schools to prosper. However in a private system the parents would have to send their children somewhere and many would choose to send them to Christian schools. This would mean that such schools would flourish. Schools that operate at the moment as Christian schools tend to do far more than the state schools but the cost of this is a actually far less than the state schools charge. This gives us some reason to think that major efficiency savings could be made if education were to become totally private.
Will the poor only look at cost
What about this question: Won't the parents from poor or uneducated backgrounds value the education of their children less and just get the basic cheapest education they can get for their children and won't these children suffer ? While this question is sometimes raised by people from better backgrounds is rarely ever raised by people from working class backgrounds. The reason for this is that in reality working class parents are often if anything more keen to see their kids succeed and do better than they did. This is the universal testimony of history. Even in the 19th century where people were only maybe a tenth as rich as even the average poor person today, they spent such a high proportion of their income on their children's education that they sometimes had to do without food to do so. Education is a very high priority for most parents and there is no evidence to suggest that parents would not look after the welfare of their children in the same way that they look after their welfare in terms of food and clothing. The burden of proof in this matter must be with those who think that parents would be irresponsible in this manner.
Will the quality of education not suffer if education is privatised?
As we have already discussed the private market will ensure the highest quality education at the lowest price as it does with everything else from kitchens and personal loans to solicitors and chemicals . If the quality of education in any individual school was to start to deteriorate and this information became known to the parents through newspapers or word of mouth then parents would be able to take their children from that school and send them to one that was doing better. This means the people running the first school would be losing money and so they would have to improve the quality of education or make less money. The incentive is there to continually improve education, no one would be able to survive without continual improvement; that is the nature of competitive markets.
Do parents really know what is best for their children.
On the basis that parents know their children better than anybody else, it is clear they can decide best what kind of education they should have . That doesn't mean that they know everything that is best for them but consider the alternative question, does the state know what is best for each individual child. Clearly not. The state treats every child as if he were exactly the same. It is a uniform approach for everybody so this blanket approach cannot be right for every single child no matter how good is the thinking its based on. The basic principal of decentralisation tells us that the best information about each child's abilities and what his educational needs are is more fully held with the parent than with the monolithic centralised state that has little particular knowledge about the individual child.
That doesn't mean that parents need to be familiar with the process of how that education is produced. All the parents need to be able to measure is the result. These results don't take an educational psychologist to be able to detect. The question is, can John now read, what per cent is he getting in his maths tests. These kind of results are what matter . How is he progressing? Is he learning? Are the teachers helping him? These are not difficult questions to find out : the parent doesn't need to be an expert in education any more than the person who orders the kitchen needs to be an expert on joinery and kitchen materials
How it should be done
Education is one of the easiest privatisations. Much easier than the utilities that have been such a success. This is because there are no monopoly problems as schools in an area would compete with one another. There is also a ready market for shares. Head-teachers could buy the school as a management buyout, teachers might want to buy the school and parents have an interest in buying shares. This is in addition to the usual business interests that simply realise that with proper incentives present in a private firm that they can supply a better service at a lower price and make higher profits in the process. In reality there would probably be a combination of owners.
The best way would probably be to sell shares in each school to the highest bidders but it might be wise to ensure the success of the program to restrict the ownership of schools by one party in any one area to prevent monopoly. This rule should expire in 5 years or so by which time managements should be on their feet.
If we assume that profits would be 15% (conservative) and education currently is 8% of GNP and that people would pay 7 years profits for the income stream ( conservative) then this privatisation should raise 8.4% of GDP - a huge receipt for any government. ( perhaps 20% of government income ). A massive amount. Particularly since parents and teachers might well buy shares in their schools. This might possibly pay off national debts and enable tax cuts ahead of spending cuts
Simultaneously give a tax rebate for parents per child in education and stop funding that proportion through schools. Gradually increase this so that in 4 or 5 years the whole cost is being paid direct from the parents and they pay proportionately less tax.
Always we must seek to match up those who gain from the tax cut with those who loose by having to pay for the service that is no longer free to consumers. With education this is the easier of the 3 main areas in this respect. Education costs £3500 per secondary pupil of which there are 3.4 million, and £2500 per primary pupil of which there are 5 million. This makes a total budget of £13 billion for secondary and £12.5 billion for primary. A simple education allowance against income tax is the easiest way to transform this area. The full allowance ( transferable in whole or part between husband and wife ) would be £10000 against basic rate tax for primary or£14000 against basic rate for secondary. This gives £2500 or £3500 respectively in tax that they don't need to pay, per child of school age. This would be better introduced gradually as budgeting for paying £300 per month for schooling might be too much initially for some families. If people were to be given a quarter of the allowance first of all - so they paid £75 per month to the school for secondary, £50 per month prim, then this may be a worthwhile transition. Each year the allowance could go up by a quarter of the total amount until it reached 100%. If the allowance was made against National Insurance tax also then the allowances would be £7000 and £11000 respectively. In other words any couple earning more than £29000 between the two of them( > 14500 each) with two children at secondary. would still pay some income tax and NI . (extra £7000 comes from personal allowances) . A couple with one child in primary would exceed their allowance after their joint income exceeded £14000, £7000 each. Incentives By far the biggest expense (90%) in schools is staff. Yet there is very little incentive in a public system to economise in any way. Nobody gains from doing so. If a headmaster cuts down on the number of teachers then he gains nothing and he is constantly under pressure to increase the number of teachers from the existing teachers in order to cut down each teachers work load. On the other hand in a private system there is an owner who is paying for all these salaries and has every incentive to produce more cost effective solutions. He also has to bear in mind his customers ,the parents and can't afford for the quality of education to drop relative to his competitors. However he might try employing less expensive staff to do some of the teachers work that doesn't require a qualified teacher to do. He could make use of videos to teach some subjects (why have teachers teaching the same lessons they have always taught when you can tape it once and then play it back). You still need someone to supervise the children during the video but it can be some kind of auxiliary. The teachers productivity can be maximised by spending their time working with individual kids rather than lecturing. In doing this they could be helped by other parents in some cases ( for a reduction in fees). This happens in some private schools and is cheaper to the school than employing staff. By a combination of these techniques its likely that costs could be cut by about 45%. Other ideas would of course materialise in due course once the incentives inherent in a private system were in place. This would save the nation in general 45% of £32 billion = £14 billion = £560 for every household. Putting it another way for every child at school the parents would save about £1500 per annum SUMMARY
So in summary we can see that a privatised system would be beneficial because (1) the private sector is almost always more efficient at providing services as it works according to different incentives to the public sector; (2) the effects on the tax system would be beneficial to the economy as a whole; (3) there would be less distortion of information on good educational practice by self interested groups; (4) a more tailored approach to each child would be possible ;(5) the global privatisation of education is inevitable; (6) value for money would be optimised rather than cost cutting necessarily;(7) good schools would grow and bad ones shrink; (8) the poor would benefit as much if not more and could still be supported through the social security system if this was desirable for a while (9) consumer pressure would bring standards up and costs down; (10) schools could be more value driven and this may well have a positive effect on youth crime and delinquency; (11) the halo effect would bring the benefits to the wider economy; (12) a fundamental human right to educate ones children in the way one chooses (without paying twice) will be restored.
Notes ( other useful information) (1) Teachers in the UK : primary 226.1 secondary, 228.4. Pupils: 5,065 prim, 3655 sec (thousands) Pupils per teacher: 22.4 primary, 16 secondary all schools 17.8 90% on education spending goes to teachers salaries , only 4% on books and equipment (costs £1800, £2300 on prim, sec places in96) A school inspection lasts 3-5 days happens every 4 years and costs £10,000 for a prim school and £30,000 for a secondary school. (OFESTED- £93 million on inspections ,£30 million admin.) 3HB p 33 Further education £4 bil, higher education 4.3 bil, prim/nursery 8.9 bil, second 8.0 bil, grants and fees 2.6 bil Education ( Total Budget £36 Billion) US $65,000 for primary education, $100k for secondary, $64,000 in foregone earnings= $250,000 per child invested. Very high returns on first 5 years - literacy and numeracy, and on graduate degrees not much on the rest. Median graduate wage £42k , non $28k Education is 5.1% of GDP in US, 4.7% in UK, average 5.4% in Europe Current expenditure per pupil is £1600 per primary pupil on average, £2200 per secondary pupil (we are using the English figures now0 variances not huge) (Total Local Authority spending on education 36.3% on Primary, 35.8 % in Secondary, 5.6% special schools, 16.3 continuing education ( differences between regions aren't huge.) If this was privatised then this saving could reduce basic rate to 13% and increase the personal allowance by £3000 ( i.e. zero rate on lower rate bracket).