Here’s another indication that the shouty Libertarian minority aren’t going to be liberating us from the tyrant state any time soon, at least in the UK.
When the coalition came to power, the noise from the herds of angry blogatarians sweeping majestically across the Internet subsided from a deafening cacophony of outraged bellowing to a low chuntering background drone. Without the stimulus of “ZaNu Labour” to maintain their permanent state of tumescent rage, many signed off from blogging with a triumphant cry of ‘my work here is done’ and, one by one, crept silently to rest.
Fast forward to 2011 and there's little sign of a burgeoning Tea Party-style movement taking to the street and holding politicians to account. May’s Taxpayer’s Alliance-inspired “Rally Against Debt” failed to get anybody other a minuscule clique of True Believers on to the streets.
Of course, a movement's success isn't necessarily limited to the number of followers it can accumulate. If an idea influences those in power, if it nudges government policy in a particular direction, then it's making a difference, even if it doesn't spawn a mass following. The coalition's agenda of cutting fast and getting rid of jobs in the public sector is an example of coalition policy travelling in the same general direction as the Libertarians, although neither as far, nor as fast, as the Libertarians want. However, this isn't a unique idea the Libertarians are bringing to the party; for many Conservatives, the Tory-led coalition is merely fulfilling aspirations that have been in the mainstream of their party since Thatcher. It might be convenient for the Tories to have a few Tea Party wannabes urging them on in the press and blogosphere, but they don't need them any more than Baroness Thatcher needed Sarah Palin.
The coalition do, however, have a few more specifically libertarian-flavoured initiatives. Let's see how one of the most "radical" ones is going. The “free schools” project in England was intended to inspire parents dissatisfied with their local school to set up their own new school from scratch.
Most parents don’t have vast reservoirs of unused spare time, educational qualifications and educational experience just lying about waiting to be used, not to mention many already being knackered by the existing, competing, demands of work, parenting, making ends meet and running a household, so it’s a reasonable assumption that this an authentically ideological Libertarian idea about what the world should be like, as opposed to a pragmatic assessment of how to allocate limited resources.
The first problem is that “free schools” aren’t a proper Libertarian idea. They’re still funded by taxpayer's money and will be chasing precisely the same pot of money as the despised "bog-standard comprehensives.' But Free Schools still appeal to the libertarian tendency because they’re not controlled by Local Authorities which are, according to angry Libertarians, staffed entirely by parasitic numpties unfit for life in the glorious world of the unfettered free market.
Anyway, how’s it all panning out? To provide a bit of context here, there are in the order of 17,000 primary schools in England forjust over four million children and around 3,000 maintained secondary schoolsserving just over three million pupils, according to figures culled from the Department for Education.
Channel 4’s FactCheck blog found that a grand total of eight Free Schools will definitely be opening their doors to pupils this September and there are further sixteen that might open in the autumn term, subject to their funding being signed off. OK, this is only Year Zero for the Educational Revolution but, even so, it’s only about 3% of the 700 “expressions of interest” Michael Gove was boasting about.
This isn’t just a numerical embarrassment for the proponents of the Free School movement, but an ideological one. As Shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham cheekily pointed out, with 100 civil servants tasked with launching the Free Schools initiative and no more than 3,000 children set to attend in the first year, we’re talking one civil servant for every 30 kids. If that’s freeing education from the dead hand of bureaucracy, then my name’s Ayn Rand.
One of the stated aims of the Free Schools policy is to tackle educational exclusion by allowing parents in deprived areas with failing schools to create a better alternative. In fact, out of the 24 Free Schools either definitely or positively opening this autumn, nine are in the top 50 per cent better-off areas in England and four of these are existing independent schools seeking Free School status in order to qualify for state funding. That still leaves the majority in the poorer than average parts of the country, but the numbers involved are a drop in the ocean.
The tiny numbers involved aren't that surprising. In the real world, busy parents really don't have time to drop everything and just build a brand new school as if they were throwing together a piece of flat-pack furniture. Free School pioneer Toby Young let that particular cat out of the bag when he realised that he couldn't attend the Rally Against Debt (which he thought was hugely important) as well as taking his kids to see a pirate exhibition, as promised. I don't blame him for wanting to give the kids a treat, but if it's that hard for a busy parent to commit to a one-off event, how many are realistically going to make the huge, rolling, week-in, week-out sacrifice of time necessary to start a half-way decent school?
The FactCheck blog highlights another interesting fact. Although the launch of Free Schools has been a flop, Academy Schools, free from Local Authority control, have been on a roll. Academy Schools are, of course, a legacy of Tony Blair’s New Labour although the Conservatives have always supported the idea. There were 203 Academy Schools up and running at the last election. That figure had increased, when FactCheck recently checked its facts, to 704, with schools converting to academy status at a rate of two every school day.
Unlike Free Schools, a fringe fad that looks doomed to fail, Academy Schools are growing at a worrying rate. Worrying because money funnelled into this fad has been money held back from the majority of schools still in local authority control. Worrying because Academies can be set up by any crank with enough money to cough up 10% of an academy’s capital costs, famously including that God-bothering car salesmen who wanted to introduce creationism in the classroom. Worrying because they’re creating a two-tier education system, with academies creaming off the most successful schools, leaving the local authorities to manage whatever’s left. Worrying because, at a level when children need a good general education at a local school, academies specialise, which is no use at all to parents if their local school’s specialism doesn’t happen to coincide with their child’s aptitudes and abilities.
Although there are a few libertarian dog-whistle words like “competition” and “choice” in the academy project, it’s not radical, but disturbingly close to the mainstream post-Thatcherite orthodoxy embraced by Conservative and New Labour alike. In some ways, academies combine the worst of both worlds, being largely funded by taxpayers, yet not being accountable to the public, or subject to Freedom of Information legislation, offering choices based on what the provider chooses to provide rather than what the user needs and introducing the relentless attrition and distraction of competition, without the advantage of being self-funded.
So I’m not worried about unworkable libertarian pipe dreams actually being enacted. What does concern me is how mainstream it's become for politicians to introduce inane and wasteful initiatives in the name of "doing something." For all the faux competition, faux "choice" and boasts about being radical and innovative, all the New Labour and Coalition flagship educational reforms have really done is to slice up the same cake of taxpayer’s money into slightly different slices, whilst wasting resources and demoralising teachers with endless change. All of which is more relevant to children's education than the wishful idea that millions of hard-pressed parents are going to magically discover they've got the time, energy and expertise to set up and run their own schools.
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