school

should education be a commercial enterprise nice to see chris woodhead is keeping his hand in. according to the ft he might be the country’s leading educational entrepreneur. nice work if you can get.
he sees schools as businesses ""i think schools are businesses. they should be run as efficiently as possible. schools that are run for profit are likely to be run as efficiently as possible. the future probably lies in an education sector where more schools are run for profit."
which is odd because the only way to increase the profits in a school is either to increase the amount of fees you collect (either increase the amount each parent pays or increase the number of paying parents), you could cut costs (cheaper teachers, fewer facilities etc) or you could hope that at some point the government of the day will step in and bail you out when it all goes a little tits up.
i know we live in a period when there is a mania for getting private money into doing things that it seems so obvious that the state should be doing (private prisons, public private finance initiatives in building schools - which end up costing the state even more than if they had done it but the business sector never seem to pick up the costs, private companies running the transport infrastructure and then having to increase the price of tickets because they have/will not invest their profits ....... moan moan) but the idea that schools can be seen as businesses just strikes me as total madness.
woodhead was a champion of a back to basic style of teaching (not sure i have any problems with that to be honest) and he is also quoted as saying
""children have different aptitudes and different aspirations. it's quite wrong to see oxbridge as the only goal. our schools won't be academic hot-houses."" (which is interesting, if only because it is so true - but of course when prince charles says it he is pilloried for being old fashioned but when someone who is now in control of many private schools says it - well hey that is fine....)
as an armchair socialist the ability of all children to be able to get a decent education is one of those things i see as a human right. while there is a part of me that has always wanted to burn down private schools i always thought it would be better to make sure that parents who could afford to send their children to such schools paid through the nose when their kids went to universities (remember i am old enough to have gotten a grant for my period at poly... ah those were the days) and then use that money to bring the state schools up to a level that equalled or excelled that of private schools.
you create a level playing field for kids to learn and then perhaps they can achieve the aspirations that they have.