Good and bad charities

Just occasionally you start to read a book and within minutes you know you are on to an absolute winner. This is one such book:

James Tooley grabs your attention right from the very start with a deeply personal story of how he went to India to study private schools for the few and discovered a vast and virtually hidden network of private schools for the poor.

Taken aback by the sheer number of these backstreet schools, he reported what he had seen to his colleagues at the World Bank and was met with a mixture of disdain and bemusement. These schools were "ripping off the poor" it seems, despite the fact that poor parents were scrimping and saving to afford the fees they could have avoided by simply sending their children to the free state schools. Why would they do this? The answer was very simple - a survey of state schools found that "in only half was there any teaching activity at all".

Another excuse was that these schools were creaming off the elite, an story I heard just the other day about schools in the UK. Poor parents were criticised for increasing inequality - another story that will be familiar to UK readers.

What was even more amazing was Tooley's discovery that the success of the private education sector had been noted by luminaries like development economist Amartya Sen, and had been reported upon by Oxfam. And both the economist and the charity had then concluded that universal state provision was the correct way forward.

Staggering isn't it?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that development gurus like Sen and mega-charities like Oxfam are part of the problem here. The incentive of the charity workers is to keep the people poor so that the problem never goes away. This is the bad charity of the title of this post.

And the good charity? There's plenty of it in evidence in the book. Here's Tooley:

Ten-year-old Farath Sultana also attended Peace High School. Her father works as a cleaner in a mosque and earned a monthly salary of 700 rupees ($15.55), which he admitted was not enough to feed his four family members. The family lived rent free with relatives who helped them get through each month by providing food. Both the mother and the father were illiterate, but they wanted their chidren to be educated. Peace High School provided both Farath and her six-year-old brother free tuition because of their critical financial position.

Amazon.com link

Amazon.co.uk link

Steiner schools

Unity has posted up one of those very, very long posts which have become his blogging trademark. Today's sermon is on the subject of Steiner schools, which Unity opposes. Wholeheartedly. The Steiner movement, and its underlying philosophical movement, Anthroposophy, are, he says, "cultish".

I don't know very much about Steiner schools but the use of the term "cultish" is a strong one, implying to most readers a degree of brainwashing and coercion of the kind that is popularly associated with, say, scientology or the Branch Davidians. In fact, Unity makes this link explicit when he say that

there are marked similarities between approaches of the Anthroposophical movement and Scientology

However, he doesn't present any actual evidence for this statement, beyond  a vague statement that Steiner schools don't teach Anthroposophy explicitly but that what they do teach is designed to prepare children to receive those beliefs. Perhaps there is more to it than that, but on the face of it this is no different to most other forms of schooling. One might equally argue that state schooling doesn't explicitly teach statism but that everything it teaches is designed to prepare children for a belief in the beneficence of the state.

Much of Unity's piece is an eye-opening exposition of the eccentric beliefs of anthroposophists - take this quote for example:

[A]ngels – the spirits closest to human beings – are seeking to create images in human astral bodies. These images are given with the intention of bringing about ‘definite conditions in the social life of the future’ related to brotherhood, religious freedom, and conscious spirituality…

Far out, man.

But so what? Is this any more eccentric than the whole water-into-wine malarkey that informs mainstream christianity, or for that matter the weirdness of any of the other mainstream religions? Many, many people have deeply irrational beliefs, and want children to be brought up in those beliefs. In a world without state education they would be able to do so.

The advent of state education has put the whip in the hands of the state and its acolytes. With the purse strings now held by the bureaucracy rather than the individual the opportunity has arisen to crush dissenting belief systems. Funding will be withdrawn from those that do not toe the line. In the case of the Steiner schools, the argument is being put forward not on the grounds that the education provided is inadequate or any other rational basis, but simply because these people are marginal and unacceptable - "cultish", in Unity's terms.

I've said it before, but I think it is worth repeating. The mindset of most of the writers at Liberal Conspiracy is not that of the liberal. It is that of the conservative. These are people who hate diversity, who despise people who don't think like they do.  They are Tories of the left.

Curriculum for Environmentalists

James Bartholemew has an interesting post about a trip he made to hear about the new A' Level in French.

I was told that not one of the examining boards for French 'A' level now sets a single piece of French literature. The students will not read a single French book or play. Instead they will go through a textbook which includes one chapter on literature and three on the environment. This is a sick cocktail of philistinism and eco-propaganda.

By coincidence, I was also in school this week to hear about a new curriculum - this time the "Curriculum for Excellence" (CfE), which will be the basis of my children's education. On the morning before the talk, I chanced upon a post by Shuggy, who teaches at secondary level in Glasgow. He was, shall we say, not the best possible advertisement for CfE, describing it as "nebulous cack", so when I rolled up at the local primary I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by the experience.

But it's fair to say that even with Shuggy's imprecations, I was still taken aback by the full fatuousness of the experience and the sheer vacuity of what my children will learn. Educational bureaucrats may think it impressive to emphasize the "journey" on which they are embarking and the "dialogues" in which they are going to engage young people, but to anyone who lives outside this rarified atmosphere, it just sounds like mumbo-jumbo.

A "high-quality, values-based education" sounds interesting - promising even - until one asks "whose values?". What do they mean when they say they want to "prepare children for living in the global community"?  Or when they stress the importance of "developing political sensitivity" (I kid you not)?

To a bureaucrat, the truth, if it must be told, has to be attended by a bodyguard of nebulous cack, but even through the fog of kafkaspeak, this sounded rather ominous. And later, it became rather clearer that, as I had feared, the values they were going to be teaching were not even close to mine. In a slide about "21st century learning", we heard about the concepts around which education is now to be based:

Sustainable living education

Health-promoting schools

International education

Global citizenship

Enterprise in education

If this wasn't horrifying enough, I spent the coffee break looking at the sample text books helpfully provided for the occasion. The subject matter was pretty much predictable - climate change, more climate change, recycling, fair trade and then more climate change.

Every cloud has a silver lining though. My children have learned from an early age that not everything they hear from people in a position of authority is right. That's an important lesson.

The state should be frightened of its people

Well, yes, we did say that the people shouldn't be frightened of the state and the state should be frightened of its people. But guys, we didn't mean you had to be frightened of small children too.

The Department of Children, Schools and Families have recently written to the Information Commissioner stating that they are having difficulties in complying with requests from home educators. (You will remember that the government launched an inquiry into HE which concluded that it was unregulated and was therefore bad). Confronted by an array of FoI requests, the DCSF now claim that there has been "harassment and a display of hostility towards Mr Graham Badman", the civil servant who was appointed to head the inquiry. They say that they need to consider the implications of this behaviour for their interpretation of Section 38 of the FoI Act, which "applies to information that if disclosed would be likely to put the physical or mental health or the safety of any individual at risk or greater risk". In other words they want to withhold information because its release might upset Mr Badman.

DCSF staff have helpfully provided some examples of some of this harassment and hostility. Here's one. It's strong stuff, so I've put it below the fold for the benefit of the squeamish...

Click to read more ...

Exodus

The exodus of home-educating families from England seems to have begun, with Scotland apparently the favoured destination. The Guardian today carries a report about one family who have decided to head for Ayrshire without waiting for Ed Balls to put the Badman proposals into law. This is of course just one family, but from the tone of the article it does seem as if this does represent the tip of an iceberg.

An influx of free-minded people into Scotland could be an important opportunity. It is quite possible that the majority will end up in the central belt, simply because this is where the jobs and housing are. Families will also want to maintain their links to England and travel is obviously much easier if you can get to Edibburgh or Glasgow. If a concentration of home-ed families does develop in the central belt it could have some rather profound consequences.

For a start, HE would become much more likely to be something that ordinary people came across in day-to-day life. It would become much more normal. People would be much more likely to consider it as an option for their own families. Normalisation would remove a huge barriet to the HE movement and numbers could swell accordingly. This growth would then feed back on itself and boost numbers still further. The effects of this movement on the idea of schooling would also be interesting. Several people around the blogosphere have discussed the idea of denormalising the whole concept of schooling and a growth in HE could cause just this.

Another impact would be that a concentration of HE parents would have much more influence on local authorities. Having fled government intrusion in England they would presumably be vigorous in protecting their rights once safely installed north of the border. And this would not only apply in the education sphere. An influx of people who cared about civil liberties and the right to be left alone might also have an important influence on the wider political landscape. Many readers here will know of the Free State Project, a plan to "invade" the American state of New Hampshire with large numbers of libertarian-inclined people. It would be rather exciting if Ed Balls inadvertently diverted Scotland from its socialist path through a piece of socialist legislation.

Clouds do have silver linings.

Andrew K on the DCSF spend

I am grateful to a reader, Andrew K, who has been doing some digging into the DCSF spend on my behalf. I should note in passing that John Redwood has been picking up on this story too - I'm not sure if prompted by my blog posting or not though.

Rather than rewrite Andrew K's comments, I'm just reproducing what he has reported to me with minor edits. I'm particularly intrigued by the enormous benevolence of DCSF to postcode NW5 1TL.

A text filter on "Connexions" gives a total of £11.8m, almost double the amount you quoted [in your earlier post].

Similarly Educational Digital Ltd (£7.8m) also appears to be Teachers' TV, making the total paid to them £16.4m.

A total of £14.3m has been paid to postcode NW5 1TL. Of this, £181k has gone to Brook Advisory Centre (two credirors for this) and £14.2m has gone to six creditors who are variants on a theme of National Family & Parenting Institute/Parentline Plus

Mange on the Move (£1,927.92) is not, as you might think, a travelling vet but rather a catering service http://home.btconnect.com/mange/mange.html

A4E £378k http://www.mya4e.com/getdoc/8e78217e-8134-4ccb-a9f7-56bbcedbf4d9/The-A4e-Story.aspx They talk the talk, but what exactly do they do?

Adfam £51k For families of drug users: latest turnover £638k Seems fairly worthy, but this looks like posturing http://www.adfam.org.uk/index.php?content=our_work_cb&include=no

4PS £492k This is the Local Government Association by another name http://www.4ps.gov.uk/

A National Voice £230k an organisation run for and by young people who are or have been in care http://www.anationalvoice.org/about/about2.htm Latest turnover £277k, so most of income apparently from DCSF

Africans Unite Against Child Abuse £90k "an organisation concerned about cruelty against the African child" Latest turnover £218k

Aldeburgh Productions £195k http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/about_us

Alligan/Alligan Ltd(two creditor numbers) £337k "Alligan exists to ensure the successful transformation of organisations in the education sector. We have considerable experience in providing specialist services tailored to the needs of our clients." Consultants http://www.alligan.co.uk/

Alpine Consortium £256k Seems to cover a multitude of sins: procurement/recruitment/consultancy http://www.alpine.eu.com/consortium.shtml

Amateur Swimming Association £994k WTF?

SW12 9DQ "Annual Maintenance Grant" £160k Postcode is for Bank of Ireland, Balham.

Appleyards Ltd £2.6million Consultants? "Appleyards are delighted to have been chosen to act as Project Managers for the feasibility stage for two proposed new academies in Richmond." http://www.appleyards.co.uk/home

Ark/Ark Conferences Ltd/Ark Educational Ltd £26.5million http://www.arkonline.org/education/ Academies?

Partnerships for Schools £16.7million Quango Partnerships for Schools (PfS) is responsible for delivering (sic)the government's secondary school renewal programme. http://www.partnershipsforschools.org.uk/

Substance 2005 Ltd £1.0 million Vewy pwetencious "We gather information – engaging, listening, reviewing, searching and consulting. We use participatory qualitative research techniques. This involves being with people, interviewing, observing and facilitating dialogue. We develop and make use of a range of new technologies and web based tools in our desire to go beyond the simplistic collation and dissemination of statistics.

We analyse, process and communicate information – through web based monitoring and evaluation, mapping and consultation exercises. We organise conferences, seminars and public events. We publish research reports, articles, guides and web based materials. We are always exploring new ways to communicate our findings and ideas."

"Substance 2005 Limited is registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965 Register No. 30017 R
Registered 14 November 2005Substance is also a member of Co-operatives UK - the union of co-operative enterprises"

http://www.substance.coop/us_company_info

DCSF - payments to individuals

The DSCF has now agreed to provide some information about payments to individuals. While the names have been redacted, this does give a feel for how much some suppliers are able to extract from the department. Here's the top ten:

Individual	180,380.73
Individual	158,024.80
Individual	154,867.29
Individual	148,018.92
Individual	146,219.84
Individual	145,387.90
Individual	133,552.14
Individual	121,233.36
Individual	102,823.95
Individual	85,440.75

There's good money to be made from DCSF.

Laban Tall on the cultural revolution

Laban Tall: People used to worry about the effect the good state education the were receiving would have on children's working class sensibilities. 

O tempora, o mores....

The Public Teat

Some time ago, I rather idly suggested to DK the idea of a companion website for fakecharities.org. This would look at those companies that were living off the taxpayer. It would essentially be a searchable database, where you could look up how much a company was raking in from which bit of the state. It would be called The Public Teat.

By way of an experiment, I applied for the type of information I was envisaging from the DCSF - a department picked pretty much at random. I was a bit surprised to find that I got a response indicating that the information would largely be forthcoming. Bitter experience had suggested that most civil servants will try a refusal first, just to see if you will go away.

I had formulated the request quite carefully. Obviously, I was asking for a lot of data, so I asked for spend only through the main system, with the data restricted to supplier name, postcode and spend for the year.  This meant that it was essentially a simple query through the purchase ledger, perhaps with a join of to the supplier data file to pick up the name and postcode. I asked for the information as an electronic file too, so there were no cost implications.

The response arrived today and as so often in these cases, what was missing was almost more interesting than what was included.  DCSF had raised concerns over privacy as a possible issue in their acknowledgement, and I had said that I would be happy for them to redact the names and postcodes, leaving just a list of amounts.

I was therefore disappointed to see that despite this, they had decided to removed all information about individual suppliers in its entirety. Why would they do that? My guess is that there are probably some individuals who are taking very large sums from DCSF and the disclosure of even the amounts would be embarrassing. But then I've got a nasty suspicious mind. I've reverted to DCSF for the missing information.

The response file is here.

The wisdom of African cats

Two must read articles at Counting Cats in Zanzibar: one on the problems with mass schooling and an eloquent argument to reduce the age of adulthood to the early teens.

A school I know

Let me tell you about a school I know.

As schools go, it's a big one. The grounds and buildings are extensive although it has to be said that they're a bit of a mish-mash. They've had some new buildings in recent years, but many of them are a bit shabby and run-down to be frank. Still, everyone seems happy enough with them; "Needs must", they say. The parents are the same really - a real mix. The school has managed the unlikely feat of bringing together families from all sorts of different backgrounds in one place and avoiding all those social rifts you seem to get at most comprehensives: there are machinists and lorry drivers and teachers and accountants: name a job and you'll probably find a representative among the parent body somewhere.  It's non-denominational too, with Christian and Moslem families represented alongside the secular majority. It's a cross-section of society at large I guess, and by and large they all seem to rub along together pretty well.

It's perhaps not the best-equipped school around: some decent science labs wouldn't go amiss for a start, but hey, some schools won't even let the kids try science practicals these days. Despite the less-than ideal facilities, the school still manages to achieve some truly excellent results. The children - it's co-ed by the way - score very highly in standardised tests of their language and maths skills - way above the average in fact, and what is really remarkable is that children from poor families are doing just as well as the rest - better in fact than a middle-class child at an average school. This is the kind of school where a bright kid from a poverty-stricken background can get their chance in life.

There's no selection though: no academic hothouse, this. There are children who are academic, of course, but most are just like any other kid: good at some things and not so good at others. The school has more than its fair share of special needs kids too. It's not easy coping with such a variety, of course, but they seem to have found a way to more than muddle through. I'm sure that other schools could learn a lot from watching them.

How do they do it? Do they just swot the life out of the kids? Well, no. Experts who have inspected the school have praised it for turning out children who are well-rounded and self-motivated.* They are apparently socially adept and better adjusted to the adult world than the vast majority of children today.  The inspectors have also praised the school for delivering the tailored, child-centred education that has eluded almost every other school in the past. Children are playing to their strengths all the time, which I suppose might explain the good results.

It's a fine school then. An extraordinary one, even. So there's no surprise that it's very popular, with the school roll growing at as much as 25% a year. With more and more parents wanting to get their children admitted, it's just as well they have so much room: so far they've been able to accomodate everyone who wants to get in.

It strikes me that this school should be, to a socialist, pretty much the ideal. Just run down the list again - comprehensive, non-denominational, child-centred, and turning out rounded, self-motivated children with literacy, numeracy and skills to boot. This is everything the left says it wants in a school.

So why the hell do they want to close it?

(*The inspectors report is here, by the way).

The baroness and the badman

Once upon a time, there was a Baroness. When surveying her kingdom of schools and teachers, she came across a small community of parents who had legally opted to retain their independence...

Read the whole thing.

A no-win situation

Further to the previous posting, there's a story in the Times today of a mother who lost the plot and struck her child with a hairbrush. The boy, who is only 8, has now been taken into care. Without knowing the full details it's hard to be certain, but it sounds, well, mad.

And there does seem to be a bit of a dilemma for the mother here. If the boy doesn't get to school she's jailed for allowing him to truant. But if she uses physical force to make him go, she gets her child taken into care. I suppose there must be something short of hitting him that she could have tried, but at the end of the day it's still physical coercion.

On violence

There's a brilliant post at renegade parent on the subject of violence and children in which Lisa takes libertarians to task for advocating traditional approaches to child-rearing (enforced schooling, traditional subjects, corporal punishment and so on) which are, on the face of it, not exactly in accordance with libertarian ideals of self-ownership and non-initiation of violence.

I'm sympathetic to many of Lisa's points. For example, she says that children should follow their own interests and we have certainly found that putting educational materials in the way of the kids has been an easy way to get them to learn things - they simply pick them up and absorb them when they are ready, with Spanish, Geography and History proving very popular. I agree that children are not inherently stupid, untrustworthy or lazy - they are highly intelligent on the whole. I think they just don't know very much. (See the difference?).

It's also worth pointing out, however,  that just because someone advocates schools run along certain lines, doesn't mean that they support schooling per se. The decision to school children is effectively made for us by government when they tax us to support school-based education. Those who can afford to HE regardless (or are willing to make the personal financial sacrifice to do so, or who can bring themselves to live off benefits while doing so) are a minority. So if we are effectively forced into having schools, the question then becomes "how do we best get them to work", to which the answer might well be "traditional subjects, rote learning" and so on. I've written before about how coercion breeds coercion and this is another example of the same thing.

But Lisa's objection to corporal punishment is a mistake. There is nothing in libertarianism that says that harsh punishments are not permitted. Libertarians are against initiation of violence, but are quite comfortable with "giving as good as one gets", and then some.  Corporal punishment in fact is probably the most liberal approach to retributive justice there is. So when it comes to child rearing, I would have thought that "physical chastisement" is quite appropriate in certain circumstances. For example, when little Jonny bashes little Jane, and particularly if the social niceties of bashing have already been explained to little him, it would convey an important lesson about the real world. After all if we accept that children are intelligent human beings (which we do) then surely we have to accept that they have to take responsibility for their actions?

That said, use of corporal punishment for non-violent transgressions such as "answering back" is probably wrong. Once though, I applied my hand to bottom of one of the offspring for running across a road without looking. Did I do wrong? There's a question here of legitimate authority and its transgression that I need to get my head around. In the meantime, there's plenty to talk about.

Propaganda in schools

I wonder what the kids learned in school today?

According to one of my readers (to whom I'm grateful for the tip) some of them (and I'm relieved to say none of mine) have been learning about...the same thing they learn about all the rest of the time - yes folks you've guessed it - environmentalism.

There's a toe-tapping new musical for primary kids to put on for their parents - it's called Eddie the Penguin Saves The World and it's about (yes, you guessed right again) global warming! (Tada!)

(Actually that's a bit of a surprise - I could have sworn it was Al Gore that saved the world). Anyway, let's find out about Eddie...

Eddie the penguin discovers that the world he lives in is changing and that the ice is melting. He decides to take his family to find a new home at the North Pole, where he meets Peggy the polar bear and discovers that human beings are causing the ice to melt. Eddie goes on a mission to save the planet and let the world know how they can change things for the better.

This fantastic new musical from Niki Davies is a must for any school investigating ecological and environmental issues. Songs can be used in conjunction with the script or stand alone.

Science education has certainly moved on since my day.

At the bottom of this post you should be able to find a sample from the show, helpfully provided by the publishers, Out of the Ark Music. The jaunty number I've picked for your delight is "The Melting Song"

The icebergs where we like to play are melting, melting away

Drip, drop, drip, drop, drip, drop.

and although I haven't copied it over, you might also enjoy "The Recycling Song"

Don't put your cardboard in the trash

Put it in a box, you can do it in a flash

Those of you who want more can visit Out of the Ark yourselves and enjoy more samples from the show, including the smash hits "Trees" and "One World" together with the bonus tracks "Use it again" and "Turn off the tap".

I bet you can hardly wait.

The melting song