tuition fees

There's been a little talk about what is expected to be the next quasi-policy announcement from the Conservatives on education - that parents should be allowed to set up their own schools with state funding. Liberal Leslie worries that this is vouchers by the back door, complete with top-ups and selection, whilst Jonathan Calder suggests that as liberals we should embrace such diversity of provision. Little surprise that I should tend to agree more with Jonathan than with Leslie.

And it just so happened that I was already writing a tome on education in response to a couple of stories last week - about the poor performance in GCSE English and Maths that's causing employers to have to train new 16 year old employees the very basics just to be able to operate in the workforce, and stories about a uniform maker thinking about putting transmitters in school uniforms so parents and teachers can better monitor their charges.

Education is important to me. It provides me with my day job. I'm also a governor of the university and a former primary and secondary school governor as well. But it is also important because I need to have an image of how, in my ideal geo-libertarian world where the "state" is restricted pretty much to collecting land value tax and distributing the whole lot of it to everyone as a citizen's income, education would be funded and function without a monolithic state provider.

One even has to ask whether it is legitimate in such a libertarian world to make parents get their children educated. I think we can answer that one pretty easily - it is legitimate because the child can not do so for themselves, and can only really attain adult responsibilities and the opportunities that go with them if they have at least the basic education to participate in those opportunities. But that doesn't mean that the state should provide it or even dictate what sort of education a parent should choose for their child. Indeed, although the vast majority of children in the UK are educated at state controlled schools, it is in fact just the "default" option. A parent's obligation is to ensure their child is educated, and the state provides such a default in case they don't choose home schooling or private provision.

But in a world where most all of the tax money currently collected and spent on state provision of services like health and education would instead just be handed out as a citizen's income equally, to everyone and where people as a result were expected to make their own provision for those services, would people put enough of a priority on educating their children to put enough back into schooling to make private provision work? Well, whilst I estimate that there is enough residential land value to yield about £250bn a year in a "100% land value tax", not far off what taxes paid by individuals (except VAT) actually raise at the moment, and enough to provide a Citizen's Income of around £100 per week for adults declining to say £40 per week for toddlers, on its own that is obviously not enough for someone totally reliant on their Citizen's Income to pay thousands of pounds a year for schooling.

But of course one of the perceived benefits of a Citizen's Income system, at least if combined with the abolition of the minimum wage (which is not even beyond the realms of possibility for some Labour commentators), is that because the CI is not withdrawn as people go out to work even for relatively low wages unlike with the current benefits system there would be far fewer households totally reliant only on the CI. A two parent household with one parent bringing home what would now be minimum wage and another bringing home half as much, and with two teen aged children could expect to have a gross household income including their CI of around £36,000 per year - not huge, but significantly more than people suffering benefits withdrawal at the moment. So one would expect them to contribute some of their earned income to their children's education as well.

Private and charitable education provision could be allowed to means test parents with lower and upper proportions of household income they would be able to charge. But the idea would be that everyone would pay something, even if it were only a proportion of the children's portion of the Citizen's Income in a few cases. Schools would have an incentive to provide an environment that attracts pupils and parents from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to pull in more than the bare minimum of means tested fees. Just as the LVT in the first place would encourage more mixed income communities as tax-savvy middle classes might choose to live in lower land value areas to reduce their tax bill.

As is observed widely in the developing world, even paying small amounts for education focusses both parents' and children's minds on the benefit they are getting from that education. Truancy would be a direct waste of that household's money. Pupils performing below what's expected of them for their ability levels would concentrate minds on whether the choice of education method employed by a school was the right one - was "worth the money" - and help promote diversity in educational methods. Parents would also see that playing their full part in assisting the education of their children by taking an interest and providing out of school stimuli would both save them money and improve outcomes for their children.

My best guess would be that we could improve educational outcomes, reduce costs, enhance diversity both in types of education offered and in pupil mix within schools and increase the involvement even of the currently least interested households in their children's education and really ingrain the value of education in everyone. Unthinkable? Maybe, with education currently eating up nearly £80 billion a year and us not having terribly much choice about what we get for that money, the unthinkable is what we need.

University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

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