Choice is good, but who pays for choice?

One of the sacred cows of recent Conservative and Labour policies over a wide range of issues has been ‘choice’. Parental choice over the school that children are sent to, patient choice as to which hospital can be accessed for acute care. Don’t get me wrong, choice is good, but choice also costs, and who bears those costs needs to be taken into account.

Take small schools as an example. There is a widespread myth that small schools necessarily provide a better education for all children than larger schools. This is a rural myth rather than an urban one, but is nevertheless, a myth. So children who are educated at small schools are generally speaking, educated at a higher cost than those educated at larger schools. It is a clear of example of the well-known economic principle of economies of scale. However, since the cost of sending a child to a small school is in some cases, three times the cost of sending that child to a larger school, it follows that someone is subsidising the small school place. Who?

Well, the Local Education Authority, and by extension, the taxpayer at large. By keeping a small school open when the nearest larger school has surplus places sufficient to take all the small school’s pupils and more, is de facto, offering the parents of children in the small school a benefit that is not offered to other parents within the same local authority. So if the average cost of educating a primary school child in an authority is say £2,800 per annum, and the actual cost of educating a child at school X is say £6,000 per annum, then that child is receiving an additional benefit of £3,300 per annum from the LEA, which is not offered to a child attending school Y where the cost of education each child is at the average for the authority as a whole. This is clearly unfair.

One solution would be to offer every school a fixed sum per pupil per annum on or about the average cost of educating a child in that authority. If the school deems that this is insufficient by virtue of the number of children at the attending the school being too few to allow that school to be financially viable, then parents can, after a process of negotiation with the LEA, choose to make up the shortfall of income from their own pockets. But parents of children in small, and financially unviable schools to continue to expect that their children to be subsidised from the public purse can no longer be tolerated.

So, choice is good, but if your preferred choice can be provided only by the additional contributions of others, then it is not a fair and reasonable choice. If you choose to send your child to be educated at a small school because it is small, be prepared to make a contribution to the cost of running that school so that others who choose to send their child to their local school don’t have to pay more for the privilege you enjoy and they don’t.