THE VIEW FROM HEIMBU

OCTOBER 2004

Heard the one about the man who died and arrived at Asgard asking to be admitted. Odin informed him that only true warriors were welcome, and had he done anything heroic in his life.

The man thought for a moment: "Well, there was this one time when I was driving down a road and saw a group of about 20 yobs harassing this poor girl. Infuriated, I got out of my car and walked up to the leader of the gang. He was a huge guy with a studded leather jacket and a chain running from his nose to his ear. As I walked up to the leader, his mates told me to get lost or I'd be next. But I ripped the leader's chain out of his face and smashed him over the head. Then I turned around and yelled to the rest of them: "Leave this poor innocent girl alone! You're all a bunch of sick, deranged animals. Go home before I really teach you a lesson in pain.!"

Odin, duly impressed, said "Wow, when did this happen?" The man checked his watch and answered "About three minutes ago."

This is an E-mail I received from Shaun. He might well be right.

I've just been reading your view from Heimbu. As usual amusing and worrying in equal parts. On that footing I thought I'd mention a possible solution to the UK's economic problems which occurred to me recently (and potentially academic and social problems as well). None of the figures I give below are exact - I haven't bothered to check any of them, so they are probably at least as accurate as any produced by the government. In all cases I've tried to err on the side of caution in calculating this. The solution is a simple one, scrap state education. Obviously this would considerably improve potential academic achievement in Britain, but there's more to it that just this.

To put all this in context, I'll just explain that Kate and I recently decided to withdraw Karadis, our eldest daughter, from state education. Unlike many parents who choose to home-educate, we had no specific problems with the school and neither did Kara (actually, she was loving it). In our case Kate and I had always intended teaching our children at home, but, when Kara turned five we decided to let her give regular school a go as she was desperate to try out this new experience (very typical of Kara). After a few weeks it did however become apparent that she wasn't learning as much or as quickly as she usually did simply by being around the house with us. Don't get me wrong, the local school is not a bad one. As schools go, I expect it is actually very good as we live in a small community where just about everyone (adult or child) gets on fine with everyone else, there are relatively small class sizes and pretty much the best that state education can offer is provided. The thing is, we don't consider state education to be a very good idea in principle, let alone in practice, so the fact that our local school is by state standards a good one is pretty irrelevant. But for the moment I won't side track to discuss the benefits of teaching ones children at home (Kara is currently enjoying her home-schooling even more than she enjoyed 'regular school' and her academic achievement has also leapt ahead), or dwell on the the numerous negative aspects of state education, as I was actually going to make a point about economics as much as either academia or the state training children to be good little citizens for the purposes of social control.

When we took Kara out of school, one of the nice side effects was having extra money. By not taking her to school and back in the car we save about 10+ pounds per week. We live fairly close, but our car is old and not that great on petrol consumption, and while she could have walked to school, it seems unfair to make her trudge through mud, driving rain and high winds (and in Orkney they are rather high at times), so Kate's been driving her there. Not doing so obviously means we save circa (in very round figures) 500 pounds a year in fuel, and naturally something like 5 hours+ per week not spent getting her ready for school, driving, collecting her etc. If we wanted we could put the 500 pounds saved this way into buying things like books for her education (even at 10 pounds per book, 50 books, although when possible I buy stuff 2nd hand so probably more like 50p a book = 1000 books) but as the house already has 8000+ books in it, there's not much room left for us as it is, so this isn't our main priority. Most children in a state school are quite lucky if they get 10 mins a day personal attention from a teacher (pretty basic maths - if a class has 30 children spending 6 hrs in actual lessons this makes 360 mins, divided by 30 = 12 mins per child. Getting 10 mins personal attention means that out of each day the teacher would have to spend 1 hour teaching the class as a whole, and the other 5 hours giving each child 10 mins personal attention per head while the others get on with things on their own. Realistically this doesn't happen). So, even if we couldn't be bothered to spend any more time teaching Kara, naturally in the 1hr that was spent simply taking her to and from school, she can be getting more actual personal attention to her education than in around 2 weeks spent a school (at best ). And that's on 1 hr on a daily basis. Naturally, we don't just spend 1 hr a day teaching her, but you can see my point.

Now all that's fine, but it hardly solves the country's economic problems. But I got to thinking, it's actually a bit unfair that here we are theoretically saving the government money by not having Kara in school (even if we save money this way too) but we see none of it; so I wondered how much per head actually gets spent on children at school (I was toying with the idea of contacting the LEA to ask them to send us this amount.... some hope!). So I did a quick bit of guess-timating. The real figure is going to be a LOT higher than what I've listed below.

Let's start with a purely hypothetical school and for the sake of keeping things as simple as possible, I'll use round figures for everything. Let's assume that the school has only 6 classes covering ages approx. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. And let's assume each class has 30 children in it. So this makes 6 classes X 30 children = 180 children. Let's make it simpler still and call it an even 200 children, so we don't have to do too much thinking about the maths involved. Before I go any further I'll add that with older age ranges of children the expenses for a school are likely to be higher, if for example, they are providing science labs and so on. I've opted for the younger age range a) as our children are young and b) it probably reinforces the point that the real figures for a state school are going to be more than my casual guesses, as there will be a lot of things I haven't included. So, we start with 200 children. Now, how many people would our school employ? It's difficult to say exactly but lets assume it has at a minimum a head-teacher, and one teacher per class. It probably also has some sort of internal admin. staff so let's say one school secretary. And it probably needs a caretaker, and possibly some cleaners, and kitchen staff to cook the school meals. Let's start with this, although it won't end there.

Wages for staff is always the largest part of any school's expenditure (that much is a fact, not my speculation). Currently a head teacher is perhaps going to be on a minimum of 40,000 pounds per year. I know that about 7 years ago newly qualified teachers started on a salary of about 15,000, the figure increasing with each year spent teaching, so let's say that the 6 other full-time members of staff are on at least 20,000 pounds per year each (possibly a lot more if some of them have been teaching for over 20 years) but we'll keep all this as simple as possible and for now call it 20K per teacher, and 40K for the head. So for these people alone the wage bill will be at least 180,000 pounds. Add in a school secretary, any support staff (for example special educational needs teachers, classroom assistants, teachers brought in at extra expense to cover sickness, maternity leave or to teach a specific subject and so on), the care-taker, kitchen staff, the cleaners etc and then saying that the wage bill would be and even 300,000 would perhaps be s bit conservative, but it's a round figure so it will do. Now, that's actual wages, not what it costs to employ the people. In general, most employers figure that the full cost of employing someone (when you take into account all the various taxes, schemes, admin and so on) is twice their actual wages. So the Local Education Authority will be forking out something like 600,000 pounds to staff the school, even if the teachers and other staff don't see this much themselves. There are of course other expenses in running a school. Things like books don't really enter into the equation as these universally amount to the smallest % in any school's budget (honestly - it amazed me, but it is true). There are however things like maintenance of buildings (which can be very expensive), providing various other facilities like computers (20 new computers for the 200 children could easily cost 40,000 pounds for example, but still leave one PC between 10 children) and so on, gym equipment, instruments in a music dept., field-trips, visits to swimming pools, plus paying the wages of the staff in the LEA who administer the school (and there's quite a few of them... clerks to governors comities, people to mark Sats tests, OFSTED and all the rest...) etc etc. So, I think if I added only another two-thirds as much again - say 400,000 pounds per year -  to the figure to cover *all* other expenses for the school, this would probably be a reasonable enough 'ball-park' figure (and probably at lot lot lower than the real figure). Whether it is over or under estimated doesn't really matter that much, as I'm pretty sure you can see what I'm driving at.

Now, as you may recall, there are 200 children attending our hypothetical school (about 33 or 34 per class), and by my figures 1,000,000 (one million) pounds being spent on the school in total, which makes a cost per child of 50,000 pounds. I obviously can't say this will be mirrored across the UK exactly, but as the bulk of the expenditure is on staff (although most on indirect staffing not teachers salaries), and if a school has more children they also have more staff, and also larger buildings, more equipment etc, the hypothetical example isn't going to be totally at odds with the rest of the country.

Now, obviously one solution would be to shut down all the schools and give each parent 50,000 pounds per year per child (150K for us! Yippee!) with a legal stipulation that the money had to be spent on the child's education (personally I think a trip to Bermuda would be very educational...). But if we want to think about the good of the country as a whole (it would be a bit unfair on people without children of school age - but then, arguably so is the current situation), let's say we take half the money saved by closing the schools and put it to a more useful purpose (the NHS -hahaha - having a big party, whatever) and just gave the remaining money to the parents (25,000 pounds per child, per year) with again a stipulation it has to be used on the child's education. You probably realise that in the unlikely event that I've overestimated any of the figures above, even to the point where they are double the actual figures (and this is about as likely as Tony Blair becoming a socialist), I've effectively just halved them again to make my point more clearly.  

Well, being offered 25,000 pounds a year if, for example, you teach your child at home would enable quite a few people to quit their jobs in favour of home schooling - which would then make more jobs available in general. On the other hand, and I'm all for a range of choices being on offer, it might alternately pay for a place at a public school, or indeed a private tutor. So we could instantly re-employ all the sacked teachers (and then some....) by say offering them 20,000 pounds a year to each teach just one child privately (something that most state sector teachers, with all their stress related illnesses etc, would jump at) and still have 5,000 pounds per child per year to spend on educational materials, field trips etc. Indeed, one would probably have to train a vast number of new teachers to fill all the vacancies for private tutors (teacher training is something that the other half of the saved money could be used for). If the country did end up having something like a one adult teaching one child ratio, this alone would probably more than wipe out unemployment, as well as raising academic achievement. Obviously there's going to be a few things I've missed in all this. More obviously still, it will never happen. But it make's you think....

I'm still picking blackberries at the end of October, which I have never been able to do before; this year must surely be the most fruitful one ever . The apple trees are so full of apples that several branches has broken from the weight, and we're having a bumper crop of beans; there's even some strawberries left.