Funding gaps and outrage

Tweet The howls of outrage from those more interested in having a stick with which to beat the government than they are in either statistics or education are hardly a surprise.  The Lib Dems, in particular, have been obsessed for years with the alleged 'funding gap' between schools in Wales and schools in England (although both Plaid and the Tories have been known to join in from time to time as well).

The lack of information this year can hardly have come as a surprise to anyone, however - not if they'd read beyond the headlines last year, at any rate.  Because last year's report (available here) clearly stated:

What happens next year?
If England are able to provide education outturn expenditure for 2010-11 on a comparable basis with the new local authority responsibilities removed then the outturn data could be compared.
The position of comparability of budgets for 2011-12 is not yet clear due to further changes in the way education is funded in England but we will be exploring this with the Department for Communities and Local Government.

I would have hoped that the absence of a meaningless high level comparison of the Welsh average and the English average might lead people to start to concentrate on the substance of the education problems in Wales instead.  Hoped, but not expected.

Internal funding gaps

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I’m always a little wary of any newspaper stories where the lead-in uses the words ‘we can reveal’.  It’s usually followed not by any great revelation of something secret, but by a story on a widely-available report.  So it was with this story in Monday’s Western Mail.

It shows that the differences in amounts per pupil passed to different schools in Wales – even within the same authority – are bigger than the headline gap between the Welsh average and the English average.  But this is no revelation; it’s not even a surprise.

It’s a point that I made on this blog some months ago; the obsession with comparing overall Welsh averages with overall English averages in order to score a political point has been blinding people to the much greater internal differences, although at that point I didn’t have figures to the same level of detail.  It also underlines another point that I’ve made a number of times on this subject – there is no obvious causal link between amount spent per pupil and the level of educational success achieved by a school.

Looking at the detail of the figures, they do suggest that smaller schools spend more per head than larger schools; some might see that as economies of scale, others as an urban/rural split in the cost of providing education reasonably close to home.  They certainly do not suggest that simply increasing the amount of money passed to schools across the board is going to solve any of the problems facing the education system in Wales.

That’s not to say that schools couldn’t do more with more money; merely that it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would.  If we want to sort out education in Wales, we need to do a lot more analysis than simply dividing budgets by numbers of pupils and highlighting the ‘gaps’ which result.  That is just a diversion from getting to grips with the real problems.

Still struggling with the arithmetic

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The Lib Dems continue to struggle to understand the difference between absolute numbers and percentages.  According to Freedom Central, in her statement this afternoon, the party’s leader said that “Labour still spends £600 less on each pupil each year compared to those living in England”.

I’ve referred to this mathematical inexactitude before.  Converting an average to an absolute in this way is distorting the truth in an attempt to make a political point.  But here’s a question – how much faith can we have in anyone’s understanding of the complex numbers in the budget if they don’t understand the difference between an average and an absolute number?

Averages and actuals

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The Lib Dems seem determined not to let go of their obsession with the ‘funding gap’ in education, which shows that the total spent on average per pupil in Wales is £604 less than the total spent per pupil on average in England.  It’s as unclear as it ever was how important that gap is, or how much difference putting extra cash into education to close that ‘gap’ would actually make, but that seems to be mere detail to the Lib Dems.

Their simplistic slogan, that for them to support any budget, the budget must show progress towards closing the gap, raises more questions than it answers.  For starters, why – on the basis of what evidence, exactly – is the English average the ‘right’ amount to spend per head?  Where does the idea come from that because England spends £6,200 per head then that is the ‘right’ amount to spend?

And then, how do they want to close the gap, precisely?  The implication which most people will read into their statements (and I’m sure the one that they will want people to read into them) is that they will simply fund each and every pupil by an extra £604 per year.

Job done?  Well, not exactly, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, by any analysis of the figures, London is a special case.  The spend per head in London is very much greater than it is in any other region, more than 50% higher than the ‘rest of England’ average.  It’s more realistic to disregard the London figure, and look solely at the difference between Wales and the ‘rest of England’.  That difference is £412, not the £604 figure oft-quoted by the Lib Dems (or, as they seem to prefer for maximal propaganda effect, ‘more than £600’).  So perhaps we need only increase all education budgets by £412, rather than £604.

Again, not exactly.  The reliance on a high level comparison of averages might be a useful political tool, but it is of much more limited use in actually understanding the numbers.  Averages can sometimes conceal more than they reveal – and in this case, they neatly conceal the fact that the difference between authorities within Wales is significantly greater than the difference between the English and Welsh averages.

Four of Wales’ education authorities already spend more than the ‘rest of England’ average (and two of those already spend more than the English average including London).  If the English average is the ‘right’ amount to spend, why should not these authorities be penalised for spending too much?

And, leading on from that, if there is a fundamental problem – so severe as to make the Welsh Government’s budget unsupportable without action to address it – in the fact that the Welsh average is £412 (or £604; the argument is the same) behind the English average, what about the situation within Wales? 

The difference between the highest spending authority (Ceredigion, at £6,340) and the lowest spending authority (Vale of Glamorgan, at £5,001) is £1,339.  That’s more than twice the size of the headline difference between England and Wales, and more than three times the size of the more meaningful comparison between Wales and the ‘rest of England’.

That internal gap is something which is entirely within the control of the Welsh Government to address; the fact that no-one seems particularly worried about its existence underlines how misleading simple mathematical comparisons can be, unless complemented by an attempt to understand why differences exist and how important they are. 

A simplistic concentration on spend per head is little more than a band-wagon riding diversion from examining the real problems which we have in our education system in Wales, which are far more complex than a simple debate about funding.  It’s playing to the gallery rather than showing any understanding of those problems, or any willingness to get to grips with them.

More on 'funding gaps'

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MH at Syniadau points out a mathematical howler in an article by the Lib Dem policy officer on WalesHome today.  In fairness, it isn’t the first time that I’ve seen the ‘average spend per pupil in Wales is £600 less than in England’ turned into ‘Wales spends £600 less on every child’, which I suspect is at the root of the error.  Not everyone understands the difference between the two statements (although Policy Officers should).

Misunderstanding what the so-called funding gap is telling us is pretty common, sadly.  I’ve seen more than one politician trying to claim that the gap can be plugged by switching spending from the central local authority costs, and passing the money direct to schools.  But the statistical paper which indentified the size of the gap makes it clear that the gap is not an expression of the differences in the amounts reaching schools, it’s an expression of the total spend on education per pupil. 

Passing a greater proportion of total spend to schools may, or may not, be a good thing; there are a range of issues to consider.  But the Local Authority central costs are already included in the comparison, and giving individual schools in Wales a higher proportion of the lower total Welsh budget does absolutely nothing to close the ‘funding gap’.  It can be closed only in two ways – increasing Welsh total educational spend, or decreasing English total educational spend.

Certainly, the use of PFI in England will be one factor leading to a greater educational spend – where it has been used, the total costs of providing equivalent premises will be higher.  That’s no reason to emulate the English spending pattern, though.  It simply indicates that different approaches to financing can make the figures less comparable. 

(And, as an aside, Plaid Cymru are proposing a change, the side effect of which may well be to increase the apparent ‘funding gap’ by taking the cost of providing school buildings out of the education budgets.  It doesn’t actually mean a reduction in spending though; it might just look like one in the relevant stats.)

My real criticism of the approach being taken by the Lib Dems to the ‘funding gap’ is that they only seem to be looking at the spend, not the effect of the spend.  For all I know, the English spend could be higher because they’re just running the education service less efficiently, and if that were true, it certainly would not follow that our school children are losing out as a result.  For a party which has made ‘cutting unnecessary expenditure’ the keynote of its campaign, calling for an increase in spending on any service purely because England spends more seems more than a little incongruous.

I don’t know whether we’re spending enough on education to give our children the start in life they need and deserve.  I suspect not, but simply comparing our expenditure with someone else’s is never going to answer that question satisfactorily.