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.
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