David Cameron has today been refreshingly honest about his plans for school funding in England: budgets will be flat, which (when you factor in inflation) will mean a drop of 7 per cent over the next parliament. Cue much mockery from Labour. But what will this mean for the future of education quality? Not very much, if the experience of the Labour years is anything to go by. Under Blair and Brown, school spending more than doubled while England hurtled down the world education performance tables. So if doubling the budget didn’t help, then why should freezing it hurt?
The strange thing about education is that it’s not so responsive to cash. A brilliant teacher is (alas) paid pretty much the same as a bad one. So extra money doesn’t mean better quality of tuition – which has proven to be the case domestically and abroad. Pushing extra cash into the schools system just doesn’t give better results.
When Department for Education commissioned Deloitte to look at the relationship between spending and school attainment, its report (here,
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