"Socialism in one clause"?

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government’s latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today:

Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools.

Most popular

Matthew Lynn

The minimum wage is too high

It’s a myth, of course, that simply ploughing more money into schools necessarily improves them and I suspect that Toynbee envisions some centralised system whereby bureaucrats allocate funds based on some incomprehensible and inflexible formula. Still, it wouldn’t have to be that way: giving head-teachers greater license to spend their school budget as they see fit (and thus freeing them from LEAs) would be a good start.