John Roughan: Let schools run themselves like successful businesses

After every election you remember the loser had something good to offer, maybe only one thing that, on balance, was not enough to win your vote. But still it leaves a regret.

Not very far from where I live there is a seriously miserable school. The staff have been steadily leaving. They say the morale of those who remain could hardly be worse. The pupils have to be aware of it.

The school's condition has been known to the education authorities for nearly a year now. They had a letter from the teachers, held an investigation, replaced the board of trustees with a commissioner. It probably wasn't going to make much difference. The board wasn't the problem.

A year doesn't sound very long, unless your children attend the school. If they had just started there when things deteriorated they would be coming up to their first big examinations next term.

If they were mid-way through their secondary education they would have faced two or three levels of the new NCEA in that dispirited place.

The problem could be fixed quickly and ruthlessly but in the public service these things take time. I don't want to make things worse for the pupils in the meantime by naming their school. It would be different if they could readily change schools but they probably cannot. There are good ones nearby but they are zoned.

I don't suppose this problem and others like it figured at the annual conference of the Post-Primary Teachers' Association this week. The PPTA, fresh from its election campaign against the National Party, was looking forward to the return of a tame Labour Government when the final count is announced today.

The PPTA lives in mortal fear that schools will one day be organised like any other professional service - like health, for example. Doctors provide a good public service, largely tax-funded, from general or specialist practices run as a business. Schools could be run the same way.

In April Don Brash outlined a policy to offer state schools the chance to be constituted as independent trusts, earning public funds for every pupil they could attract. Crucially, the successful schools would be able to expand beyond their presently imposed limits, probably by taking over schools with falling rolls.

Several benefits would flow from that, not the least being that teachers would be paid like professionals and PPTA conferences would look less scruffy. The physical condition of schools would improve, their character and curriculum would respond to popular priorities and parents would readily pay a reasonable fee for service on top of the public grant, as they do for doctors. Pupils from low-income households would carry extra public assistance, exactly as they do for doctors.

With the school's livelihood riding on crucial appointments, the trustees would take care to get them right. And when they realised they got one wrong they would have every incentive to fix it without delay.

The impulse of any successful business is to grow. That impulse takes care of the concern that competition would leave low-income districts with an inferior service.

They have that now, of course; zoning merely keeps their clever kids captive for the supposed benefit to the rest. If schools were run as a business, with the usual rewards for growth, there is no doubt the good would drive out the bad. Education would settle into a standard of service as equitable as supermarkets.

Defenders of the status quo do not really dispute this. They argue rather that education is too important for its qualities to be decided by consumers like you and me. We might safely decide what kind of food, housing, healthcare and transport we will buy, but when it comes to education, experts know best.

Experts such as the Qualifications Authority, that brought us the NCEA, and the PPTA, which decided this week to oppose the Cambridge International examination, a test many schools have adopted to provide the measurement consumers cannot see in the NCEA.

Not so long ago governments were steadily making compulsory education more responsive to parents.

David Lange introduced boards of trustees with bulk grants to spend at their discretion on maintenance and equipment. National extended bulk funding to cover teachers' salaries for boards that wanted more staffing discretion and abolished zoning.

Progress ceased abruptly under the present Government but the seeds of competition are still in the ground. There is a logic about the liberalisation of any sector. Even Labour, after six years, has relented a little in its resistance to the trend.

This Government's doctrinal opposition to private education has gone too little noticed. When it came to power it not only capped state contributions to independent schools, it stacked the cards against them. If their roll increased, their funding per pupil was cut; if their roll declined, their total funding was cut.

It would not allow any more independents to take advantage of the 1976 Schools Integration Act (giving state funding without zoning or fee restrictions) if there was likely to be an impact on state enrolments. And the booming private tertiary training sector was left in no doubt when Labour came to power that it was to be the poor relation of the public polytechs.

During the election campaign, however, Labour announced that its early education grants, initially restricted to "community-owned" childcare services, would henceforth be available to suitably qualified privately owned centres too.

And in the May Budget it set up a fund for "highly effective schools" to use for sharing their methods with other schools.

As a response to Don Brash's take-over scheme, it was at least a nod to the possibilities. But things improve only when the opportunities and incentives are right.

Education will be invigorated when no school can rely on captive pupils; when public funds reward success and the qualities that people want in their schools can permeate them all.