State schools

The cost of educating a child in the state system is greater than in many private schools, it has been claimed.

Fee-paying schools work out cheaper because millions of pounds of public money is being spent on bureaucracy, a headteachers' leader said.

And he warned that, despite the huge sums being pumped into state schooling, 'an awful lot of money never gets close to a child's education'.

It's not as if people don't know this. Some people at least....but it does go to show the most important point about the spending of taxpayers' money. It isn't how much you spend that is important to the result, it's how you spend it.

For example, the Finnish school system is usually pointed to as the best in the world. They spend less per pupil than we do. However, they also spend it differently: there's a pretty rigid line between schools that teach academic subjects and those that teach vocational ones. You know, not comprehensive education, but something more like our own past system of grammars and secondary moderns.

Which is, of course, why we have a policy in favour of such a system.

As ever, we're delighted to learn things from our fellow Europeans....it's the political entity which is the European Union that we're against.