[MUSIC] So, some people argue that if education was turned into a free market then everybody would benefit because unsatisfactory schools would get closed down. Is there any evidence for that? >> No. I mean, that's a fantasy. That's a, a political fantasy. It's a fantasy in two senses. In the first sense, that's not how markets work anyway. If you look at, at, at what we think about as ordinary, normal markets in, in terms of things like, supermarkets and how they function. Morrison's supermarket chain is losing lots and lots of money. It's doing very badly. Its, its stock market value is, is sinking. But it's not going out of business, it's not closing down. It may be susceptible to takeover. It, it's certainly trying to, to improve its position. But in terms of, of, of performance, there is no direct relationship between its performance, and the continuation or discontinuation of its, of its, of its stores. And if you look across the, the, the economy. then, then there are many businesses which are losing money, losing customers, not doing well. Some of them do go out of business. But most of them don't. Markets are in fact very messy places, that, there isn't a simple relationship between quality performance, and whether or not you survive in the market place. So that is a fantasy in that sense because that's not, not how markets work. But it's also a fantasy, because, the education system is not organized in a way which is susceptible to being even. A very, badly functioning market. In all sorts of ways. Geographically for example, schools are, are fixed in particular places and there are constraints on who, who can get to them, how many people can get to them, and how they can get to them in terms of transport. And, and you can't close a school where there is no other school operating, where those students might go. In another sense if, if you're trying to create a market based upon choice and there is only one school in a small, town, or a particular locality, then there is no competition, there is no market. So you don't have a market dynamic operating in that sense. But also in a way the state could never put itself in the position where schools would close on the basis of a market rationale rather than a political or economic rationale. Because the state will have to take responsibility for students. They have to go somewhere, they have to be educated by somebody, and, and having an, an unplanned, process of closure, would be enormously problematic politically. Both in the terms of managerial sense, but also in a, in a, in an electoral sense, I think. So there are all sorts of reasons why there that there is not a simple relationship between recruitment or quality and and market forces in education. Like they don't work like that. But also, if one looks at examples of the attempt to create markets, even given these problems, there's no clear relationship between the market dynamic and, and quality. There was a recent very interesting study in the United States of, of charter schools, done at Stanford University. And they looked at the relative performance of charters schools as against existing state schools in, in various, in states across the United States, all of the states that have charter schools. Not all states do have charter schools. And what they found was that in those states that had high levels of entry requirements for charter school providers, that the charter schools did as well as the state schools they were competing with. But in those states that had very low entry requirements for these alternative providers that overall the charter schools performed worse than the comparator state schools. So the regulatory framework of the market, if you, if you can call it that, plays a, a, a, really important role in in all of this. And the other example you can think about, which is very immediate to us in England, is again the academies program where we've had a market like expansion of academy providers where some academy chains have taken on lots of new schools over the last two years in particular. And now 17 of those chain providers have been identified as unfit to take on additional schools that they haven't been able to manage the expansion of their provision and have been unable to maintain the quality, levels of quality of schooling expected by the, the school inspectors across their, their chain. So in that case, it's, there's a different kind of, of evidence that suggests that, that a market system doesn't work in education.
