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Duncan O'Leary

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Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.

Posted by Duncan O'Leary at 2:07pm on Thursday, 17th January 2008

I don’t know why I keep blogging about school choice, but I can’t help it. Today Matthew D’Ancona writes over on the Spectator blog that the announcement yesterday on school admissions is ‘an old fashioned public sector rationing system doing its bleak work’.

 

He adds that ‘The “covert admission practices” [the government] refers to include such supposed horrors as parental interviews, allegedly expensive uniforms or daring to ask parents which order of preference they have placed schools in. This is a Government that talks about “aspiration” and the “personalisation” of services but still prefers the pseudo-egalitarian gesture and the Whitehall diktat’.

 

My problem is that I think the Right is so inconsistent on these issues. It spends a lot of time talking about ‘producer interests’ getting in the way of personalised services. But the point that it misses time and time again is that producer interests can exist in markets. They [can] arise when producers of services have more power than users even when they are supposed to be serving them.

 

So markets, per se, are not the solution to the problem the Right identifies with public services. If it is really concerned with producer interests, then is should be arguing for the the governance of markets, which is exactly what admissions procedures are trying to provide.

Comments

1
The Right love to forget that equal-choice (certainly different to free-choice) is dependent upon equal ability to choose - in a market that is basically equal buying power.Do we live in a society where everyone has equal 'capital' with the state, or is it okay for people to bring in extra resources to get preferential treatment in state provided services?Perhaps though that is the point - what sort of 'choice' are we actually talking about?
Posted by Tom Richardson  at 6:43pm on Thursday, 17th January 2008
2
It’s not a matter of markets or central regulation. We need to acknowledge that families have preferences and that there are certain criteria that school admissions should follow. Once we put these into place we just need to design the right mechanism that yields, in a totally decentralised manner, the right allocation.
I can hardly see a Right wing opposition to a basic set of criteria that should rule school admissions.  The economics literature has shown that once these criteria are in place, there are Pareto efficient mechanisms that do not allow the strategic misrepresentation of families’ preferences.
Posted by Rafael Hortala-Vallve  at 1:40pm on Tuesday, 22nd January 2008

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