Last night I learned of a wonderful absurdity in the world of government monopoly education.

As pretty well everyone will know, head teachers in the government-controlled sector live and die by targets. Their careers depend on them. One of the targets is high attendance.

Then came the snow last week. Most schools in London were closed on the Monday. But more schools managed to open on the Tuesday. Now you might think that those schools whose head teacher and staff struggled into work for the benefit of the children in their care were particularly conscientious. Not in target-land however. They were mugs. Since their schools were open, the many absences of children from their schools on that snowy day will count against them when it comes to calculating how good their attendance figures have been. But those schools which stayed shut will be deemed to have been shut because of exceptional circumstances and their attendance figures will not be affected at all.

So the conscientious schools that opened will be punished with bad attendance figures. The less conscientious schools that stayed shut will be rewarded with high attendance figures. Thus does the state give perverse incentives.

Similarly, the government encourages schools to adopt a warm, welcoming spirit to those of minority faiths. At the same time, any school which has Muslim children will have days when many of the children are absent because of the Eid - the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. So on the one hand the government says, "be welcoming and understanding of minority faiths". On the other hand it effectively says, "Do everything you can to upset Muslim families by trying to stop Muslim children being absent on Eid days or, failing that, hit your attendance targets better by accepting as few Muslim children as you can".

These examples are just a small part of the madness of target-land. The world works largely on the basis of incentives. If the incentives are perverse, the results often are too.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

Comments (0) TrackBack (5)