Do private schools increase competition?

Somebody at a political discussion meeting made a throwaway remark that he thought grammar schools/private schools were A Good Thing because they “increase competition”.

Ho hum. At the school level, of course they do. There is no doubt in my mind that children who attend private schools get better academic results than if they’d attended state schools, which is hardly surprising, but I’m not sure that’s relevant. Let’s assume that state schools see themselves as competing with private schools, so maybe at the margin, they up their game slightly, again, A Good Thing.

But the point of secondary education is to equip children for a life of work and/or give them the best chance of getting a university place, which in turn is to help children end up in the best possible job. Education (beyond a certain basic level) is not really an end in itself – consider a family with children who are planning to move abroad in a few years, there is no point in the taxpayer paying for the children’s education as they will not see any benefit.

Beyond a certain level, this is just an arms race. If every child were 10% better educated, then that would just mean that most of them end up in jobs for which they are 10% over-qualified i.e. from the point of view of an individual child, you want the best education you can get, taking society as a whole it would be a waste of resources.

“Competition” can mean different things:

i. If Producer A does his best to supply goods and services which are better/cheaper/whatever than Producer B, that is good for the economy, because Producer B then has to play catch up and overall standards increase. That’s a clear win. Key to this is that consumers (or potential employees) have full knowledge about the goods and services (or working conditions) and can make fair comparisons (which they clearly don’t).

ii. If Producers A and B have innovated and improved as much as they can, they “compete” by spending more money on advertising (providing misinformation or irrelevant facts) and trying to lock each other out by fair means or foul. That is a waste of resources and a loss.

iii. There are some competitions that are just competitions for the sake of competition, like athletics. How does society benefit if an Olympic runner sets a new world record a couple of milliseconds quicker or a few inches higher/further? Answer: not at all, at best it has a short-lived entertainment value. This is a humungous waste of resources. Compare this with films or music – that is also pure entertainment value, but people can enjoy the same films or songs for decades after they were released. Who sits down and re-watches the Olympics of a few years ago, or a horse race that was on last week? I guess nobody.

To return to the theme of private schools, you can give your child an advantage in later life by sending them there. Does that increase ‘competition’ in the positive sense mentioned at i. above? No, it just means that some other child is at a slight relative disadvantage for no particular reason, which is like the bad competition at ii.

To tie this in with iii., if real life were a closed system liked athletics, private school children have a one second advantage when qualifying for the Olympic running team, so they are more likely to get in. Does that mean the Olympic running team will be any better when it gets to the Olympics? Probably not, it just means that the private school kids starting training earlier, they still have a couple of years further training before the Olympics, by which time the state school kids with a one-second handicap would have caught up anyway.

Here endeth today’s rant.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but it is not as simple as people think. Going to the other extreme and banning private schools might just make things worse, as there’d be nothing for state schools to compete with, so standards might slip for everybody.

Maybe the least bad system is bottom-up privatisation of state education i.e. giving parents ‘education vouchers’ and letting them choose which school to ‘spend’ them at? But if parents can ‘spend’ the vouchers at private schools and pay top up fees, that just compounds the original problem, so it’s not as simple as that either.