This short posting could also be entitled The
inevitability of school vouchers or, perhaps, The re-establishment
of private schools. My reason for suggesting this is based on
thinking about the consequences of what has been revealed in a recent
survey sponsored by the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society. It seems to
me that it is becoming obvious that school vouchers are going to have to
be brought in by all developed governments (if similar to those in
western governments) if they wish their populations to recover to
replacement birth rates.
According to the survey by Centre for Economics and Business, the cost of
raising a child in England from birth to the age of 21 comes to £140,000.
This is the cost of a small house in the south of the country, and a very
handsome house in the north. This cost obviously does not include private
secondary education (now used by only 7% of well-off parents) because the
cost of these fees plus ancillary expenses would add anything up to
another £100,000.
At the present time, the main pressure for charter schools,
parent-sponsored schools, home education and education vouchers comes
from the more intelligent, middle-class parents who are deeply worried
about the declining standards and social discipline in the state schools
available to them but yet cannot afford paying fees for private schools.
Some of these parents can manage to afford to move their house into
another catchment area where there happens to be a good state secondary
school -- perhaps about 20% of the whole. But even this proportion is
threatened by the generally declining academic standards of teachers,
particularly in the 'hard' subjects such as languages and the
sciences. The result of this is that the middle-class is now caught
in its own form of poverty trap and its fertility is now much less than
the replacement rate of 2.2 children per family and less than that
of people who are materially poor.
Parents have children for selfish reasons, of course. If they ever did
respond to governmental, religious or nationalistic calls to increase
their family size, it certainly doesn't happen in modern times. The
French government, in particular, have had a strongly pro-natalist policy
for a long time with quite generous state hand-outs to parents who have
more than one or two children. But even these subsidies don't remotely
compare with the cost of education.
I suggest that the only feasible pro-natalist policy that could be
adopted by developed governments is by offering education vouchers to the
full extent of the cost of private and state education (they are much the
same). Besides (in my view) bringing efficiency about in education and
increasing the general quality of education this policy would be
particularly attractive to middle-class parents who could then be
selective as to where they send their children. The net cost of all this
would be far less than the rising costs of family credits which recent
governments, particularly the present Labout government, have felt
obliged to give to middle class parents -- even with earnings two or
three times more than average wages -- in order to retain their electoral
support.
For this reason, unless a developed western economy resorts to vast
immigration flows from central Europe or Asia in order to support an
ageing population, then education vouchers for the full average costs of
secondary education will be inevitable. When, I wouldn't like to guess,
but well within ten years in the case of England I would have thought,
because the both the state education system and the birth rate continue
to decline in a deeply worrying way.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
BRITAIN TOPS EURO LEAGUE FOR COST OF RAISING CHILD
Arifa Akbar
Raising a child costs more in Britain than anywhere else in Europe,
researchers claimed yesterday. An independent business consultancy found
that expenses, including child care, holidays and university funding,
have reached £140,000 for every son and daughter.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research said that bringing up a
child in a typical two-parent working household from infancy to the age
of 21, amounted to £129 a week, or £6,686 a year. The total cost is more
than the average price of a house in Britain. Parents' expense does not
abate when their child reaches adulthood. The most expensive years are
likely to be when their child is aged between 19 and 21, and up to
£10,000 a year may be needed to fund a university education. Other
expenses during this period, such as driving lessons and gifts, are
estimated at £8,845.
Parents with young children also feel the financial pressure. When
children are aged between two and five, the report estimates that parents
will have to fork out up to £9,889 a year, a total of £39,557, largely
due to an average childcare bill of £25,000 over these years. Britons pay
more than their European counterparts to bring up their children. The
cost in the UK is about 33 per cent more than in Spain, 30 per cent more
than in France and 26 per cent more than in Sweden. For overall costs,
Italy and Germany came in second and third place respectively, while
Spain was found to be the most economical country, with parents spending
less than £100,000 per child.
COST OF A CHILD
from birth to the age of 21
Euorpean comparisons
UK -- £140,000
Spain -- £93,000
France -- £99,000
Sweden -- £104,000
Germany -- £117,000
Italy -- £120,000
(Centre for Economics and Business)
Continental Europeans tend not to pamper their children with luxury items
in the same way as people in the UK. British parents are estimated to
spend 71 per cent more than their Spanish counterparts and 62 per cent
more than the French.
Malcolm Berryman, chief executive of the Liverpool Victoria friendly
society, which commissioned the research, said: "Everyone knows that
raising children can be expensive but few will have realised that
bringing up three children could cost nearly half a million
pounds."
Jill Gwyufryu-Evans, 31, a mother in Wales who has an 18-month daughter,
Helen, and is expecting another child next month, said she and her
husband, Matthew, a quantity surveyor, had been surprised that their
savings had been swallowed up so quickly after their first child was
born. "It is only when you have a child that you realise how much
they cost," said Ms Gwyufryu-Evans. "Helen goes to a private
nursery and we would have liked her to go to private school, but we're
re-assessing that now that we have another on the way."
Independent -- 21 November 2003
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