Education in England has been increasingly privatized. The result has not been good. It has not produced a better educational service. When international comparisons are made this becomes painfully clear. It has not become more efficient, because of a proliferation of private nursey classes, the academization of state schools, all new schools being free schools, university student number competition, and so on; it has not resulted in young people in England becoming more able – although it may have persuaded many to believe that they are very able and very clever despite not being able to speak and write in as many languages as children can do elsewhere in Europe – nor to show imaginative ability in mathematics and science (as well as many other subjects), as other young people in Europe can demonstrate when international comparisons are made.

Figure 8.1 gives a summary of the problem. It shows results for mathematics, but much the same can be seen for reading and problem solving. It uses data from 2012, as the repeat OECD organized international surveys taken in 2015 and 2018 did not measure ability up to age 24 but only around age 16. Schools in the United Kingdom are quite good at priming young people to produce an expected answer at age 16 or 18. However, by age 24 a great deal of what was taught in a UK school has been forgotten (greater than is the case in most other European countries, as Figure 8.1 makes clear).

As the figure implies, this may be related to economic inequality. The higher the economic inequality in a country, the worse the real educational performance.

What Figure 8.1 shows is not that economic inequality directly causes poor educational outcomes, but that a country such as the United Kingdom, which has become so economically unequal in recent decades, will tend to move in the direction of other very unequal countries, such as the United States. In contrast, in more equitable countries, such as Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, education at school is carried out in such a way that, when young adults are later tested in their early twenties, they are still – on average – quite competent in mathematics.