There are a lot of over educated, over paid, but underworked people in this country, & a large percentage of them are government school teachers.

The only way you will ever get value for money from government schools is, as Rhrosty says, endow the kids, & let them carry the subsidy to the school of choice.

Having sorted the money, then give the P&C, definitely not the head master, the right to fire all non performing teacher. After getting rid of about 25% of the existing teachers, along with quite a few head masters, we might then get some value from the rest. There would be much less "going through the motions", which is endemic in the job for life union controlled government systems.

Head masters are still union members, & apart from that, are often a large part of the problem.

We have seen a very good government school slide to useless, when a new head started covering up the drug & behaviour problems, rather than controlling them. Far too many heads want to avoid rocking the boat, boat rocking is not good for promotion prospects, & are frightened to apply discipline, unless forced by a strong P&C.

Of course, getting rid of half the bureaucrats, & most of the experts would be totally necessary for any improvement.

This forum is full of private school apologists. The question that needs to be asked is if the public is paying so much for these private schools, why don't we finish the job and just nationalise them, thereby automatically ending their discriminatory practices in both enrolment and employment. The facts are there are 0 differences in academic performance between public and private schools teaching students with the same SES status - so private school parents have been sold a myth and are paying for nothing except gold plated facilities at these schools and in some areas the ability to segregate their children from children from lower SES backgrounds. We need a radical rethink of public funding for education - for example why not publicly fund all teachers salaries on a uniform basis ( so many teachers for the same no. Of students, with extra allowances for special needs etc), and nothing else, so all the excess public funding currently going to private schools can be reallocated to public schools where it is needed. That arrangement would be more than generous to private schools. What part of the word private don't you understand? With so much public funding going to private schools, the public should start demanding for value out of them - for example maybe they should be required to share their gold plated facilities with local public schools, seeing as everyone has paid for these through their taxes. It's a shame our politicians can't seem to contemplate what Chile is doing right now, and phase out public funding of private schools completely.

A monopoly in education supply is their goal and an undoubted guarantee of Social disaster. Anyone so sure of their "Correctness"™ can only be one subject to faddishness, we are still recovering from the whole reading debacle.

Private schools are a critical source of diversity and hence fulfill an essential social good.

'The question that needs to be asked is if the public is paying so much for these private schools, why don't we finish the job and just nationalise them, thereby automatically ending their discriminatory practices in both enrolment and employment'

simple JohnJ

then you would get the same atrocious results as the fully tax payer funded system.