Before leaping into the perceived success or failure of the UK OFSTED system to achieve its objectives, I'd like to ask Julie a couple of questions.

In your last article published here you waxed lyrical over the benefits of home-schooling. Are you advocating that these "home-schools" are measured against the same criteria? If so, how? If not, why not - what is the special ingredient that lets them off the hook?

In the article before that, you waxed even more lyrical about the wonders of private enterprise in schooling. Of course, such businesses would need to be measured on the same scale as every other school, to ensure they were up to the mark, but how would you take into account in your measurements the disparity in funding available to the individual schools?

Would you measure against each other a school which relies totally on government resources for its existence, and one that is allowed to dip into the taxpayers' pockets to augment the fees it receives from its customers? And what would you do with the results of such comparisons?

The devil, as always, is in the detail. Broad brush strokes are fine for propaganda, but not for policy.

This brings to memory occasions in which students have been asked to leave well performing schools (usually private) not because of behaviour or failure, but because they may bring the school average down. In this scenario, the student who clearly needs more help has to change to a lower performing school, and effectively receives less help. This can and has happened.

Of course overall it’s good to know how well a school is doing. But reputation and private enterprise all too often work in inverse proportion to the needs of the student. Obviously a private school with a better reputation will be able to justify higher costs. A student then, with a lower income family, cannot afford said school. Right from the outset, the student is given a huge disadvantage. This is blatantly unjust.

The only way for every child to be given equal opportunity to realise their potential is for all education to be free. I don’t think the concept is very radical. In fact if I’m not mistaken, it used to be a given.

Dear Julie,

As a contributor to our Online Forum, would like to enquire whose side you are on?. Also as a successful aged student with honours and also engaged in International Relations was told by my tutors not to be influenced by Parties or Media but to form my own opinions. As rural West Australians, both my wife and I have been recently disgusted by the editor of our only public paper the “West Australian” publishing a glaring headline - Anti-US Line from Teachers:Costello, reminding us elders of the earlier social tactics of the Fascists and Nazis. Also as our local editor letting the article be printed makes us feel that the editor must be in collusion with our government which from a philosophical standpoint, owing to the threat of terrorism and asylum seekers, seems to have been successful in bringing not the best of democracy in our society but the worst.

Also citing one of your earlier essays - “Profit no longer a dirty word in Education” - gives too much reminder of the rash of a new and possibly misguided Christianity whose right-wing doctrines preach very much the same as indicated in your former essay - also reminding one of the warnings of Adam Smith, father of Laissez-faire, who said that though greed was necessary for economic competition, there also had to be a doctrine to look after those who could suffer from it, the workers. Later John Stuart Mill gave the same warning. What we are asking is are these same admonitionary signals from eminent historical thinkers, still being taught as well as the new social doctrines you are espousing?

Julie, Every year a different batch of students enters the school gates along with a different set of teachers. Reliable data on performance of standards will need to understand these variables and their impact on performance.

I think theres some more fundamental questions that need to be asked around that universal quetion "education for what?".

For many Australians the state school system is the only choice of school on offer. The free market and competitive culture you ask for in peformanace reports is fine for those schools who can compete on this education market, but for the majority of schools, just providing a standard education to the masses is already a hard slog.

While schools are economies of knowledge, they are also communities of people. I don't think you've factored this into your analysis.

Well said everyone Julie has forgotten some very basic economic principles in her ideological drive towards user pays education. It’s the stratification of education levels based on parents economic position that most of us don’t want. Every child should have the same opportunity whatever their parents finances or geographic location. These measures you talk about will only encourage this to happen. Give us some real world scenarios rather then the magic theory. What training will be provided to parents so they can make informed choises with the information provided from the test. After all does Julie belive that a one town school with 30 students that is 600 kms from the capital can be compare to a 1500 students one in the CBD?

Who really wants or needs all this information about schools performance? My kids have all well and truly left school now, but I was actively involved with the P&C during the 80s. For most of the time we were lucky to get a quorum for meetings and it was generally the same core group of interested parents all the time. I doubt if things have changed very much since. There will be an awful lot of time and effort put in by teachers and school administrators in generating all the information required for what I suspect will be marginal return. It would be far more beneficial if the resources and energy were actually devoted to educating kids.