CfBT - highlighting the importance of diversity in education

Diversity in education provision gives more opportunity for people to access the types of learning that are important to them. We profile an English-based, not-for-profit organisation working to provide a wide range of education services at home and around the world.

Nearly 35 years ago CfBT provided training in England to teachers of English as a second language. Today its services are far wider and span the globe. It is, for example, helping low-income schools in South India gain funding for equipment; training Malaysian teachers to teach English; running school inspection services in the UK; introducing charter-like schools to Qatar; and recently started owning and operating schools.

The money that the not-for-profit organisation makes from its global ventures is poured back into a range of 'public good' education programmes - from the 'highly practical' (a Welsh drug rehabilitation programme) to the 'research-driven' (a project aiming to find out how to get more diversity into education provision).

CfBT chief executive Neil McIntosh (pictured) described his organisation as a "public service organisation but not a public sector organisation". It operated in an industry where for-profit organisations "compete quite aggressively", and its longevity and growth were clear signs that the money-making mentality was no barrier to a public good organisation. Indeed, CfBT's market smarts have proved to be the key to it success.

"We have no problem with the market place. Society has to have either the disciplines of democracy or the disciplines of the market to be successful," Mr McIntosh said.

"It is plainly sensible to use business efficiencies to compete successfully."

CfBT had two cores to its work: serving governments - teacher education, education reform, leadership training - and education provision.

On the provision side of its operations, CfBT had, fairly recently, bought three schools and half a dozen nursery schools - "to show that we can operate well in the classroom, as well as advising others how to do it" - and it also runs Include, a charity that helps and teaches children thrown out the mainstream education system because of poor behaviour.

Greater diversity essential

Mr McIntosh said that greater diversity was essential in education and CfBT worked to promote that. But while governments often paid lip service to the idea of diversity their practices were at odds with that.

"The British government's rhetoric is that the private sector will never look after needy children so education should be state funded and supplied, while ironically many of the neediest children go to special schools outside the public sector, some run by for-profit organisations."

Mr McIntosh said there were only two essential participants in education, the teacher and the learner, and the state should seek to achieve whatever goals it had for education with minimum interference in the teacher-learner relationship. Governments, however, often had a strong tendency to see the maximising of state intervention as desirable.

Although governments often boasted that they provided free universal education at primary schools, the schools did not receive sufficient funds to provide a quality education.

"We should be in no doubt about how damaging the delusion - that we can have it all - can be".

Mr McIntosh said private, fee-funded schooling did not have to equal elite schooling. "There are countries where the fee paying sector is the only resource available to the poorest. And there are, for example in India, huge and growing numbers of schools charging very low fees and attracting [low income] parents in preference to the at least notionally 'free' state schools."
		CfBT helps run Enabling Quality Improvement Programmes in Schools (EQUIP) to enable some Indian private schools for children of low-income families to borrow money for computers, furniture, library books, teaching material, sports equipment and building repairs. A Subtext story on EQUIP.

Substantial private provision of education would continue to exist. The objective should be to encourage those qualities which existed in the best of non-state education.

Mr McIntosh summarised those qualities as:

• Simple lines of accountability - if consumers of a service did not know who was responsible, they were disempowered. In the independent sector, consumer-producer tensions were managed much better than in most of the state sector.
• Scope for parental choice - it should be acknowledged that for a significant minority of parents the power of exit, always the best way of measuring the extent of the choice available, did not really exist.
• Good staff morale.

The CfBT website is at this web page.