Spectator, The: A gap year for William, a refresher course for Peter--how educational they'd find it

I dare say that William Hague needs a gap year. He could go off to India, as gapsters do, to broaden his education and come back with new ideas. Peter Lilley, his wan deputy, would be sent on a refresher course in Argentina. They would be missed, of course, but we must all make sacrifices, as indeed we do every year, sacrificing two-- fifths of our incomes to support the public sector, with welfare, health and education at the top of the bill. Their message to us is to grin and bear it. When they were in office, they pumped up public spending, and all that was wrong about this, Mr Lilley now maintains, was that nobody believed them. Education, he says, must mean compulsory schooling, which means that schooling must be available free, which means that the taxpayer must pay for it. If our system still fails two-thirds of its pupils, as Mr Lilley says it does, we must find ways to help them and no doubt this will cost even more. On his refresher course he will discover that none of this has to be true. I shall start him off in Argentina, where 30 per cent of all pupils in secondary education go to schools which are privately owned. Then he can fly on to the Ivory Coast, where private schools have more than half the market. In India, his leader could brush up his computer skills at NIIT and join its 500,000 alumni. By the time they have finished their travels, the two of them might have concluded that good education can be a good business, and pay for itself. This is the unconventional lesson of The Global Education Industry. It began as a study commissioned by the International Finance Corporation, which works with the private sector in the developing countries and could be described as the active ingredient in the World Bank. The IFC set Professor James Tooley of Newcastle University to see whether private education in these terms was capable of justifying an investment, in terms not just of general betterment but of straightforward financial returns. The answers surprised him.

Pitagoras and Objectivo

HE found competing chains of private schools in Brazil, with names like Objectivo and Pitagoras, covering the market all the way from kindergarten to university entrance. He found educational companies flourishing in Zimbabwe and South Africa, in Romania and Peru. Marketing mattered, an established brand helped, but technical advance was crucial. The successful companies had grown from small beginnings and for the most part had financed themselves. Now the Institute of Economic Affairs has published Mr Tooley's findings and the Conservative party should treat itself to a copy. Better, though, for its leaders to go on their travels and come back wondering, as Mr Tooley did, if their own supposedly developed country has the right ideas. He saw how the Brazilian school chains put their money on technology and innovation, and fretted about the paucity of innovation in state schools in England. He saw South African companies so concerned to place their students that they bought recruitment agencies, he saw Indian companies obsessed with quality control and uniform high standards, and he asked himself how our state schools would measure up to them. Competition could show us the answer to that, but Mr Hague and Mr Lilley still believe in more of the same at even greater expense. They have something to learn.

World class

WE are not merely a body of people carrying on industry in order to make dividends, said the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries -- we are much more. British commercialists and British technicians will be judged by the entire world by the success we make of this merger. That chairman was Lord Melchett, ICI's first, but six years ago his successors, to my dismay, took the merger apart. They gave ICI Pharmaceuticals its independence and called it Zeneca. Now they can feel justified by Zeneca's performance, certainly as measured by its share price, which has multiplied by five, but ICI is no longer the mighty company it was. With Sir Ronnie Hampel retiring as chairman after 44 years' service, the last of the old guard has gone. ICI now has a chairman from Unilever and a chief executive from Guinness, running a parcel of businesses bought to replace its own, which have languished in a clearance sale. I would now say that Sir Ronnie and his predecessor, Sir Denys Henderson, made only one mistake. They kept the wrong half. They should have left the ICI roundel on their brilliant pharmaceuticals, and spun off their heavy chemicals under some such made-up name as Nezeca. This ICI would still be what it claimed to be and what Melchett thought it should be: world class.

Gricer rides again

MY railway correspondent, I.K Gricer, is on his way to Berne (changing trains at Lille and Basle) to tell the Swiss how to run railways. `Privatisation and deregulation of public railways -- can it work?' is the snappy title of this conference, chaired by Sir Patrick Brown (late of the Department of Transport) and sponsored by the British Council. He will be signalling caution. Switzerland, so he tells me, has its own federal railway system and another 65 private railway companies, with trains running up and down and round mountains and through them, all connecting with each other and keeping time like a Swiss watch. Backed up by post-buses, cable-cars, funiculars and steamers on the lakes, they form the densest network of co-ordinated public transport in the world. He wants the Lord Mayor to ask the Swiss back to show us how to do it.

Launch party

THE curse on Barclays has given it a bad case of Electro-Cerebral Dysfunction, or failure to engage brain before operating computer. This disease of bankers has caused one of Barclays Premier's managers, at odds with one of his premier customers, to send him a computer-generated invitation to the launch of a new car. Roulette and blackjack will be played, he adds by way of enticement. The customer pleads a prior engagement with his Ford main dealer for the launch of Barclays' latest chief executive, and hopes that this model will be good for more mileage than the last two. Board games, he says, will be played -- they are a Barclays speciality -- and also Beggar My Neighbour.