Also, I think that John does speak some sense, in that if it were possible to “top up” vouchers then more rich(er) children would escape to schools that were not filled with poor (and far more likely to be disruptive due to broken homes, general poverty, poor parenting, etc) children, making the schools attended by poorer children even worse.

Furthermore, one can take two options due to that point - either require that parents escaping the system pay the full cost of the replacement education, or one could apply a “school tax” onto the cost of any education over the value of the voucher. The latter might raise more revenue than the former, by creaming the top-end schools for cash at a rate higher than the cash gained from not having the voucher spent.

It is certainly an argument against school vouchers that can be used to subsidise private education - but a lot of places around the world which have vouchers expressly prohibit this.

I’m also not at all convinced by your claim that lottery systems prohibit choice. So long as the parents get to choose a list of preferred schools, the research I’ve seen suggests that most people will get into one of their top three choices.

There certainly are problems with voucher systems - I have yet to be convinced the system can work for rural communities for instance. But the problems highlighted in the comment above are easy to circumnavigate and thus a bit beside the point.

School vouchers, as a subsidy, will shift the demand curve to the right: there is now more demand for private education. As any economics student will be able to tell you, the effect of this on an inelastic supply curve is to raise the price of private education by nearly the cost of the voucher, and to admit only a few more pupils in.

So obviously, a £3000 voucher will not allow your children to enter a £3000-fee school, as the cost will have risen nearer £5500.

If you can already afford to send your child to a private school, you’re in for a windfall in terms of the quality of education; a small school of 400 pupils will now get an extra £1,000,000 courtesy of the government.

Of course, this money has been diverted from the fund (or potential fund) for state schools. About 5% of pupils are currently privately educated, so that means the money available for state schools has decreased by about £150 (assuming £3000 vouchers). In a state school of 1000 pupils, that equates to about five teacher’s salaries and the entire photocopy budget. You can forget new books.

But of course, you now have a choice where to send your child. And you’ll want to send your child to the best school in the area. Everyone will. Assuming they can afford the transport costs - although luckily transport costs are zero in a free market, of course. If you’re lucky, maybe the school will sack a few more teachers so they can afford to bus kids across the city.

But how is the best school going to choose whose vouchers to accept? Either by:

(a) Setting an exam - although this hardly raises the standard of education in all schools; it just creams off the brightest pupils in the city.

(b) By catchment area - which doesn’t increase choice.

(c) By lottery - which doesn’t increase choice.

(d) Or by raising a financial hurdle - if you can pay a thousand pounds or so on top of the voucher, you can get your child in. Of course, this expansion in supply of private education will shift the supply curve, and the overall price of private education will fall a bit from its raised level, and - as free-marketeers know, will make those schools competitive and the quality of education within them will rise.

Of course, if you can’t afford to pay a few thousand more on top of the voucher for your children’s education - which accounts for the majority of people in the population - you’ll have to send your children to one of the old state schools - or a new school that’s bizarrely sprung up into an uncompetitive market. These of course now have less money per pupil, fewer pupils from richer socio-economic backgrounds, and fewer good teachers, as the private sector will have lured them away. So the majority of schools will be much worse than before.

If you’re lucky, the failing school your child has to go to will be close by. Otherwise you’ll have to pay to bus them there too. But you’re probably a single mother and deserve it.

So overall, school vouchers will have increased the disparity in educational outcomes, not raised them across the board.

But this is the thing: the free-market is the most effective means of distributing goods and services according to ABILITY TO PAY. It has nothing to do with equitable distribution.

I think we need to look at the experience of Holland again here. Do they have the problems you foresee? I would have thought a variable voucher would be sufficient to deal with this kind of problem. After all, the schools don’t have an intimate knowledge of the children they are assessing for entrance, so the sophisticated finessing of the entrance criteria by the schools will be difficult.

I’m not sure if your idea of making schools accept all applicants regardless of the consequences is tongue in cheek or not. I can’t see this as a serious proposal.

It’s worth pointing out that in products and services provided by the private sector the choice tends to be between a good product and a good product with bells and whistles on. A Skoda is a cheap car, but a very good one. A Rolls Royce is a good car too, but just has a lot of toys and cachet. Ditto supermarkets. The food at Aldi is cheap but good. Waitrose is good and fancy. If only schools were the same.

We should also remember that we are only trying to design a system that is better than the current shambles. Just because we cannot reach perfection doesn’t mean we are stuck with what we have now.

Well, the most obvious gaming is for schools to select pupils on the basis of their cost to educate. Children who are disruptive, exceptionally bright, talented, stupid, or untalented, children with physical or mental disabilities, children who don’t speak English fluently, even just working-class children: All of these categories cost more to educate than the ideal child, who is slightly above average without being particularly exceptional. If anyone ever wonders how grammar schools are so successful it’s because that’s what most of their pupils are.

If the voucher is varied in value depending on the child, it won’t be varied as subtly as the school is capable of varying the intake, so again there are gaming methods here.

This will mean that some schools will be more successful than others because they can game their intake better. Parents will respond by gaming their children into those intakes - and it is middle-class parents who will game most successfully, in part because they tend to care more about education (people who benefitted from their own education are more likely to value it for their children) and in part because they have greater financial resources.

The only way to resist this is for intakes to be completely unselective. That means either requiring schools to accept all applicants regardless of what that does to facilities and class sizes and relying on market forces to make parents select a less-overcrowded school, or an application lottery.

It’s worth reminding people that choice in education for most parents means choosing between a good school and a bad one, not between a maths school and a language school, or a church school and a non-church school.

I don’t know how this compares to the UK, but I think that choice is such a good thing, that it is even worth of paying a little bit extra, in the case that it is more expensive. But at least the Dutch model seems to be somewhat cheaper than the American model.