“… a fair amount of effort and organisation from parents ….researching and finding schools and so on…Many parents would do this… but some would not. What will happen to the children of those parents who cant or won’t engage with the system?”

Either the same thing as now – they’ll end up not getting an education worth a damn – either because the children and their mothers create sink-hole schools, or because the receiving schools refuse to accept them .
Or they’ll get an education instead of not getting one because the receiving schools will insist that their mothers actively co-operate with the schools by giving them breakfasts, delivering them to school on time, making them do homework and looking after school books, etc. for fear of expulsion and the hassle of finding another school to attend [see how fast they’ll learn when you threaten to remove their Child Tax Credit, Child Benefit, and child elements of their Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit and the Local Housing Allowance room requirements for each child not placed, OR the government brings in compulsory attendance at a few specialist special needs schools for the hard cases and the sad cases – if there are any left by the time New Labour’s ‘inclusion agenda’ keeps closing them down.

Schools could also likely run training sessions for the mothers to learn the very basic parenting skills that they lack.
So, no worse, and probably better.

The most laughable part is the pretence that what Roo is advocating is a market. In a market, there is an exchange of money for property rights. Since Roo is not advocating buying and selling of School places, the claim that a market mechanism is involved is spurious.

In areas where there were few Nursery Classes in the County and voluntary-aided Schools, the result was that the set up Nursery provision and competed hard for the children and the money. Voluntary and commercial provisions shrank!

And that, Roo, is why the Voucher lobby have been quiet for about the past 15 years.

” rig the admissions system so that children who were clever but had not been properly taught would be admitted to universities with lower grades. ”

Isn’t that the College admission system for Oxford and Cambridge? An extra hurdle that’s there to benefit the in-crowd and disadvantage anyone who isn’t in the loop?

“What do you do? Move house to get the specialist school of your choice?

Not if you’re a council tenant, because you can’t.”

WRONG.
http://www.homeswapper.co.uk/

Vouchers are an obsession of a mobile, urban, aspirational middle class, a way of formalizing a system that is already unfair by institutionalizing the unfairness. That’s why people get excited about it.

“Private schools can cover their financing cost through the fees they charge”

Although you are right of course; fees are obviously the mainstay, some (perhaps all – I don’t know) have other sources. I believe a group of four relatively local Independant schools. which, although seperate entities, are all under one Trust – own land elsewhere. I’m not sure if they have other income streams nor how much the land nets them, but they don’t rely on fees alone.

Almost all of these schools provide a mixture of bursary and means-tested places. Each school will have its own quota and would generally – but not exclusively – be given when the pupil joins at age 11, 13 and 16. These probably add up to a fair amount of money that would have to be raised, especially as the bursary may also includes school uniform, travel, school meals and any other add-on cost (e.g. field trips)incurred during the student’s time at the school .

I would have more sympathy with this if the system did not already include a large degree of de facto market mechanisms. The discussion seems to have missed the point that we already do have a form of voucher in this country (England, at any rate, I don’t know if the same is true in Shuggy’s neck of the woods). Finance follows the child, so schools are, in effect, in competition for funding by competing for pupils. So why does this seeem to be effective for schools in some areas where standards are driven up but not in others where they stagnate? I would say that it is, at least in part, because pupils in some schools can ‘cash in’ their voucher because their parents can move or send them to private school, but pupils in other areas do not have that choice. By amending the system slightly to allow that choice, or some element of it, to the poor, there is at least the chance that some of the worst inequities of the present system will be mitigated and the attandant risks look small (when we look at Sweden). So why the resistance? And why the heat in the resistance?

Private schools can cover their financing cost through the fees they charge. Under a voucher system the amount of funding a school receives per pupil is fixed so they don’t have this option.

Of course there were, and it is possible to have entirely market based systems now. My point was about introducing market mechanisms into a universal system – making institutions operate as if they are working in a market environment when actually they are not.