The Education Industry

This book examines the quality as well as the quantity of contemporary education as it answers the following questions: Are we getting value for money? What makes a good teacher? What sort of education do we want? In the UK in the twentieth century education grew while national income did not. Britain devoted more of its resources to education than any other European nation and yet the UK had the largest proportion of children leaving school at 15 and spent more on each university place than the USA. The author argues that far too little attention was paid to cost-effectiveness analysis and planning. He examines Swedish and American examples and concludes that we must seek and employ the common features of modern management – network analysis, operational research and organizational theory.

In one sense, education was always a service industry. This book examines the quality as well as the quantity of contemporary education as it answers the following questions: Are we getting value for money? What makes a good teacher? What sort of education do we want? In the UK in the twentieth century education grew while national income did not. Britain devoted more of its resources to education than any other European nation and yet the UK had the largest proportion of children leaving school at 15 and spent more on each university place than the USA. The author argues that far too little attention was paid to cost-effectiveness analysis and planning. He examines Swedish and American examples and concludes that we must seek and employ the common features of modern management – network analysis, operational research and organizational theory. He also argues that traditional education has to come to terms with the mounting pressures of new curricula and new media.