Private lessons

摘要

It was a tempting prospect in the early A years of the government's battle with the education establishment, a dozen failing Local Education Authorities (LEAS) were forcibly transferred to outside contractors, and a score of schools met a similar fate. That raised the vision of private companies taking over more parts of public education, improving them and building businesses in the process. Some of that is happening. Because schools are increasingly in charge of their own budgets, they can choose to buy services from outsiders, rather than from monopoly officialdom. One firm, Serco, sells a school-management software package to individual schools all over the country. Increasingly, schools are forming dusters to buy such services jointly.