Nick Cowen

Improving the educational outcomes of children from low-income backgrounds is crucial to tackling Britain's lack of social mobility. However, after more than a decade of New Labour's initiatives, and with spending on education now at record levels in real terms, the gap between low-income children and middle-class children has actually widened. The Swedes have developed an approach to education that provides choice for all parents, regardless of income. Funding follows the child, and parents can choose which school their child attends. Independent providers, either charitable or commercial, can receive payment from the state on the same terms as state schools. The results have been impressive. In areas where independent providers operate, standards are driven up in all schools. Children with special educational needs and children of immigrants have benefited noticeably. The policy, introduced in 1992, is well established and popular with parents. In Swedish Lessons, Nick Cowen asks what we can learn from the experience of a country with strong egalitarian values that has successfully incorporated the mechanism of choice into its educational provision.

How Schools with More Freedom Can Deliver Better Education

Swedish Lessons

David S. Oderberg

Stephen Davies

Philip Booth

Claire Fox

Dennis Hayes

J. R. Shackleton

Jacob Mchangama

Victoria Hewson

Leo Kearse

Today should be a Golden Age for free speech – with technology providing more ways of communicating ideas and opinions than ever before. Yet we’re actually witnessing a growing wave of restrictions on freedom of thought and expression. In Having Your Say a variety of authors – academics, philosophers, comedians and more – stress the fundamental importance of free speech, one of the cornerstones of classical liberalism. And they provide informed and incisive insights on this worrying trend, which threatens to usher in a new, intolerant and censorious era.

Threats to Free Speech in the 21st Century

Having Your Say

This timely and provocative book challenges the conventional wisdom that neoliberal capitalism is incompatible with social justice. Employing public choice and market process theory, Nick Cowen systematically compares and contrasts capitalism with socialist alternatives, illustrating how proponents of social justice have decisive reasons to opt for a capitalism guided by neoliberal ideas.

Rawls Unveiled

Neoliberal Social Justice

Nick Cowen

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