Schools may soon charge extra for unassisted thinking

The open day would begin in the usual corridor with the usual laminated signs, and would arrive, somewhere between the science labs and the canteen, at a table marked unaided track. Under the model being described to parents, the school would run two parallel streams. In the standard stream, pupils would work as they do now, with assistance available on every device and in every subject. In the other, they would not. The second stream would carry a fee.

The prospectus would present this as a matter of method rather than status. Unaided lessons would be handwritten, supervised and slower. Essays would be drafted in the room and defended out loud. Mathematics would be done on paper, with the working shown, because the working is the only part the school would claim to be teaching. Parents would be told, accurately, that their children would produce less.

The fee would not be for equipment, since the unaided track would need less of it than the standard one. It would be for people. Supervised writing requires a supervisor, spoken defence requires somebody to listen, and marking handwriting requires a human who can read it. The expense would be attention, which is the one input that has not become cheaper, and the school would be pricing it honestly for the first time.

“We are not selling the absence of technology,” a head teacher at such a school would be expected to say. “We are selling the presence of an adult in the room for the whole hour. If those two things have become the same product, that is not a decision we made, and we would rather charge for it than pretend we can provide it to everybody.”

The waiting list would be the awkward part. Under the model, the free stream would be the one that produces polished work quickly, and the paid stream would be the one that produces worse work slowly, and the queue would form outside the second. Admissions staff would notice, without saying so at the table, that the parents in the queue would overwhelmingly be the ones whose own jobs involve writing things.

The counter-argument would be raised at the same open day, by a parent who would not be asked back. If unaided thinking is worth paying for, it is worth teaching to everybody, and a school that charges for it has quietly reclassified a basic skill as an enrichment activity. The school would agree, in writing, in a newsletter, and would keep the fee.

None of this is scheduled. But the two tracks already exist in every school in the country, unpriced and unnamed, separated only by which pupils happen to switch the assistance off. The proposal's only genuine innovation would be the invoice.