The UK State Education Business: Always Earning According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the total public spending on education in 2023 (including financing student loans) was £116 billion. The estimated cost of running State schools alone was £56 billion with approximately £6,900 being spent on every secondary school student in England. For the FE sector, the spending per student is claimed to be £7,100. The cost of providing suitable facilities for a State Education service is clearly significant, even when schools themselves are built with substandard building materials, routine maintenance is entirely forgotten about, and teaching staff are employed on the bare minimum of salaries, given their workload. On top of these obvious costs however, rather like the NHS, the UK's State Education Business also maintains several, highly profitable, private industries. Pearson-Edexcel is the UK's only exam board to be run for profit. Pearson Plc is a FTSE100 listed company. Pearson supplies over 60% of the UK's GCSE maths exam papers, even though every school and college in the country is free to choose either AQA, OCR or WJEC exam boards which are run as charities. Pearson's total revenue for 2023 as £3.7 billion, with a net income of £0.4 billion. The company employs over 17,000 people on an average UK hourly wage of £8. According to a 2020 report in the Guardian, Pearson paid its previous CEO a baseline salary of £1m on top of a £7m golden hello. In 2023 the total amount paid to Pearson by the UK taxpayer, for the June GCSE exam papers alone, was £65 million. Almost 40% of this revenue (£25m) was for the GCSE Maths exam, with a further £1.8m paid for the November maths resits. Over 300,000 students fail to achieve the maths GCSE grade 4 pass every year: that represents £15 million in exam fees, which under current legislation, will eventually be levied again. Roughly 120,000 FE students will resit their GCSE maths exams each year, incurring an extra total exam fee of £6m. The GCSE exam is only one part of the picture: a recent request made to Ofqual under the Freedom of Information Act for the total number of FSQ exams sat each year was refused on the grounds that releasing this information was "not in the public interest." It is not possible therefore to guess at the fees levied for FSQ examinations, however approximately 600,000 students could potentially be taking these exams multiple times a year, each time for a fee. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is at present a call from "education consultants" to increase the number of FSQ maths exams. Exams, we are told, have to be written. If they're written they then have to be marked and I guess this isn't cheap. Well, actually it is fairly cheap: last glance they were paying a fiver a shot. But the exam fees themselves are just a drop in an ocean of cash that pours from the State's public education coffer into private pockets. According to their own website, the UK's leading education recruitment agency is Teaching Personnel. Their mission (apparently) is to "make a difference every day through staffing, tutoring and supply." In 2022, Teaching Personnel made an enormous difference to a tiny few by posting a company turnover of £141 million. In that year it paid its top earning director £194,000. I get regular, jaunty little texts and emails from Teaching Personnel. The most frequent are those asking if I'd be interested in "a side hustle" as they put it. No, really. What they mean is this: would I be interested in earning £35 for an hour giving a 1-2-1 online maths tutorial to a student with an officially recognised physical, mental, social or learning difficulty. "But I have absolutely no relevant expertise or experience in that area whatsoever!" Say I. Response: "You're missing the point again Grant: we get commission on this!" I'm paraphrasing, obviously. TP may (or may not) be the UK's leading agency, leading the way in reorienting money from a budget intended for some of the most vulnerable members of society, but it certainly isn't the only one. Agency Central lists over 400 education related recruitment agencies on their website alone. And then, of course, there are the consultants and QuANGOs. The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) is funded by the UK taxpayer via the Department for Education to the tune of... an undisclosed sum as far as I can tell. According to their website, they are "led & delivered" (whatever that means) by Etio Global: formerly Tribal Education Services, part of Tribal Group, an AIM listed Plc. In 2023 this for-profit organisation posted a revenue of £86 million and paid its top earning director over £1m. The National Tutor Program (you may recall this being described as a "side hustle" by the UK's leading agency) is a system set up to allow "approved providers" (among them of course, Teaching Personnel) to invoice schools and colleges for providing maths support for struggling students: especially those with particular problems, for which they charge extra. Approved by whom? None other than Tribal Group Plc. Does this approval process require a demonstration of management having any mathematical expertise? In answering this, it suffices to check out the past performance these institutions have when it comes to the provision of mathematics in our State schools and colleges: every year, 70% of all students entered for the foundation GCSE maths exam fail to achieve the all important grade 4 pass, and for a decade, 90% of all FE students fail it again when they reach college. At some point we are going to realise, experts in education aren't expert at anything other than generating unnecessary income streams. It does not require layers of management and external run-for-profit consultancies to put resit students in the same room as teachers who genuinely know how to help them achieve the grade 4 GCSE pass: which is the only thing that will release them from the eternal resit cycle.