In the mid-19th century in colonial India, the Raj realised it had a problem with cobras. To deal with it, a payment was offered for every snake that was killed. Some of the savvier locals quickly realised that they could breed cobras especially for this purpose. But the British heard about this and abruptly ended the programme. The disappointed snake hunters released all their now-worthless cobras into the wild - thus exacerbating the problem.

Public policy is rife with unintended consequences and the more complex an ecosystem, the more likely these are to exist.

Last year, the government announced a levy on businesses from 2017 to pay for more apprenticeships, set at 0.5 per cent of paybill. To protect small organisations, it will only apply to those with a paybill of £3 million or more (about the largest 2 per cent). This funding can be used to train apprentices within their organisation, so it is less a tax and more a directed area of expenditure.

Most multi-academy trusts will be caught by this and there have been grumblings that there aren’t a huge number of apprenticeships for them to use - most notably, at present, nothing in teaching. But so far, so OK. They are, after all, large organisations with financial flexibility and are better able to weather this than small schools that are rightly protected. Policy goal achieved.

Unintended consequence

Except, wait! It turns out that - in what is the most bizarre unintended consequence in education policy that I’ve ever heard - some small maintained schools will be hit by this. Due to the frankly archaic position that the local authority still processes the wages for community schools - and remains technically the employer of staff - it seems that such schools are considered part of the same ‘business’ as the local authority; as such, they’re in the scope of the levy.

Given the local authority receives all its education funds via a topslice from its schools, the levy payment will come straight out of the budget of these, in some cases tiny, organisations. I can’t emphasise quite how messed up this is. Since 1988, Local Management of Schools has given all schools almost total autonomy over budgets and staffing. Those that don’t want to academise often say that, as they are now free to do what they want, there’s no advantage. To act, even unintentionally, as if they aren’t, in practice, separate small organisations that ought to be nowhere near the levy, is poor.

I cannot believe this is the policy intention. It is, simply, another example of the cobra problem - an unforeseen consequence. The Department for Education has policy responsibility now, both for school funding and for the apprenticeship levy. It has no excuse for not sorting this out.

Jonathan Simons is a former head of education in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Gordon Brown and David Cameron