The Times: Don’t close private schools, open them up

By covering the fees of the brightest poor pupils, the government would spread the benefits of an independent education.

I was not a success at the expensive boarding school I attended. I was moderately unpopular, awful at games and, as I was frequently reminded, entirely lacking in house spirit. But, although I hated it at the time, the school was a success for me. All the teaching was good, some of it was brilliant (thank you from the bottom of my heart, Miss Willmott and Miss Beckett) and I got into a good university. So when it came to deciding where my children should be educated, I scraped the money together with help from my parents and sent them to private schools.

That sending children to a private (or independent, in the modern euphemism) school is the natural choice for those who can afford it is a problem for our country. One of the essentials of nation-building is persuading everybody that “we’re all in it together” and our education system ensures that we’re not. Seven per cent of the population is in a different boat to the other 93 per cent, and a much more secure one at that. That’s not just during their schooldays. Private school people tend to stick together during their adult lives, ensuring that the two worlds never entirely mix.

This social divide is much deeper in Britain than it is in other countries. In America, though there are some swanky schools, regular prosperous families send their kids to the local state school. In France, Italy and Germany, private schools tend to be for the religious or the troubled. It is only in Britain that the professional classes willingly go without holidays to ensure that their children are educated apart from the great majority of their compatriots.

The divide is much more important than it used to be. The top private schools used largely to be patronised by the cream of society (thick and rich). But as the growth of the “knowledge economy” outpaced that of the manufacturing industry, and children’s educational achievements increasingly determined their futures, they became highly selective and highly academic.

Brains, thus, can increasingly be bought. A study by researchers at the London School of Economics looked at the difference in university attendance and the earnings of state and private school pupils born in 1958 and 1970. Although it controlled for cognitive ability, to ensure that the results were not biased by the increasing selectivity of the schools, it found that the gap increased sharply between the two cohorts. In 2006-16, pupils from Westminster School, which educated 0.02 per cent of the country’s secondary-school-age children, made up more than 1 per cent of Oxbridge’s total intake. Its pupils, thus, get Oxbridge places at a rate 50 times that of the average school. So now parents’ ability to pay private school fees determines not only their children’s social milieu but also their professional prospects.

The full online article can be found here.