The Times: University cap on private schools ‘will drive brightest pupils abroad’

Capping the number of private school pupils going to university would lead to a brain drain in which bright students would go abroad to study, a leading head teacher has warned.

It could leave universities, which mostly select on academic ability, struggling to fill courses, the annual Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) of 300 leading private schools was told.

Labour passed a conference motion last week calling for fee-paying schools to be “integrated” into the state sector. As an interim step, universities should cap at 7 per cent the proportion of entrants from private schools, the motion said. That would mean thousands of privately-educated pupils with good grades at A level missing out.

Chris Ramsey, headmaster of the all-boys Whitgift School in Croydon, south London, said that many children would go abroad to study if they could not get a university place in Britain. “Some of the pupils at our schools are already choosing a university overseas,” he said. “It is a slow but steady increase and certainly not on the decline.

“Say if you were running a university in the UK and you were suddenly told that only 7 per cent of your intake could come from the independent sector. You’d be saying: ‘I don’t understand how I’m supposed to fill the university with appropriate students’.”

The rest of the online article can be found here