Former prime minister, John Major, called “truly shocking”
the way that “the upper echelons of power . . . are held overwhelmingly by the
privately educated or the affluent middle class”
A pupil at a private day school is, according to the Sutton
Trust’s figures, 55 times likelier to win a place at Oxbridge than a
state-school pupil from a poor background. When private-school students and
state-school students meet for the first time on a level playing field, ie at
university, inevitably the state-school students outperform the private ones –
inevitably because many of the private ones have in effect been over-promoted,
having had such superior resources devoted to them during their childhood.
Private education acts, in other words, as a crucial block on downward as well
as upward relative social mobility.
“Finishing schools for the children of oligarchs,” was how
Andrew Halls, head of King’s College School in Wimbledon (day fees of more than
£20,000 a year), vividly characterised them in a well-publicised Sunday Times
interview. “We didn’t mean as schools to exclude the children of teachers,
police officers and nurses, let alone doctors and lawyers,” he explained, “but
these high fees” – more than £30,000 a year at the top boarding schools – “are
above the salary levels of all these people now.”
Although one-third of pupils at private schools receive help
with their fees, averaging about a quarter, those pupils are often siblings of
other pupils and/or the children of staff or the military or the clergy; that
one in 12 private-school pupils receive a means-tested bursary, but two-thirds
of those one in 12 are still paying more than half; and finally, that fewer
than one in 100 pupils are in receipt of a full bursary, ie paying no fees. In
short, most parents going down the private-school route still pay heavily to do
so – and that the fees they pay are out of reach of the population as a whole.
Tristram Hunt the shadow education secretary, recently
announced that Labour in power would, in his words, “introduce a school
partnership standard requiring all private schools to form genuine and
accountable partnerships with state schools if they want to keep their business
rates relief.” The Daily Telegraph declared that Labour had “retreated to what
it knows best: class envy”. While there was a letter to the Guardian querying
the paper’s headline. “Taking away one small part of the huge state subsidies
to private schools is hardly an ‘assault’ which concluded, “this is the
equivalent to an ‘assault’ from one of Ken Dodd’s tickling sticks.”
In 2013, the chief inspector of schools, Michael Wilshaw,
told private school heads at the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference that
their existing partnerships with state schools largely amounted to “crumbs off
your tables, leading more to famine than feast”.
In the words of Alan Bennett: “We all know that to educate
not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents
is both wrong and a waste. Private education is not fair. Those who provide it
know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to
purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their
education ends without it dawning on them, then that education has been
wasted.”
Education should not be just another item or service to be
bought or sold. It is the most formative part of any child’s upbringing. We all
want the best for our children and capitalist society prioritise the right for
individuals to educate their child as they wish (a phantom right for most
people, given that fees are not an option). It is not the child’s money that is
spent on fees; no child has earned the right to a better education, just as no
child has failed to earn that right. So the question is, do some parents have
the right to pay for an education that indirectly harms the life chances of
other children by blocking their path?
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