James O’Brien is a successful radio show host and television presenter. His no-nonsense, straight-talking interviewing style has helped him build a base of hundreds of thousands of loyal fans. The Tory MP Nadine Dorries is not one of them.
In March 2017 she took to Twitter to complain that O’Brien had blocked her over their differing views on Brexit. She is an ardent Brexiteer – he isn’t. Dorries became so incensed by O’Brien’s refusal to engage that she launched a public attack on his private education, tweeting: ‘Well James O’Brien the journalist has blocked me. Is that how supposedly impartial journalists operate at LBC by blocking MPs?’, later adding, ‘to be fair, I think the fact that O’Brien is a public school posh boy fuck wit, has more to do with it than his being a journo’.1 In a further tweet she suggested that his public school contacts must have helped him get his job as a presenter on the BBC’s Newsnight.
Dorries’ assertion that O’Brien was privately educated is true. He attended the Catholic boarding school Ampleforth College, before following his father into journalism and landing a job as editor of the William Hickey gossip column on the Daily Express. And O’Brien, who has previously referred to himself on air as a ‘champagne socialist’, happily acknowledged his pedigree schooling. But he also made the observation that Dorries had chosen to send her own daughter to Ampleforth.
The charge against Dorries, who has also called out Cameron and Osborne as ‘arrogant posh boys’, was of rank hypocrisy. Yet Dorries refused to recognise the irony and instead fired off another tweet saying that she was proud to have sent both her daughters to Ampleforth, where she said they had learned very good manners.2
Dorries is, of course, not the first public figure to subconsciously distance themselves from the personal decisions they have made about their own children’s education. David Dimbleby famously tried to embarrass Jacob Rees-Mogg over his schooling when they were discussing Rees-Mogg’s support for the expansion of Heathrow Airport on the BBC’s Question Time in December 2015. When Rees-Mogg said he had been to school in the area close to the airport, Dimbleby interrupted the Tory politician to tell the audience that the school he was referring to was Eton. But Rees-Mogg drew uproarious applause when he coolly reminded the veteran BBC presenter that he had attended Eton at the same time as Dimbleby’s own son.3
Public schools have a mesmerising influence over British people. Parents recognise on one level that by paying up to £42,000 a year they are securing an unfair advantage for their children, but at the same time they do not believe they should be held personally responsible for that decision. Who doesn’t want the best for their children?
Even the singer-songwriter Paul Weller, whose work includes ‘Eton Rifles’, an extraordinarily well-observed satire of how the rest of society views the public schoolboy, ended up sending his five children to public schools, although not to Eton. It’s an odd decision for a man who was a voice of Red Wedge, the music and arts movement of the Labour Party, and once complained to The Observer about an ‘invisible establishment’ and ‘the big money people elite’.4 A much more relaxed Weller told The Independent in 2010: ‘I guess you get what you pay for; my little lad’s only four and the other day he was counting in French. It’s hard for me to get my head round what is a nice school because I never experienced that.’5
Someone who has been much more coy about where their children were educated is Amanda Spielman, better known as the chief inspector of schools. Asked by The Guardian in 2018 where her two daughters went to school, Spielman chose to plead the fifth. However, a little light digging quickly establishes they both went to the same school as their mother – £24,000-a-year St Paul’s Girls’ School. If there’s a job in the public sector where a commitment to state education is a prerequisite, surely it is the one where you go round the country telling state school heads how to run their schools.6
For those who have benefited from a public school education, it can sometimes overshadow their achievements, especially in left-leaning industries such as the performing arts. Harrow-educated actor Benedict Cumberbatch spent several years complaining that he was the victim of ‘posh bashing’ and was being ‘castigated as a moaning, rich, public-school bastard, complaining about only getting posh roles’. Things got so bad that he even threatened to leave the UK for America.7
The most absorbing example of this apparent conflict between privilege and authenticity was played out by the actor Laurence Fox when he was threatened with legal action by Harrow after he spoke out about his bad experience at the school. Fox, whose family has attended Harrow for generations, was expelled shortly before his A-levels and vowed never to send his own children there. Yet when fellow thespians Julie Walters and Christopher Eccleston complained in 2016 that public school-educated actors were dominating the profession, Fox hit back.
He said: ‘They should probably stop talking. I think people should keep pretty quiet about stuff like that especially given the money they earn…’
But Fox was also defensive about how the world saw him: ‘I may sound posh because I went to public school but I don’t feel particularly posh. I’m not married to someone who’s posh, and our kids don’t seem that posh to me. But you’re always going to have posh people feeling superior and not posh people feeling inferior, so you want to be somewhere in the middle. So long as you get on with people when you meet them, that’s what it’s all about.’8
Appearing on Saturday Live on Radio 4 in February 2016, Fox revealed that his father, The Remains of the Day actor James Fox, was similarly kicked out of Harrow as a young man, saying: ‘My dad had been expelled and his father had gone and been expelled. Most of us have been expelled from Harrow and yet we continue to send our children there. I didn’t respond very well to the Harrow education, but I was a pain to them as well, so in the end we parted ways.’
In 2015 Fox and his then wife Billie Piper were still undecided whether to send their own children to a private school, even if they have ruled out Harrow. He told the Daily Telegraph: ‘It’s probably changed a lot since I was there,’ recalling an era in which fagging, for instance, was still the norm. ‘But I still think that public school wasn’t designed for the modern world. Also, I wouldn’t want Winston [his son] in a place where there are no girls. It took me about five years after leaving to have any real confidence around women.’9
This ambivalence reflects the feelings of many who have been to a public school. No matter how appalling an experience it was, former pupils find it difficult to break from tradition. So, while ex-public schoolboys and privately educated girls often complain about their own education it doesn’t necessarily deter them from sending their own children to fee-paying schools. They may candidly acknowledge its flaws as a fair system of education, but their own children are the exception to the rule.
Even George Orwell and Alec Waugh, two of the fiercest critics of public schools, ensured their children received a private education. Orwell had reserved a place at Westminster for his adopted son, Richard, although after Orwell’s death he instead ended up at Scotland’s oldest public school, Loretto School, near Edinburgh. Waugh sent his two sons to his old school Sherborne, which he had so mercilessly savaged in his book The Loom of Youth. When it comes to the education of the posh, it sometimes seems a case of ‘do as I say and not as I do’.10
Dillibe Onyeama, the author of Nigger at Eton, who suffered terribly from racist and sexual abuse in the 1960s, says he can find no reason that would stop him sending his own children to an English public school. ‘Since private education is appreciated in Britain, I do not see that it should be faulted. If influence and monetary power represent the norm in a capitalist free-enterprise state, on what grounds should parents be prohibited from playing the game the way the cards fall? If I could afford it, I am not sure that I would say no.’11
The spell private education holds over British parents is difficult to break. When aristocratic families have a falling-out with the public school system they tend to send their own children to day rather than boarding schools. Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, had a terrible time at Harrow in the 1960s. His reaction was to send his own children first to state primaries. Yet by the time they reached secondary school age he had packed them off to public schools in Chester.12
The journalist and author Alex Renton has written very powerfully about the harm boarding schools does to children.13 He was the victim of sexual abuse at Ashdown House prep school, whose former pupils include Boris Johnson. But although he has vowed not to make the same mistakes with his own children, he does not disavow private education, only boarding schools. All this shows is that private education is a hard habit to kick. When the disgraced Eton-educated Tory minister Jonathan Aitken faced ruin and imprisonment after losing his libel case against the Guardian in 1997, one of his first thoughts was how was he going to continue paying his children’s expensive boarding school fees.14
Nick Hillman, a former adviser to ex-universities minister David Willetts and who now directs the Higher Education Policy Institute, thinks there might be a cultural fear of the unknown. ‘If you have no family experience of state school education then it is easier to go with what you know.’ And parents are fearful of rearing children who might turn out very different to themselves.
There are two notable exceptions to this rule, namely Anthony Crosland (Highgate) and Tony Benn (Westminster). All four of Benn’s children started out in private schools but were removed so they could continue their education in the state system. Melissa Benn remembers how important the question of education was to her mother and father: ‘At the beginning of our schooling, all four of us were in private schools. My two elder brothers were at Westminster and I was at Norland Place [where George Osborne went]. But then as my parents became more committed to the idea of comprehensive education, we were all moved to state schools – I went to Fox Primary and then Holland Park, my brothers went to Holland Park.’
Benn acknowledges the switch from private to state was difficult for her father and caused him some anxiety: ‘I was put into the St Paul’s entrance exams at eight and eleven and both times I passed, and the reason I was entered was because there must have been a residual anxiety within the wider family and perhaps my parents were checking that I was still developing intellectually. But I didn’t go and I think I would have been a very different citizen had I gone there.’
Interestingly, she says her mother was unaffected by the destructive class attitudes of the time: ‘My mother was an American, and she was tremendously influential, politically, in our family, and in her marriage, and she was a great supporter of the new comprehensive movement.’ She adds: ‘I’m very interested in the decision my parents made. They were morally courageous. I now know as a parent that the combination of adolescence and secondary school causes tremendous anxiety to parents. The year before last I went to speak to all the heads of Essex state secondary schools and I think the comment I made which had most resonance with them was when I pointed out that they not only have the pressures of running state schools but that they are dealing with young people during adolescence.’ Benn spent many hours discussing education with her father, who she says hated his time at Westminster School. ‘He was very interested in my daughters’ primary school. They both went to the most ethnically mixed school, where we live, in the borough of Brent – and he was so interested in the idea of these seventy-seven different nationalities within the primary schools and he said it was extraordinary. And he would say he had a very limited education in comparison! And we would talk about the benefits of state education, and then I would say, “OK, so come on let’s talk about the benefits of YOUR education”. And he would say, “I didn’t like Westminster”, and I would say, “yeah but it clearly gave you the skills to do this and that”, and so we did have honest conversations. I think he would have been quite pleased that I went to speak to Westminster students, which I did, but after he died.’
Tony Little, former headmaster of Eton and author of An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education, believes private education is the first choice for most parents. He says: ‘Polls show that most parents would have their children at a private school if they could.’
I haven’t been able to find concrete evidence to support this view. And it is a claim that is complicated by subjective and impressionistic reasoning. If the question is framed ‘do you want your child to have the best start in life?’ the answer is hardly surprising.
English public schools sell their £40,000-a-year places on the basis of their exam results and so huge pressure is placed on departments to top the exam league tables. Some of the teachers are leaders in their field and are involved in setting the exams (at Eton seven of its teachers set exams for courses taught to their own school pupils)15 and so the potential for conflict of interest is considerable. But in one way the schools are already playing the system and not always within the rules.
Public school teachers play a key role in setting exams that are intended to be equivalent to GCSEs and A-levels, but which state school heads believe are easier than those on the national curriculum. One state school head, a former member of the Association of School and College Leaders, told me that the IGCSE was easier than the GCSE: ‘When we realised this and realised why the private schools were taking it, we started getting our kids to sit it. But when the government cottoned on to how easy it was they stopped us doing it. Of course, they could do nothing about the private schools.’
In August 2017, three of the leading English public schools – Eton, Charterhouse and Winchester – were all caught up in an exam cheating scandal. Pupils had been granted access or had seen the questions before sitting exams equivalent to A-levels. A teacher at Winchester and one at Eton were removed from their posts, sparking investigations by Ofqual and the House of Commons education select committee.
If there is an element of double standards in those who decry public schools and yet privately educate their own children, it’s also worth noting that, when it comes to scandals involving schools found to be helping their pupils cheat in exams, the reaction has been oddly favourable. Far from deterring parents from sending their children to these schools, it can actually reinforce the idea that parents are ‘getting what they pay for’.
Mumsnet, the online discussion forum for parents, hosted a thread from 2013 to 2016 on the ‘state vs public’ debate. It reflected a wide gamut of motivations for sending children to public schools, but the overriding focus was on improving the chance of getting your children into a leading university and/or improving the child’s life chances. There are other factors, such as childcare and added ‘snob value’, but these tended to be secondary. For wealthy families, where school fees attract tax breaks and are often part of a package of executive perks, the case for a public school education is hard to resist.
BoffinMum offered this advice: ‘I’ve used both sectors for my kids, taught in both sectors and attended both sectors. I would say that in a lot of cases it’s not really worth the kind of money schools are charging these days, unless there’s a particular reason, such as the only other state option being completely unsuitable, needing extras such as boarding or extended days that you can’t get locally, or a child being very musical or needing ballet training, and needing copious timetabled opportunities for practice. Otherwise I actually think the state sector currently has the edge for a lot of children.’16
One Mumsnet couple, who were both state educated, said they were well paid and could ‘easily afford the fees’. Peanutbuttersarnies said: ‘I’ve worked out that private education for both would be about £300k. With this money we could save and give them a deposit for a house. Or buy a property when they go to uni for them to share as their first property. So private education would need to be pretty amazing.’
As spokesman for the independent schools’ movement, Barnaby Lenon is paid to advertise the advantages of a private school education. However, Lenon, the son of a vicar who grew up in a council estate in Sidcup and won a scholarship to a small public school called Eltham College, is passionate about how much a child can achieve at one of his schools.
He began his training at Holland Park comprehensive and after stepping down as headmaster of Harrow he helped establish a state-funded free school, the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford, east London, where he is chairman of the governors. It is an exceptionally successful sixth-form college which now enjoys the support of a number of public schools, including Brighton College, Caterham School, Eton College, City of London School, Forest School, Highgate School and University College School. The school has been dubbed the ‘Eton of the East End’. Lenon has written about what makes successful schools in his book, Much Promise: Successful Schools in England, plugged by his former pupil David Cameron, who described it as a ‘must read’.
Days before we meet at Paddington Station, Lenon informs me I’ll be able to recognise him because he will be wearing red trousers. Lenon did not get to run one of the country’s biggest and most famous public schools for twelve years without knowing what colour trousers he would be wearing seven days before a meeting. From the start, Lenon makes it clear that he considers ‘public school’ to be a pejorative term used by the media and ‘socialists’ to create an impression of elitism, top hats, ‘fagging and buggery’. He prefers ‘independent’ or, at a push, ‘private’. When we grapple with the etymology of ‘public school’ he says he can’t be sure of what ‘public’ really meant at the time. The Victorians retained the word ‘public’ because it gave the impression they were still honouring the terms of the public endowments. Lenon accepts that most of the medieval foundations were established to teach the poor ‘but they became successful, expanded rapidly, and their endowments were too small to educate all the other pupils’, hence the introduction of fees.
For Lenon, the appeal of the ‘independent’ schools is stronger than it has ever been. He says that they offer ‘first-class’ education and high chances of access to good universities at a cost much more reasonable than many people think. ‘The average annual fees for a day school are just £13,500… with pupils drawn from a wide variety of social backgrounds,’ he says.
He argues that the choice of private education is so diverse in this country that it is almost impossible to compare institutions. The top selective public schools such as Eton, St Paul’s and Westminster are a world apart from an establishment in the north of England with a total intake of 150 run by a husband and wife. Says Lenon: ‘Most independent schools are not academically selecting. They will take whoever comes along, that’s true of virtually all prep schools, and it’s true of the majority of secondary schools. They’re catering to those parents… who can just about afford to send their kids or can afford it with a bursary.’17
Lenon is keen to stress there are ‘lots of myths’ surrounding public schools which may deter some parents from sending their children. He says many ISC members run exceptional facilities equivalent to ‘three-star hotels’ where child welfare is at the centre of their service. Of course, state schools suffer from equal and opposite myths about teenage pregnancies and classroom stabbings. The main difference is that state schools, by definition, are more open institutions, accountable to the public via the government.
But as far as Lenon is concerned any political objection to private education has been rendered redundant by the introduction of university tuition fees: ‘When you and I were eighteen, nobody paid to go to university, now they’re paying £9,250 a year plus maintenance loans. Receiving, if they’re lucky, five hours of tuition a week and so that is no more expensive than going to an average independent school where they’re going to be getting thirty to fifty hours’ tuition a week. In terms of the principle, which of course many socialists would understandably stick to, that principle has now been given away by Tony Blair and subsequent governments because now people over the age of eighteen in this country are paying for their education. So, I don’t feel that there’s any reason to apologise any more for paying for your education even if one felt inclined to do so.’
Anthony Seldon says that it is only people opposed to independent schools who think that parents chose them ‘for snobby reasons’. He explains: ‘In truth there is a whole variety [of reasons]. Most parents I meet want the very best for their children and if the independent school is the best in the area, the answer is fairly obvious.’18
For someone like the comedian Jim Davidson, who was brought up in a council estate in south-east London not far from where Barnaby Lenon grew up, the memories of state schooling in the 1960s are not good. He told me: ‘I was the one Protestant boy in a 400-seater Catholic school. It was a secondary modern. They didn’t have the 11-plus. It was horrible, all we cared about was playing football. It was just really rough. I mean the teachers were frightened to death. It was like the Bash Street Kids. They never did any homework and I didn’t go to school a lot of the time. In the fourth year I hardly did anything – I went fishing most of the time. And I just sent them a letter with my dad’s signature saying I was sick. Everything was geared not to learn. And I didn’t get any exams.’19
After Davidson made it in show business he sent his first daughter to a state school. ‘I got married and got money and then I sent my daughter to a normal school and she was as bad as me in a frock. She got expelled for blowing up the chemistry lab when she threw a match in the Bunsen burners. I got booted out of that relationship when my daughter was five months old but I kept in touch with her even until this day. And she lived with me for quite a bit. But she didn’t learn anything at school.’
By the time his second child was born, private schools were a natural choice among the new social circles in which he was now mixing. His son went to ‘Cheltenham school – which I believe he hated. And boarded there. I didn’t want him to do that but I’d split with wife number two. I turned up to watch him play rugby but I didn’t interfere. So he left there with various A-levels and then later on in life as a mature student – about five or six years after he left school – he went back to uni and got a degree in psychology. But now can’t hold a job down, just does jobs to pay the rent. He wants to be a rock star, so he needn’t have gone to school. He just needs to know C, F and G. He’s very handsome and talented and he plays in a band – he doesn’t make much money but I don’t think he’s bothered and he’s very happy.’
Davidson now regrets sending his son to Cheltenham. ‘If I’d had it my way he wouldn’t have gone. I would have given him the opportunity but let him decide.’ Davidson ended up paying for his second son to go to Hurstpierpoint College in West Sussex, although he later tried to bribe him into leaving. Davidson recalls exactly how he broached the subject: ‘I said: “Freddie, go to a normal school that costs nothing and on your eighteenth birthday I’ll buy you a Ferrari,” and he said, “Actually Dad, as much as I’d like a Ferrari, I think a good education is probably more important.” Now he manages a car sales department at Nissan.’
So why did he pay all that money on private education? ‘Private schools just seemed the thing to do – if you didn’t do it you were a bit of a lefty. All the people I knew sent their kids to private school. Even the lefty ones. Especially the lefty ones.’ But he also wonders ‘how many fathers that have split up with their wives are quite happy to pay for their kids to go to school because of guilt? And do they really think it’s better? Because the wives want to punish the father – less money for the new blonde bimbo.’
Did Davidson think it would give his children a leg-up in life? ‘I hoped it would. But it didn’t turn out like that. I didn’t know much about private schools – I didn’t know much about schools at all, but you think you pay that money… What it did do is, they speak well, and they have good knowledge of things, and they’re quite sensible, they’re not “Jeremy Kyle” kids. So even if they’re not the brightest (and I’m not saying my kids aren’t the brightest), they’re around kids who want to learn, and I think that’s the difference. If you pay for kids to go to school, they tend to work harder because you say, “Look, I’m bloody paying for you to do this.” I’m probably the last of the uneducated Davidsons in my family.’
He ends by saying proudly: ‘Charlie is a lawyer, a member of the Carlton Club, and I’m meeting him on Thursday and we’re both going to a Freemasons’ lodge together.’
While one barely state-educated comedian has given three of his kids a private education, another highly educated public school comedian has kept his children in the state sector. David Baddiel went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s in north London, whose former pupils include comedy actors Matt Lucas and Sacha Baron Cohen, former Tory home secretary Leon Brittan, historian Simon Schama and F1 world champion Damon Hill. Afterwards Baddiel took a double first at Cambridge.
His daughter attended Camden School for Girls, where other well-known parents have chosen to educate their children, including the actor Emma Thompson and the education campaigner Fiona Millar. His son goes to the local comprehensive school. But for Baddiel the question of his own private education challenges assumptions people have about public schools.
When Baddiel started out at Haberdashers’, his father, then forty-two, had been made redundant by Unilever. He told me: ‘He eventually set up his own business selling Dinky Toys in an indoor market but he made very little money from that. So the only reason I could go to Haberdashers’ was because of the direct-grant system. This meant most people there were richer than me, or rather their parents were. Having said that, Habs is a bourgeois school. We have in this country quite an outdated idea of our education system, which is that private schools are posh and everything else isn’t. Whereas the truth is that, within the private sector, Eton and Harrow and Winchester and St Paul’s are posh. Everything else is middle-class. Plus of course selective. So it’s much more about middle-class aspiration than wealth or privilege in and of itself.’
Baddiel says that the public schools have helped immigrant families who may not have assimilated in mainstream society: ‘I’ve noticed in going to read to schools with my kids’ books now that some of the same kind of schools have a very large Asian intake. When I went to Habs, it was a very large Jewish intake (in fact I believe it had, unbelievably, a quota). The point about this is: if you come from an immigrant background, education isn’t about class. Immigrant kids, whether Asian or Jewish, have families on their backs who come so recently from proper impoverishment and/or persecution that they are very very focused on their kids doing well. Indeed, assimilation itself gets channelled through education. If you can get a good education, you are British, and therefore, safe. And it’s much more to do with that cultural need than a more simplistic one of wanting to rise in class ranks.’
He adds: ‘Having said that, being Jewish has a particular spin here. Because people in the UK don’t have much sense of what Jewish is, because I went to a private school, it is sometimes assumed that I come from a privileged background. I think that would not have been the assumption had I been from another ethnic minority. I was listed by Michael Gove, whilst he was education secretary, as being one of a bunch of people who went to private school and was now successful in the arts. The assumption therefore – especially as I went to Cambridge – is that I had been awarded advantages in life due to poshness.
‘But I got into Habs and Cambridge because I was clever. It was nothing to do with money and still less to do with connections or position or anything else. But I think we have something of an ingrained binary simplicity as regards class in this country, and like to avoid complexity. Anyway, I don’t think going to a private school helped me that much. The teaching was good, in some cases, and in others not. It was very focused on Oxbridge league tables, so a structure was in place to get you there which may not have been elsewhere (my wife, Morwenna Banks, who didn’t go to private school in Cornwall, tells me that she basically had to get to Cambridge on her own). And from Cambridge I got into Footlights, which taught me how to be on stage and make people laugh for the first time. Although when I came out of Footlights in the mid-eighties everyone hated anyone from Footlights because alternative comics were kings. So I had to start again. But that’s another story.’20
In raising his own family Baddiel is committed to state education and has helped raise funds for his children’s schools. He told the Sunday Times: ‘I give money to help things that otherwise would not happen,’ adding that the gap between facilities in the private and state sectors was ‘ridiculous… These schools do their best with not enough money.’21
Baddiel said he also helped pay for pupils to stage a musical and for eleven-year-olds at his son’s north London secondary school to see a performance of Macbeth. And he has donated for basics such as Bunsen burners and whiteboards. ‘If you do not have the basic things you need to teach the subjects available then the teaching will suffer. Inflation is getting higher and budgets are going down. It is getting harder and harder.’
Tom Utley, the wonderfully understated Daily Mail columnist, is more qualified than most to judge the pros and cons of the two kinds of education: Utley followed his father to Westminster School; he is a former prep school teacher; he sent one of his sons to a comprehensive, one to a grammar and the other two to Dulwich College.
He asked in one of his columns in 2007:
Won’t the younger two resent me for making sacrifices for their elder brothers, which I didn’t make for them? What can I say, except that when I embarked on this breeding business, I had no idea how much I would be earning as the boys grew up? All I’ve ever wanted for any of them – the fourth quite as much as the first – is the best education that my circumstances could provide at the time.
My left-wing friends (a lot of them privately educated) have also accused me of trying to ‘buy privilege’ for the two who went to Dulwich. But it’s not privilege I’m seeking for any of my boys. All I want, like every parent reading this, is that our young should have the best chance we can give them to realise their potential, wherever it may lie. If that’s a ‘privilege’ in the British education system, then it damn well shouldn’t be.
As it happens, our second (privately educated) son is thinking of becoming a secondary-school teacher. That fills me with joy. If he values his education so much that he wants to pass on his enthusiasm to others, that’s just brilliant by me – and to hell with Bentleys, flashy holidays or tickets to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.’22
Jim Davidson has also had time to reflect on his decision: ‘If I was a young man starting out again here’s what I’d choose. If I lived in the country I’d like a nice, village school perhaps they can walk to – a good happy atmosphere. And then you start to plan for secondary school. And I’d bring them into it. I said to my granddaughter, “Would you like to go to a school that specialises in dancing?” She said, “No, because then that is all that I will have.” But at least the conversation was had… But I wouldn’t want them to leave school at fifteen.’
He can see no reason to stop parents sending their children to private schools: ‘If you can pay for it, you’re loosening the burden on the state schools that are overcrowded and speak fifteen different languages. The world has changed – if you go to a school in south London now, probably English is only just about the majority of people’s language, so it’s more difficult for people who speak English to be taught.’
Despite the financial cost, there remains a stubborn demand for fee-paying education in Britain, draining the state schools of willing and often very able students as well as highly resourced parental support. The public school industry benefits from cuts to state education, which have left many state schools forced to crowd-fund part of their pupils’ education.
The ISC has been quick to take advantage of the state school funding crisis, saying that ‘Conservative cuts’ to state education have led to a ‘dramatic rise’ in the number of parents choosing private schools. And it warns that it will soon be ‘essential’ for parents to switch schools if they want a ‘good education’ for their children.23 But how accurate is this claim? Do public schools really provide a better education than their state school equivalents? Or put another way, do they represent value for money? A number of academic studies show that bright students do well in exams whether they are sent to Eton or the local comprehensive.24
There is also plenty of evidence25 to show that once you even out the playing field at university, state school pupils outperform their privately educated counterparts. This suggests that the quality of teaching isn’t any better in the private sector. Parents are really paying for smaller classes, a nannying support service and a place in the privilege network. Private school parents recently complained that the hot-housing of pupils to achieve good exam marks left their children with ‘knowledge gaps’ because there was no time for reading around the subjects.26 Recent school league tables have also seen private schools lose out to better-performing state schools.
The 2017 Sunday Times school league tables saw fifteen private schools, including famous names such as Cheltenham Ladies’ College and London’s Godolphin & Latymer ‘crash’ out of the elite table. The results prompted Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University to say: ‘Parents will increasingly be wondering whether private education is worth it.’
Melissa Benn says parents should consider that: ‘If I look at the people I know, one set of parents who have chosen state education and the other who have chosen for their kids to go private, their children pretty much end up at the same universities if their families are from the same social class. (Private schools might have the edge in terms of Oxbridge entry, given their smaller class sizes and other privileges.) And studies show that children from state school often do better than their private school equivalents when they go to university, but they also become very different kinds of people and citizens, they go into often very different kinds of work, because, often, they have been socialised in completely different ways. And so my human perception of why parents so often choose private schools is their wish to get them into the right set of networks.’
The appeal of private education is made more attractive by state and tax subsidies. Diane Reay has been a visiting professor in Finland for five years. She says the Nordic model of community education removes the temptation of elitist education where she says ‘less than 2 per cent’ of their schools are private and even those don’t enjoy any higher status: ‘They can’t understand why the most powerful people in society would want to segregate themselves from everybody else. This is because they have a strong sense of collectivity and community.’27
In France, where private education is restricted to the Catholic schools whose teachers are paid by the state, their politicians and judges are almost exclusively drawn from representatives of the national state education system. The same is true of Germany,28 where the constitution forbids the education of children on the basis of their socioeconomic status and so their private schools cannot educate only the very rich. In both countries private education tends to be reserved for the teaching of children with special needs.
Reay says: ‘It’s become normative, accepted, that we have a private school system for the best and for the brightest. Of course people talk about the iniquity of their [private schools’] tax status but no one really talks about the damage they are doing to social cohesion, because it is the establishment which is segregating itself. This goes back to what it means to be a citizen and how different it is here… A good citizen should want for all children what they want for their own child. We don’t have that here. Nordic countries still believe that. But our private school system has undermined that whole basis.’
A succession of British governments have let private schools grow into the behemoths of power and influence that they are today. But in a post-Brexit, populist world, an education policy of inaction may no longer be an option.