From the chapter ‘Education‘
Will Orr-Ewing, Educationist and founder of Keystone Tutors
For centuries, education was predominantly a private pursuit in the UK, with the elite paying fees for formal schooling or private tutors. Other than those few who might be picked to sing at a local cathedral and receive schooling in return, the vast majority had no access to free formal schooling. The Church of England, which saw the Christian education of children as part of its mission, will be forever synonymous with the move towards mass education as they founded and maintained schools for local children free of charge. It wasn’t until 1870 that the state began to pick up the cudgel of universal free education, and today, out of the heritage of these elite, church and state endeavours, a smorgasbord of types of schools exists. Increasingly fractious debates rage about the place for each in a 21st-century liberal democracy, the hottest of which remain, as ever, around fee-paying, private schools.
Looked at from the outside, UK private[i] schools would seem to be the apple of The Establishment’s eye. They are phenomenally successful in their own right: if they were their own country, in many years, British private schools would come top or second in the much respected PISA[ii] world rankings in English and science and maths.[iii] They are five times more likely than their state counterparts to have educated Britain’s most powerful people.[iv] They must be the quintessence of the phrase: ‘friends in high places’. Elite, stable and seen by critics as unchanging, what place do they merit in a policy overhaul designed to benefit the nation?
Elitist or irrelevant is how these schools are viewed by the many. Campaigns such as #AbolishEton are just the more radical end of a conversation about the relevance of private schools in 21st-century times. Many of private schools’ presumed friends on the right of politics seem equally troubled by their existence, or have begun, at the very least, to question their privileged status – for many are registered as charities, own large tracts of land or inherit significant endowments. Outside politics, public declaration and grateful pride from these schools’ many successful alumni in sports, arts or business is remarkable by its absence. Because they educate so few, they are short of vote-chasing friends in Westminster; because they educate so well, but so unequally, they are short of friends in the public at large.
This view, although understandable, is a shame. These schools are seen to be divisive not by a desire to be so, but only because they are so effective at what they do and in who they do it for. I have spent my life around these schools as a student, teacher, trustee and director. Anyone who knows them, knows that their teachers give a damn. They are staffed by public-spirited souls who have dedicated their careers to helping children just as much as those in state schools do. Most of these teachers have experience of teaching in the state sector before the private sector; few are ideologically in favour of private education. Quite the opposite. They would love to be able to serve children from a wider array of backgrounds than only those who can afford their school’s fees.
Alas, private schools’ leadership is more often than not constrained from doing so not by a lack of willpower but by a failure of imagination. The sector’s response to criticism is a defensive crouch. To ensure that they keep their charitable status, they must demonstrate their ‘public benefit’. But because there is no statutory definition of what this means, they tend to fall back simply on what other schools are doing: predominantly the sharing of resources and provision of bursaries.
The sharing of facilities is all well and good, but inconsequential to the majority of children. As the Independent Schools Council concedes, ‘assuming all [private school facilities] were shared with state schools, they would only serve a small fraction of the 28,000 state-funded schools in the UK.’[v]
The enthusiasm for bursaries is more problematic. The number of families helped by them is even more miniscule than the number of children who benefit from the sharing of facilities. Even if, for the sake of argument, the entire private school system was opened up to means-tested bursaries, it would reach only 7 per cent of school students. The dream of social mobility via bursary increasingly feels like the fixation of an era that has passed. Many of the field’s leading thinkers (Selina Todd,[vi] Gregory Clark[vii] and John Goldthorpe[viii]) advise that schools can do little to advance social mobility in any substantive way on a national basis. In what way does it benefit the public to pluck the brightest and most hard-working out of their local communities and give them a place at the top table?
What we need is to make the impact of these unique institutions, repositories of heritage and achievement for centuries felt for as many children as possible. How could this be done?
In a sentence: ‘unbundle’ the school experience and massively redistribute it so that many more children can secure access to at least some of it.
The typical school day is currently a ‘bundled’ experience. Classes, meals, music, art, sport and so on are provided, by and large, wrapped together as one product. But this is a contingent fact of history and a fairly recent one at that: in the 19th century, these schools were much more fluid, with students, for instance, bringing their own tutors to teach classes not offered by the school. I believe the system should usher in more fluidity again.
So imagine a school that began to present and price its offering à la carte rather than all you can eat. Let’s imagine some tiered ‘subscriptions’ or ‘memberships’ on the menu. At the top would be your current all-inclusive offering. A middle tier might allow a family access to teaching in certain subjects not offered in their current school, or perhaps participation in some extracurricular provision. A lower tier would make the school available in the holidays for school-run revision camps, tutoring clinics or enrichment activities. Private schools have a reputation for their academic rigour; their focus on the individual child; their commitment to the whole child outside the classroom as much as inside. Slowly, but surely, the benefits currently offered by private schools would be available for far more families; and over the longer term, such widened access could have the knock-on effect of accelerating all schools to seek this reputation and focus.
Where this gets even more interesting is how it ties with private schools’ charitable and bursary goals. By having so many more flexible services at its disposal, a school could act with laser focus on particular needs in their current locale or a more national context. A fraction of the money required for a full bursary could give free access to local children to its special educational needs (SEN) department, for example, or to its full Oxbridge and Ivy League preparation services or its careers service. Now that, in the wake of the pandemic, schools know how to record their lessons to a high standard, some private schools might decide that their public benefit will be to give full online access to their best recorded lessons for anyone who wants them.
Think of the local family who uses their nearby private school for English as an Additional Language (EAL) lessons not provided at the school they attend more regularly, or the ambitious but disadvantaged student who can finally find a Mandarin, environmental technology or Ancient Greek A Level teacher and make a compelling application to a top global university because of it. Their attitude to the local private schools goes from seeing it, like Jude Fawley,[ix] as a place of impossible high walls into a vital part of the local community – to a hub of educational richness, online and in person.
Another big advantage is that these schools, with a new role in their community, would help to build solidarity in our fractured society. Class prejudice has beset this country for centuries. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, private schools could do their part to epitomise the mutual obligations inherent in being a part of society,[x] and counterbalance the siloed opinions and mistrust between many at the forefront of debates about schools with sentiments of love, dignity and mutual respect.
Private schools’ secret sauce is in helping youngsters to build common cause among young people, especially through extracurricular pursuits. So each has the potential to build bridges and relations between all kinds of schools and communities across the country, and thus start to unpick the elite knots of social circles that private schools generate. For example, rather than choose far-flung international places for their sports team tours, why not ensure (as a provision of their charitable registration) that at least some sports tours are done to other parts of the UK to play against local teams, with thought paid to how to socialise within games (mixed teams?) and afterwards. Football, after all, is beloved by all parts of society. Beyond sports, combined music and drama performances could achieve the same effect. Encouraging shared endeavour across society has plenty of precedent. The solidarity built by fighting side by side during the World Wars is legendary, leading as it did to the post-war settlement and creation of the welfare state. Is it too much to expect that elite students might come to realise that those who have ‘failed’ in the meritocratic game may have done so through no fault of their own, and may come to empathise with those whose hand, dealt randomly at birth, did not happen to contain any aces?
There could be other, more tangential, knock-on effects too, ones that could open the mindsets of policy makers, school administrators and parents too. If significantly more families were able to choose specific aspects of education for their child’s needs (albeit still at a [smaller] private cost), might they begin to demand more discretion over how some tax monies are allocated to them, say, such as the pupil premium[xi] or that devoted via the National Tutoring Programme?[xii] There is even an argument to be explored for tax-funded vouchers for parents to choose how their children receive their education, and across which schools. That discussion is outside the realms of this essay, but a consequence of unbundling the school experience, however many steps are taken, would bring massive empowerment and agency to families or even the children themselves to shape their educational future. At long last the sombre and standardised conveyor belt of contemporary schooling could be given a healthy shake up.
The unique quality of children is that no matter where they come from, no matter how rich or poor, they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, vulnerable. The unbundled private school could be tried tomorrow, building out of the incipient partnerships now being forged between state and private schools, its success assessed and then scaled. It is an idea that has its roots in many schools’ histories, the majority of which were set up to educate local children for free, and only charged fees for those outside the parish. It is an idea whose time has come again.
Notes
[i] In the confusing lexicon defining the different types of schools in the UK, ‘private’ schools are also sometimes called ‘public’ schools although they are paid for privately by charging pupils fees to attend. All ‘private’ schools are also ‘independent’ schools, because their governance is independent, but not all’ independent schools are necessarily private (because some are not fee-paying); however, the terms are often used interchangeably. Schools funded directly by the government’s tax revenues are generally called ‘state’ schools.
[ii] The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment.
[iii] For example, in 2015, UK independent schools scored an average of 558 in reading, 557 in mathematics, and 572 in science, which is an average 16 per cent higher than the UK state schools average. See Oxford Economics (2018) The Impact of Independent Schools on the UK Economy. A Report prepared for the Independent Schools Council, www.isc.co.uk/media/5364/isc_impact_of_independent_schools_on_the_uk_economy.pdf
[iv] The Sutton Trust (2019) Elitist Britain 2019, www.suttontrust.com/our-research/elitist-britain-2019
[v] ISC (Independent Schools Council) (2020) ISC Census and Annual Report 2020, www.isc.co.uk/media/6686/isc_census_2020_final.pdf, p 20.
[vi] Todd, S. (2018) ‘The six myths of social mobility’, Keynote address to UCL Institute of Education, 30 May, https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/myths-of-social-mobility/#:~:text=Selina%20Todd%20is%20Professor%20of,Women%27s%20History%20Network%20Book%20Prize.&text=Social%20mobility%20is%20an%20individual,%27self%2Dmade%20man
[vii] Clark, G. (2015) ‘Social mobility barely exists but let’s not give up on equality’, The Guardian, 4 February, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/04/social-mobility-equality-class-society
[viii] Wilby, P. (2020) ‘The expert in social mobility who says education cannot make it happen’, The Guardian, 17 March, www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/17/the-expert-in-social-mobility-who-says-education-cannot-make-it-happen
[ix] Jude Fawley is the tenacious, honourable hero of Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel, Jude the Obscure. He is an ambitious, self-taught man, but social convention and conformity thwart those ambitions.
[x] HM Treasury and Sunak, R. (2020) ‘Chancellor’s statement on coronavirus (COVID-19): 8 April 2020’, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chancellor-of-the-exchequer-rishi-sunak-on-economic-support-for-the-charity-sector
[xi] DfE (Department for Education) (2022) ‘Pupil premium: Overview’, www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium/pupil-premium
[xii] DfE (Department for Education) (2022) ‘National Tutoring Programme: Guidance for schools 2022 to 2023’, www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-tutoring-programme-guidance-for-schools-2022-to-2023