A parable for today’s society

Your article concerning the conversion of the former Diocesan and Payne School into living accommodation for the King’s School saddened me (Former Primary Turned Into Pupils Home From Home, Kentish Gazette, July 28).

The building was opened in 1849 and, it seemed to me, could not have been suited to its purpose even then.

The advent of the 20th and 21st centuries certainly did not make it more so.

In 1942 it was necessary to accommodate the girls from the bombedout Payne Smith School and two temporary huts were provided.

These huts were still in use when the school merged with Kingsmead School about three years ago, ie 70 years later.

For many years there was a class housed in another ‘temporary’ hut the other side of the main road.

The school served children largely from less-than-privileged backgrounds.

Neither the church (for the building was owned by the ecclesiastical authorities) or the county was prepared to spend very much on these premises over the 160 years, and certainly not enough to remove the huts or build a new school.

Now, however, a private school, the parents of whose pupils can afford to pay £35,295 a year, can find a million pounds to purchase the site and heaven knows how much to refurbish the buildings to provide luxury digs for their privileged students.

The King’s School, of course, is hand in glove with the church.

My politics are nowhere near those of the Corbynistas and the like, but the fact that children from poor homes were given little over more than a century and a half, whereas the children of the rich are now munificently catered for in the same building, is surely an eloquent parable for the equalities that exist in our society today. Colin E Eyre Littlebourne Road, Canterbury