‘No frills’ private school charges £52 a week

Founders promise to focus on academic standards and Christian ethos and forgo ‘flashy’ theatres and pools

By INDEPENDENT schools that charge £12,000 a term have in recent years added Olympic-sized pools and elaborate theatres to help give value for money. Now Britain’s first “cut-price private school” is to open this Septem- ber charging parents just £52 a week – without any perks.

The Independent Grammar School: Durham will charge parents less than £2,700-a-year for a “traditional private education without the frills”.

This is a fifth of the average fees for an independent senior school, according to the Independent Schools Commission’s (ISC) annual survey of its 1,200 members.

James Tooley, professor of education policy at Newcastle University, said: “This is not necessarily for lower income families, it is for anyone who says private education is far too expensive. They often include Olympic-size swimming pools, rugby pitches and so on – we are saying that these are not necessary for private education.

“We are saying, let’s get rid of all those and have the basics: high academic standards, strong grounding in mathematics, phonics and languages. It will be no frills and no flash.”

He plans to open the school at a newly refurbished church in the centre of Durham. The school will have Christian ethos, but will not be faith-based.

Prof Tooley, who has spent the last decade setting up chains of low cost private schools in countries such as India, Pakistan and Nigeria, added: “There is always a desire among parents for private education, even those in very poor countries who cannot afford the fees.

“I have given talks at conferences about this, and I am always asked ‘could the same thing happen in the UK?’ I have been thinking about it for several years and then finally got together with some colleagues and decided to do it.”

Prof Tooley is setting up the school along with a Chris Gray, the former principal of Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland, who will be the headmaster. They are currently in the registration process with the Department for Education, and hope the school will be open by September. If successful, they plan to open a chain across the north of England.

The school’s curriculum will be “traditional and knowledge-rich, giving children access to the best of what has been written, spoken and said”.

There will be an inclusive admissions policy, with the school taking children of all backgrounds, and there will be no selection tests. The average fees for an independent secondary school is £13,566 per year for day pupils, rising to £30,651 per year for boarding schools. It costs the tax payer £6,000 per year to educate each pupil at a state school.

Julie Robinson, general secretary at the ISC, said that fees of £2,700 per year are the lowest she had ever heard of any school being able to offer.

She said: “It will be incredibly impressive if they can run a school efficiently on that. If it does pull it off it will be quite something.”