Vulnerable children will be offered place at Eton or Harrow

PUBLIC schools are launching a diversity drive that will see children who risk being put into care offered places at Eton College and Harrow School.

Under the initiative, named The Boarding Schools Partnership, youngsters from some of the most vulnerable families will enrol at some of Britain’s top boarding schools.

More than 80 councils have signed up to the scheme, which will be launched tomorrow by Lord Nash, the schools minister, and Lord Adonis, a former Labour education minister. Harrow, Rugby, Benenden and Eton are among the schools taking part.

Colin Morrison, the chairman of the Boarding Schools Partnership, said the school fees, typically ranging from £25,000 to £39,000 a year, would be covered by their local councils. This is far less expensive than keeping a child in care, which costs at least £100,000 a year, but does not include the cost of care for children during school holidays.

“It will be expensive but if it keeps children from having to go into care, it will be worth it,” Mr Morrison told The Sunday Times. Currently, only about 100 children go to private boarding schools paid for by councils, but Mr Morrison hopes that the scheme will help boost this number to about 1,000 a year within five years.

Shean Shrigley, 19, who lives on a council estate in Blacon, Chester, with his mother, a cleaner, and three younger sisters, graduated from Eton College under a similar scheme for disadvantaged youngsters.

He said he believed that vulnerable children would do far better in schools like Eton than in care.

“In foster care you feel abandoned,” he said. “Eton is a place where people have got a community and support behind them. It makes a massive change to people’s lives.

“I was underprivileged but I have my mum and my family. In foster care, children have no one.”

In the past, similar schemes have previously failed to get off the ground. Earlier this year, a multi-million-pound government-backed project to give disadvantaged children free places at top boarding schools was axed because, it was said, social workers had “low aspirations” and failed to make referrals.

That project was funded by the Department for Education (DFE) and the Education Endowment Fund (EEF).