Why public schools must adapt to survive
Martin Stephen, a former high master at St Paul’s, tells Max Davidson why private education must move with the times
Few topics ruffle more middle-class feathers than private education. Why do public schooleducated men – and women – continue to exert an influence in public life out of all proportion to their numbers? Only around seven per cent of children go to independent schools, but you would not know it from the frequency with which they pop up in board rooms, the judiciary, the Cabinet, even at the Oscars. How do they do it? Should they all be able to do it in skirts? (More on which later.) And who can now afford the eyewatering fees?
That particular hoary old debate recently acquired a fresh edge, thanks to research carried out at King’s College, London, which will have alarmed parents who have just written out a fat cheque to Eton, Harrow or Winchester.
A research team led by Prof Robert Plomin looked at more than 4,000 pupils from state schools, grammar schools and independent schools and concluded: “For educational achievement, there seems to be little added benefit from attending selective schools.” Or, to put it another way, bright pupils are born bright, so they do not need to be hot-housed at school. Panic stations! Stop that cheque!
Except it’s not quite so simple, according to Dr Martin Stephen, former high master of St Paul’s School in London, whose alumni include George Osborne, Jonathan Miller and John Simpson. “One of the strengths of independent schools is that they are good at nurturing children of special abilities. Education begins with the family and, whereas state schools tend to try to please the government, independent schools focus on pleasing parents – who know the needs of their children better than anyone.”
Or to put it yet another way, as
The Daily Telegraph reports that the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) did in a debate on private schoolteachers’ workloads yesterday, exorbitant fees lead to a “sense of entitlement” among parents, who put pressure on schools to deliver the grades that will get their progeny places at Oxbridge. And why not, counsels Stephen? He is fond of citing an American study that found that 80per cent of parents who believed their offspring had exceptional ability were right – they actually did.
Suited and booted at his tastefully furnished home in Hammersmith, Stephen looks every inch an old boy. He was educated at Uppingham and, before his time at St Paul’s, was headmaster of the Perse School Cambridge and Manchester Grammar School. He was also chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), which represents the country’s leading independent schools. But behind the beakish exterior, there is a rebel lurking. A self-confessed “maverick public school headmaster with a seared conscience”, he is certainly not an uncritical cheerleader for private education.
“In the past, public schools survived by adapting, but they have not been very good at reacting to the demands of an egalitarian society,” Stephen admits. He is particularly critical of Eton in this regard. “It is a brilliant school, but you cannot fail to smell the extraordinary sense of entitlement that fills the place.”
A prolific author, Stephen has just published a highly entertaining book, The English Public School: An Irreverent and Personal History, which does exactly what it says on the tin; examining the pros and cons of private education, while capturing the eccentricities endemic in establishments that have become household names.
Ludicrous minor characters flit across the pages, as if this were a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Meet the school chaplain who boasts about spanking his 16-year-old daughter when she is late home; the retired RSM who gets blotto at the annual CCF parade and booms, “Contingent! Pair up in threes!”; or the thick-as-two-planks geography master, who has only been given the job because he has an Oxford rugby blue, and who bores the pants off his pupils by reading aloud from a textbook on glaciers.
When the public schools of the past were bad, they were very bad, stamping down hard on anything in the nature of shenanigans, particularly sexual shenanigans. There was a famous 19th century headmaster who was ridiculed for insisting that boys’ trouser pockets were sewn up, so that they could not indulge in what was euphemistically known as “pocket billiards”. Just Victorian prudishness, you might think, but, as Stephen recounts, he was still made to wear trousers with sewn-up pockets as a schoolboy in the Swinging Sixties.
The public schools of the 21st century are much more civilised environments – in part, Stephen believes, because “they have often been their own worst critics. They can make fun of themselves. And, most importantly, they can adapt to change.” At St Paul’s, Stephen overthrew centuries of tradition by abolishing uniform in the sixth form. “I was convinced that 16-year-olds should learn to dress for the future they faced as adults.”
What does he make of the fact that his alma mater will now allow boys to go to school in skirts, as announced this week? “I am very nervous of this sort of announcement,” he replies. “The danger of blanket rules about dress and dresses is that they make the deeply personal issue of gender identity a cause célèbre, rather than a personal matter to be solved personally and individually.” Still, he is minded to remember that “homosexuality was an illegal offence that would have got you immediate expulsion in my time at school; this debate over dress code is certainly a no more radical change than the change over attitudes towards [that]”.
Stephen’s father was a Sheffield GP (who became Sir Andrew Stephen, thanks to his services to football as well as medicine) but how many GPS, he wonders, can afford to send their children to public schools today? The fees for day boys at St Paul’s are £25,000 a year. Top boarding schools charge far more – Eton £38,000, Dulwich £41,000 – making life tough for what Stephen calls the “middlemiddle class professionals who have been their bedrock”. For this, he blames greed stemming from poor governance, and fanned by demand from the overseas market.
Though he and his wife, Jenny, former head of fee-paying South Hampstead High School, privately educated their grown-up sons, their instinct when it comes to their own children “is not to pay fees, even though they earn good salaries, but to move to the catchment area of a good state school”.
He believes that too many English state schools set their sights too low – and few challenge their students to aim high. “Boris Johnson and Eton are always mentioned in the same breath, as if they are organically linked, but nobody ever asks how Jeremy Corbyn was shaped by his school.”
One of the hallmarks of a public schoolboy, Stephen believes, is his self-deprecation. He gleefully quotes one of his own school reports: “Martin will never become a milk monitor until he learns to be responsible.” But his respect for public schools, warts and all, endures. He admits that the schools are an endangered species, but argues: “You do not improve an education system by abolishing the best schools in it.” Instead, the Government should seek to share what they do well with those who cannot afford them from their own pocket.
Money, as ever, is key. At Manchester Grammar School, and again at St Paul’s, Stephen threw himself into raising money for bursaries and other schemes benefiting children from lessadvantaged backgrounds. He particularly regrets the fact that,
‘Nobody ever asks how Jeremy Corbyn was shaped by his school’
when the independent sector has offered to educate selected pupils from the state sector, charging only what it would cost to educate the children in the state system, governments of all political stripes have pooh-poohed the idea.
As for those exorbitant fees, Stephen believes that the highachieving public schools of the future are more likely to be outstanding, but relatively affordable, day schools such as Leicester Grammar School (where the fees are £13,000 a year) than the old boarding school warhorses.
But he also acknowledges the remarkable resilience of Eton, Harrow et al, and their ability to reinvent themselves. “They are the Japanese knotweed of education – extraordinarily difficult to eradicate and born survivors.”