Kids Company Camila: I cheated to get into top school... my mum took the exam for me
CAMILA Batmanghelidjh, the founder of scandal-hit charity Kids Company, has admitted she cheated to gain entry to top public school Sherborne School for Girls. She said her mother took the exam which got her into the school in Dorset, which she attended from the mid 1970s to the 1980s. Her extraordinary confession follows repeated reports that Ms Batmanghelidjh made grossly exaggerated claims about Kids Company’s achievements.
According to Ms Batmanghelidjh, the school sent her Common Entrance exam paper, which she was required to pass to gain a place, to Iran, where her family lived at the time.
But instead of sitting the exam herself, her mother took the exam for her 12-year-old daughter. This weekend, Ms Batmanghelidjh justified it in a newspaper article by saying: ‘I would never have passed [the Common Entrance exam] myself.’
Sherborne was a major financial donor to Kids Company, which is being investigated by Parliament, the Charity Commission and the police, before the charity collapsed insolvent in August amid allegations of sex abuse on its premises.
Some of Kids Company’s clients have also been given free and reduced-cost places at the school, where fees reach £32,000 per year.
This month The Mail on Sunday revealed that Kids Company’s number one cheerleader in the Cabinet, Oliver Letwin, is a governor and former trustee of Sherborne School for Girls. Letwin insisted on giving £3million of public money to Kids Company in July, against the advice of Whitehall mandarins.
The BBC has commissioned a documentary about the charity, scheduled to be shown next year. Insiders have expressed surprise about this, given that £330,000-ayear BBC executive Alan Yentob was Kids Company chairman of trustees between 2003 and 2015.
Last month Yentob admitted that he meddled in the BBC’s news coverage of the closure of the charity.