Privateschools

I am always amused when politicians who have benefited from a private education seek to deny the privilege to others. So it was with Lord Foulkes’ latest polemic (“Why private schools harm our education system”, The Scotsman, 2 December). In it, amongst other things, he lamented the failure of a scheme to bring certain Edinburgh Merchants’ Schools into the state system in the late 1970s.

What Lord Foulkes did not touch on, for obvious reasons, is the comparative costs of secondary education in the independent and maintained sectors. Whilst it is difficult to make an exact like-for-like comparison because of different accounting practices, a layman’s study suggests that the costs of education in a state secondary and a merchant company school are not that far apart. Indeed, it may be that the price of an independent education in an Edinburgh private day school is actually less than that in a state school.

If this is indeed the case, and an economist would need to produce proper figures to confirm, then the obvious and logical step would be for the city council to outsource secondary education to the private sector, not the other way round.

I did suggest this once to a leader of the city’s education committee who, while acknowledging the logic of the hypothesis, informed me that ideologically it was a nonstarter. Enough said.

(LT COL) STUART CRAWFORD Hailes Green, Haddington