The damage that private schools do to their pupils and to society
Kate Clanchy’s polished review of David Kynaston and Francis Green’s Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (The unfairness of fee-paying schools affects all our lives. And they are much cannier than this book allows, Review, 26 January) smartly points out the battle-hardened resilience of Britain’s private schools and how difficult they are to budge from their entrenched position in our poor, divided society.
Kynaston, Clanchy, and (not to forget) Melissa Benn clearly do good work promoting rational debate on the issue, but all of them consistently ignore the body of work that my colleagues and I have been presenting for the past three decades, highlighting the psychological problems of our private education.
Until we acknowledge how subbing out parenting to elite institutions produces a transgenerational problem with attachments and spawns an uncreative, anachronistic and entitled elite (consider Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example), a morbid rigidity in social classes, a fear of Europeans who prefer state education, and promotes that very divisiveness, we are still making it far too easy to fail at becoming a proper social democracy.Nick DuffellAuthor ofWounded LeadersandThe Making of Them
• Kate Clanchy misrepresents or ignores key aspects of our argument in her review of our book.
First, she condemns as insufficiently ambitious our proposed Fair Access Scheme, by which one-third of places would be allocated on a statefunded basis, but does not mention that we explicitly see that as an initial ratio, with a view to it increasing significantly over time. Nor does she mention our emphasis on how the criteria for these places would be determined by government, not the schools themselves. And, contrary to her claim, we certainly do not say that the schools would like the scheme.
Second, she depicts as naive our approach to the private sector. Given that we devote pages 237-45 to what a formidable and entrenched vested interest it is, supplemented by brilliant marketing and PR, this seems strange.
More generally, we regret her largely dismissive tone. In terms of the big picture, the three of us are surely on the same side. So we suspect are the majority of Guardian readers in a desire for private school reform. There are enough opponents as it is.Francis Green and David KynastonAuthors of Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem
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