Banning private schools now won’t magic away inequality
EVERY couple of years, independent schools find themselves in the spotlight.
An independent school is what you and I would usually refer to as a private school.
I’ve had the privilege of visiting a couple. One was a boarding school and the other was more like your average school – if your average school was on a high dose of educational steroids.
There’s a great deal of hyperbole flying around about independent schools. It is, for example, assumed that every child who attends one comes from a wealthy family.
This is not the case. Many kids receive grants that contribute to the cost. Then there are families who put themselves under tremendous financial strain to give their kids an educational advantage.
Obviously, the majority of kids who are independently schooled do come from upper middle-class or upper-class backgrounds. But the first thing to remember before incautiously railing against the principle of private education is that we are talking about children and young people who did not choose which family or social class they were born into.
Private schools are undoubtedly the primary mechanism by which social inequality finds expression across every variable open to difference. The starkest of which is how over-represented privately educated people are in the dominant professions and fields in society.
In the UK, seven per cent of kids are educated in private schools, yet a recent report by the Sutton Trust noted that 65 per cent of senior judges, 49 per cent of armed forces officers, 44 per cent of newspaper columnists (not me) and 29 per cent of MPs were privately educated.
As Boris Johnson babbled his way through one hour of easy questioning in Tuesday night’s Tory leadership debate – slavishly applauded for completing coherent sentences in much the same way I applaud my toddler for missing his potty and defecating on a wall – one thing was abundantly clear: the mortgage his parents took out to send him to a posh school was a terrible investment.
That is, if their objective was to nurture a socially sophisticated, responsible and honest man.
Of course, where private schooling is concerned, virtues such as integrity and competence are not always the product being advertised. What many parents are buying is access.
Access to gated communities full of opportunity and access to the self-belief (sometimes entitlement) that can propel an academically unremarkable individual to the very apex of society.
However, Boris aside, many parents are purchasing access to an educational environment that is carefully bespoken to maximise human potential.
Independent schools are often set in woodlands, with windows looking out on to lush greenery. The air is always fresh, the stress levels lower.
The curriculum and timetable often account for not simply an array of subjects but also the optimal period a pupil can reliably apply themselves before requiring a break or some leisure time.
Some schools even have their own tennis courts, sports and concert halls, churches and transportation systems.
Ultimately, independent schools are communities designed around the educational needs of children whereas state schools are tailored to suit the financial constraints of government.
The issue here is about how state schools are inadequately resourced and, more broadly, how kids from different social backgrounds are, thus far, poorly integrated into one another’s lives.
Abolition of private schooling is a worthy long-term aim. But this must be handled with care.
For now, I believe private schools should be mandated to take on more children from poorer backgrounds, among other things, in return for their charitable status.
Calls to immediately abolish them may be cathartic and politically lucrative. But the assumption that society would just level itself out is, in my humble opinion, uneducated guesswork.