A most uncharitable campaign
Having brought British education to its knees, the government is now busy trying to destroy or cripple those remaining bastions of high academic standards whose very existence highlights the catastrophic failure in the education system. Thus Brown Labour is trying to squeeze the life out of A-level and now, through the arm’s length vehicle of the Charity Commission, has renewed its ancient pastime of witch-hunting against the independent schools on the grounds that they are ‘socially divisive’. As the Guardian reports:
Private schools will be stripped of their charitable status - along with £100m in tax breaks a year - if they are found to be operating as ‘exclusive clubs’ for the rich, the charities watchdog says today.Thousands of parents on relatively modest incomes are being driven in desperation to pay the ruinous fees of the independent schools sector solely because excellence has been driven out of the state system. Now the quality of education at those schools may be jeopardised as they are forced to divert yet more of their resources into jumping over a bar that the government raises ever higher to demonstrate they are not socially divisive. And of course, if the Commission’s threat is carried out and schools are stripped of their charitable status, the resulting rise in fees — or closure of the schools — will mean that the independent sector will revert to being the province of the seriously rich and thus become not less exclusive but more so.
The temperature was raised even higher in advance of the Commission’s statements by a bizarre diatribe against independent schools delivered by Dr Anthony Seldon -- himself the headmaster of one such school, Wellington college.
Hosting a conference at his Berkshire school last week, Dr Seldon said independent schools were ‘detached from the mainstream national education system, thereby perpetuating the apartheid which has so dogged education and national life in Britain since the Second World War.’ He added: ‘It isn't right any longer for our schools to cream off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university places.’Apartheid? Independent schools actually fall over themselves to bring in pupils from impoverished backgrounds. But according to Seldon, this is merely further proof of their ‘apartheid’ since this creams off bright children from poor homes, thus removing them from ‘their own social milieu’. So what is he saying — that independent schools should have no poor pupils at all and become truly enclaves for the truly wealthy?
In fact the real targets for attack seem to be excellence, high academic standards and the middle class. Indeed, Seldon himself implicitly acknowledged this by attacking grammar schools too for being dominated by the middle class and being private schools in all but name. On that basis, as the High Master of St Paul’s Boys’ School, Dr Martin Stephen, writes today, all good academic institutions that teach well and achieve good results must therefore plead guilty to the same crime of social divisiveness.
The immediate cause of this current onslaught is an ideologically motivated change in the legal definition of charitable status. Prior to this change in the law in 2006, bodies advancing education or religion or providing for the relief of poverty were automatically assumed to be acting for the public benefit. Now the law says they have to prove that that they are doing so, and it has fallen to the Charity Commission to produce today’s guidance which defines public benefit and says how it is to be proved.
Even though charity does not mean necessarily meeting the needs of poor people but meeting need generally in order to provide public benefit, this requirement to prove the test has provided a stick with which to beat up independent schools for allegedly not benefiting the poor.
In fact, the actual wording of the Commission’s guidance offers rather more leeway to independent schools than might have been thought from its own repeated threats against them. It says:
This does not mean, in effect, introducing an element of relieving poverty into all charitable aims. It is not the case that people in poverty actually have to benefit. Or, that charitable aims have to be limited or confined to people in poverty, although the founders of charities can choose to do that if they wish. It merely means that people in poverty must not be excluded from the opportunity to benefit.Given the ferocious advance billing of this guidance and the controversy it provoked well before it was published, it would seem that the Commission decided to be politically circumspect in its wording. But it has nevertheless provided the wherewithal for a campaign of harassment against the independent schools.
According to Phil Hope, the charities minister:
Providing public benefit is at the heart of charitable activity, and now all charities without exception will have to demonstrate their public benefit in return for charitable status.That public benefit is already conspicuous to all who are not blinded by the ideological fixation that excellence and high standards are intrinsically divisive. Since the independent schools sector produces the highest academic standards, its contribution to the economy and the running of this country is out of all proportion to the tiny numbers that it educates. In addition, it provides an invaluable benchmark of academic excellence through which Britain’s education system can be measured and its flaws exposed.
Which is why its benefit to the public is incalculable. And it is also why the government wants to kill it off altogether. Charity law? No — class war.