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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Lessons for less: affordable excellence

Neil Collins commends the business plan, and theeducational ethos, of the New Model School Company

Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might think — yet there’s another primary school in this street that the site doesn’t show, which is so oversubscribed that it has just registered its first pre-birth application from desperate parents.

Maple Walk is a fee-paying school, but quite unlike other prep schools in the capital. Where they boast of the quality of their facilities, Maple Walk has almost none. Its seemingly modest ambition of teaching small children to read, write and add up — something which seems to be beyond many state schools — is accomplished in a church hall and a couple of Portakabins. Its other ambition, to instil good manners and self-discipline, would be recognised by all those parents struggling to pay fees (as well as taxes) for the education of their offspring. What they wouldn’t recognise are the fees. Maple Walk charges less than £5,000 a year, less than half the market rate for a prep-school place in London. It’s non-selective, non-denominational and designed to be non-profit-making, a combination which is bound to cause fluttering in the educational dovecotes.

This experiment is the brainchild of Robert Whelan, the deputy director of Civitas, the right-wing think tank. He became so frustrated with think-tanking about education and finding nobody took any notice that he decided to do it instead. The result is the New Model School Company Limited, and Maple Walk.

Three years ago two pairs of brave parents sent their two children to a run-down church hall: today, the school has 59 pupils from Reception to Year 2, and a waiting list the same size. It has 104 registrations for 20 places in 2009, and 68 for 2010. More than 40 applicants had to be turned away from this year’s Reception class, and there are 48 on the waiting list for next year’s, even after raising the class size to 25 to accommodate siblings. In short, it’s bursting at its inadequate seams.

More articles from: Neil Collins | this section

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