Tristram Hunt has managed to get a great deal of attention for his proposals for private schools helping out state schools, with even his own (private but sufficiently stuffed with Socialist children to be OK) alma mater getting rather annoyed at what it calls a ‘tasteless’ policy which espouses ‘what some might deem an offensive bigotry’. In summary, the Shadow Education Secretary wants to make the £700 million worth of tax breaks that the private sector enjoys conditional on the schools helping those in the state sector by sharing facilities, deploying teachers to help out with lessons, and making sure that they participate in the same leagues for sports, debating and other activities where private schools often only compete amongst themselves.
This is being interpreted as an angry class war attack on people who can afford (often only just about) to send their children to private schools. And indeed Hunt did turn on his special Estuarine accent that he uses whenever he’s drawing class dividing lines between Labour and the Tories. But there won’t be that many voters who will disagree with the idea of private schools working more closely with state schools: indeed, it sounds rather nice. Hunt isn’t proposing token collaboration in return for these tax breaks, though, but the following rather tough standards:
– All private schools should provide qualified teachers to help to deliver specialist subject knowledge to state schools.
– All secondary private schools should assist with expertise to help get disadvantaged state school kids into top class universities, including Oxbridge.
– And all private schools should run joint extra-curricular programmes where the state school is an equal partner.
That last point applies to debating competitions, sports matches and the like. Schools competing against one another in local leagues sounds especially uncontroversial, and indeed many schools already do that. But the other demands are rather more taxing.
Some private schools might conclude that they can’t provide these services and that therefore they can’t take the tax break, but they’re not being forced to do any of these things if they don’t want to. Some might calculate that the cost of providing teachers for other schools is higher than the tax break the school would be entitled to anyway and that they would ultimately save money by refusing to comply with Hunt’s Schools Partnership Standard.
But there is of course a bigger flaw in this plan. If the state schools were good enough to get the disadvantaged kids into Oxbridge, then they wouldn’t need some teacher from the local private school toddling in to tell them how to do it. Delivering specialist subject knowledge should surely be something that the state school is perfectly good at anyway – and Hunt’s demand that the private school send ‘qualified’ teachers to teach the state pupils will amuse some heads who are quite happy to employ ‘unqualified’ staff (that is teachers without the official Qualified Teacher Status rather than someone who doesn’t have a degree or A-levels).
Most parents would much rather send their children to state schools where they can meet students from a good mix of backgrounds, rather than just encounter them every so often on a playing field or at a debating contest. But they can scrape together the money, somehow, and so they do because they think that the private sector will give their child a better education.
Of course there are some odd people who send their children to fee-paying schools because of the social contacts and because they don’t like poor people. I met some of those types at my own secondary school and was very happy to escape them when I moved to the local state sixth form (which might have benefitted from the advice of some of the local fee-paying establishments, given the tutor who prepared pupils for Oxbridge hadn’t been to either university). But most are doing what any parent would do, which is trying to give their children the best education. Which is fine for those who can just about afford school fees, but not for those who cannot, who still want the best for their children but are unhappy with the local state provision. The need to answer that basic desire that all parents have to give their children the best shouldn’t be lost in the angry debate about whether politicians should bash private schools or not.
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