Can a school share out its success?

They have enviable results in the classroom and on the sports field. They command substantial fees and send large numbers of pupils to top universities. So why have leading private schools found it such heavy going transferring their success when sponsoring state schools?

It seemed the ideal solution to help break down the great barrier between state and private schooling, as well as to address the charge that private schools were not doing enough to justify their charitable status: a leading private school takes a struggling state school under its wing, lends it some expertise, allows it to use some of its facilities and even shares some of its teachers. Results surely cannot fail to be impressive.

That, certainly, seemed to be the outcome when the London Academy of Excellence, a Stratford-based sixth-form college which is sponsored by a host of private schools including Eton, Brighton and Highgate, recently announced that eight of its pupils had been offered places at Oxbridge. It seemed to be the story, too, when two years after it opened in 2009, an academy sponsored by Wellington College was given an ‘outstanding’ verdict by Ofsted.

The then education secretary Michael Gove praised Wellington and its master, Anthony Seldon, to the rafters, making a pointed plea to other private schools to follow its lead. Speaking at Wellington’s festival of education in 2011 he said: ‘The question for some public schools, some of them in Berkshire, is: if you’re so good, why is Anthony Seldon proving he’s better at transforming state education than you are?’

Eton later responded by sponsoring Holyport College, a free school which opened eight miles away in 2014. Stung by Gove’s charge, Eton gave the new school money for an all-weather sports pitch, £77,000 for new furniture for its boarding houses, cast-off music technology equipment, a piano and a minibus — as well as lending Latin and technology teachers.