Charity begins at school

Among the many organisations which donors to Comic Relief have generously helped to support is Tar Isteach, a Dublin-based group of former IRA terrorists led by Tommy Quigley, who was jailed in 1985 for three murders. The group recently received £80,000 for its programme of events supposedly aimed at rehabilitating prisoners released under the Good Friday agreement, which consisted of, among other things, a ‘hill walk’ that just happened to retrace a route taken by escaping IRA prisoners, and a talk by Danny Morrison on ‘current developments in the struggle against a broad background of what is going on in the six counties’.

It isn’t this use of charity money that appears to concern Labour, however; it is the thought that private schools should qualify for charitable status. This week the government publishes its Charities Bill, which will review the definition of a charity in English law. In particular, the Bill demands that independent schools and hospitals justify their charitable status in terms of the public benefit they offer. In other words, it will no longer be enough for Eton to educate the sons of toffs at a cost of £20,000 a year; public schools will be expected to throw open their playing fields to tykes and to send their beaks on missions to educate the inner-city poor.

It is wholly desirable that independent schools do not limit their activities to the education of the wealthy. Indeed, many offer bursaries and scholarships for the benefit of children whose parents could not otherwise afford private education. But it has become more difficult for schools to do this since the government, in one of its first acts on taking office in 1997, abolished the assisted-places schemes, which had helped to subsidise the education of the poor at private schools.