Michael Mosbacher

Christ’s Hospital shouldn’t lecture pupils on white privilege

Students from Christ's Hospital (Getty images)

Students and teachers at Christ’s Hospital, a £36,600-a-year boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, are set to be given ‘diversity training’. The plans, announced in June 2020, mean lessons will be given on ‘micro-aggressions and stereotyping’. Christ’s Hospital is far from the only public school to march headlong down this route; they are following a path previously trodden by the United States’s private schools. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t making a big mistake. 

The narrative of those who welcome Christ’s Hospital adopting the post Black Lives Matter fad for universal inclusivity training is that it is precisely the privileged pupils of Britain’s leading public schools who are desperately in need of discovering why they need to check their privilege. Yet this misses the truth about a school like Christ’s Hospital.

The school is perhaps best known for two things: its uniform of breeches, yellow knee socks, barrister-type white shirt with bands and cassock-style blue coat (provided free to all pupils), would not have looked out of place in the eighteenth century, but certainly makes its pupils stand out today. More importantly the school offers far more bursaries than almost any other.

Christ’s Hospital should continue to do what it has been doing so successfully for five centuries – and not succumb to new dogmas

Christ’s Hospital, now co-educational, was established in 1552 to educate and house poor boys from the streets of London. Many other of Britain’s great public schools, including Eton, were also established to provide education to the poor. Whilst most now offer only bursaries and free places to a small minority of pupils, Christ’s Hospital has to a far greater extent stuck to its original purpose. It has managed to maintain its founding ethos through its £381 million endowment and total funds of £433 million; funds it has amassed through its historic links to the City and its livery companies.

Out of Christ’s Hospital’s 878 pupils attending during the 2019-2020 school year, 661 received some level of fee support with 93 on entirely free places – far more than for any other school.

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