Old school ties can’t last forever

Deplore it or revere it, you cannot but respect the private school industry’s wart-like survival in modern Britain. Has any other institution outlived its confidently predicted demise so robustly and for quite so long? It is getting on for 80 years since the liberal establishment turned against its own educational system. And yet the crusty old monster clings to Britain’s public face, now prettied up with the fittings and facilities of five-star hotels while offering one well-trained teacher for every 8.6 children. An anachronism of the 19th century has been revitalised in the 21st, thanks to brilliant advertising by Harry Potter and the injection of zillions of Russian and Asian dollars — foreign-born children now making up a third or more of the ‘best’ boarding schools’ rolls.

In 1940, writing in this magazine, you could find a future Conservative party leader  — state-educated Ted Heath  — joining the then fashionable call for decisive action to end ‘inequality in education’. Nowadays, most Tories would nod along with that notion. But they would approach the job by tinkering with the state system rather than taking bulldozers to those faux-Gothic spires.

Not so the Conservatives of the second world war. The then education minister Rab Butler confided that he wanted to abolish all but ‘two or three’ of the public schools. Churchill said he wished to see 60-70 per cent of their places go to bursary-supported children. Forcibly flooding the schools with hoi polloi has long been the favoured weapon of ex-public schoolboy reformers and abolitionists, from George Orwell to David Kynaston. It’s suggested with just a hint of sadism.

Butler lost his nerve, rather as Michael Gove did as education secretary 70 years later. (Gove came into the job a proponent of slow strangulation for the schools, through removing their tax breaks.)