Let us begin with the story of what the historian Professor Brian Simon once described as “probably the biggest hijack of public resources in history”. This was plotted 131 years ago when the government’s Schools Inquiry Commission declared that there was no reason to encourage ‘indiscriminate gratuituous instruction’, an idea which they compared in its mischief to the indiscriminate donation of alms to beggars. They proposed an ingenious reform, which was rapidly adopted by Parliament.
They would seize the schools which then provided a free education for the poor in many towns and (ignoring the statutes which had established them) they would abolish them, and then (defying the lawful wishes of their benefactors), they would take over the endowments which had been left over the years to fund them and use the money to set up schools not for the poor but “for the extension of middle class education”. This was a bold idea, for which the commissioners received much credit, but, in truth, it was not an original one.
For several centuries, the masters of the great public schools had been enriching their institutions by the same device. All of these schools were founded for the free education of the poor – that is why they were originally called ‘public’ schools. When Henry VI founded Eton in 1442, for example, he instructed that “No one having a yearly income of more than five marks shall be eligible”. In 1382, the founder of Winchester, William of Wykeham, declared that the school was to be made up of 70 “poor and needy” pupils, although as a concession to those whose patronage he sought, he agreed also to take ten “sons of noble and influential persons”. Rugby, Harrow, Westminster, they were all founded as free schools for the poor. And yet, all of them eventually were hijacked by the wealthy, who paid fees to attend. The headmasters were happy to take their money and were quite clever in helping the hijack.
Thomas Arnold preserved Rugby for the rich by closing its free lower school so that, unless the children of the poor could afford to pay someone else to teach them, they could not learn enough to get into the main school. The schools insisted that new pupils should be able to speak Latin, with the same result. At Harrow, the head man took the register at noon when the poorer pupils, who were day boys, were all at home for lunch and, just to make sure of their absence, he forbade them from riding horses to speed up their journey home. Westminster wriggled out of its legal obligation to the poor by arguing that Queen Elizabeth I had never confirmed its statutes. Winchester justified its behaviour to the 1818 Brougham Commission by explaining that, in truth, its current pupils really were poor – it was only their parents who were rich.
With the Public Schools Act of 1868, these ancient schools completed the theft by capturing any remaining endowments which were still dedicated to poor pupils. A year later, following the lead of the Schools Inquiry Commission, the Endowed Schools Act organised a far grander larceny, seizing from towns all over the country a fortune in endowments which had been left for the benefit of the local poor but which were now used to pay for a network of new fee-paying private schools for the middle class. As a single example, Sutton Coldfield, whose poor had been educated for free by virtue of endowment, saw £15,000 taken from them to provide “a high school for well to do children” and a further £17,000 for a high school for girls. There were petitions and protests, but the affluent had their way. The poor were left only with the bare bones of an ‘elementary education’ granted them by the 1870 Education Act. They never saw their money again.
Now, come forward a century or so and look at the story of what happened to Britain’s schools during the last 20 years. From poisoned roots, a mighty structure has grown – 2,300 private schools with an annual income from fees of some £3.2 billion, educating nearly 600,000 pupils, a magnificent seven per cent of the nation’s children. This remains the most unusual feature of the educational landscape of Britain. There are other countries who allow private schools to operate alongside their state system – almost every developed democracy does. There are some who educate far more of their children in private schools (17% in France, 13% in Denmark). However, apart from small pockets of privilege, invariably these are religious schools, like those in France or Italy, or ‘free’ schools like those in Denmark, often under funded and relying on state subsidy to survive. There is no other country in Europe where private schools present a fully-fledged alternative to the state system, open essentially only to the affluent.
Does that matter? In the first instance, it is a question of power. Stephen Pollard and Andrew Adonis, now a Downing Street adviser, recorded in their book, A Class Act, that on the latest available figures, the magnificent seven per cent accounted for: seven out of nine senior generals; thirty three out of thirty nine of the most senior judges; more than 120 of the 180 officers graduating from Sandhurst; half of the 18 permanent secretaries running Whitehall; and just under half of the 94 Grade Three civil servants then aged under 50 (most of the rest went to grammar schools, some of which have since been privatised). Research for the Economic and Social Research Council found that 75% of private school pupils went on to take professional or managerial jobs. From the state schools, only 40% reached that level.
This question of power, and of social justice, has ceased to be fashionable, largely because the politics which kept the question alive have been marginalised. However, in a pragmatic age, an equally pressing version of the question remains – a purely educational one. The debate about the desirability of our private schools has hardly ever been framed in this way. The question is: does the existence of private schools have any impact on the educational performance of the mainstream state system? Can we relax and allow the two systems to enjoy a peaceful co-existence? Or is there some kind of destructive friction between the two? The answer is not quite what you might expect.
Consider, for example, the hiring and firing of teachers in the state and private system, a subject which has tended to remain encased in privacy but which has been unlocked by the research of Simon Szreter, an economic historian at St John’s College, Cambride. Szreter analysed World Development Reports and found that in the last 20 years, Britain had fallen behind just about every other developed country in its investment in teachers for the state sector. Meanwhile, the private schools had forged ahead.
All through the 1970s, Szreter found, both state schools and private schools in the UK had followed the behaviour of all developed countries in hiring extra teachers, and by the end of the decade, the combined efforts of the Heath, Wilson and Callaghan governments had put an extra 100,000 teachers on the payroll. State schools were closing the gap on private schools: whereas at the beginning of the decade, the average state class contained 26 children, by 1979, it contained only 19. The private schools were still better placed – their pupil:teacher ratio was about 50% lower – and the average of 19 disguised a mass of state classes of more than 30, sometimes more than 40, but the state sector was clearly catching up. Then Mrs Thatcher took over.
By demographic chance, in the 1980s pupil numbers started to fall, in both private and state schools, but, while the private sector continued to invest in more teachers, the new Conservative administration took advantage of the falling pupil numbers to get rid of them. During the 1980s, half of the extra teacher who had been hired in the 1970s – 50,000 of them – were removed from the payroll. The fall in pupils meant that the pupil:teacher ratio dropped for a while and then, as pupil numbers rose again, it climbed back. Szreter found that all of Britain’s main economic competitors had continued to invest heavily in teachers: “By 1991, the best of continental countries were running a ratio of between ten and twelve pupils per teacher.” But Britain’s state schools were still stuck with an average of nineteen students in every classroom. In the early 1990s, only four of the 25 most developed nations had larger classes than Britain – Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea – and Szreter suspects that when the figures are finally brought up to date, they may well all have left Britain behind: “No other democratically elected government in the modern world has dreamed up this masterstroke of actually disinvesting in the educational resources of the nation.”
In the meantime, the private schools had continued hiring and re-established their superiority, with average classes containing only ten pupils, nearly 100% lower than the state. Szreter estimates that to regain a position where the state school classes are only 50% larger than private ones, the government would need to hire 100,000 new teachers.
Clearly, there is real unfairness in this. And yet, that does not, on the face of it, entitle us to blame the private schools. Where is the evidence that this mass shedding of teachers happened because there was a system of private schools over the fence and not simply because a Conservative government was intent on cutting public spending in order to fund tax cuts? There are more clues deeper in the background. The reversal in the staffing of state schools was part of a wider picture of encroaching financial hardship. Although the Conservatives often increased the notional annual SSA guideline for spending on education, they invariably failed to provide enough cash to keep pace with inflation and pupil numbers and, in spite of waves of protest from parents and teachers, they allowed the real-terms funding of state schools to shrink.
In the London borough of Ealing, for example, the local education authority dug into its reserves, switched money from other budgets but neverthless was compelled to cut. Ealing’s director of education, Alan Parker, reconstructed what happened. To begin with, he says, the borough protected its schools and cut the support services: eight Education Welfare Officers were lost, just as the demand for their work on truancy and exclusion was rising; the Education Psychology Service was cut to the point where, instead of offering help to schools, it could do little more than prepare statements to get funding for children with special needs; the number of staff who could teach English as a foreign language was halved. The pressure persisted and the borough was forced to cut its adult education. Now there were grants for Higher Education and Further Education only for those on Income Support who chose to pursue one of a narrow range of vocational courses; the rest would have to fund themselves or forget it. The youth service was cut by 50%. Arts, libaries and museums, too. Routine maintenance of buildings fell to zero – “one of the main scandals of the period” according to Parker. Then the cuts reached inside the schools – no more tuition in music, larger classes, less administrative support, less for books, less for classroom equipment, less for materials. “It is self-evidently the case,” Alan Parker concludes, “that the overall experience of education has been impoverished as a result.”
Our survey of LEAs produced similar accounts from all over the country. State schools found themselves caught in a pincer, compelled by law to teach the national curriculum, but compelled by cuts to reduce their service. The result, as our survey showed, was that LEAs and schools cut back on music, sports, French in primary schools, libraries, special schools, outdoor centres – anything that was not protected by law was liable to be cut. This was not a case of cutting at unwanted fat.
In one year of John Major’s spending limits, Merton, who have drawn some £30 million out of reserves, nevertheless had to cut their education budget by £4.7 million, most of which came directly from the budgets of schools, who responded by cutting staff and reducing maintenance on their buildings. The London borough of Hammersmith has had to cut its budget for schools every year for the last six years, taking a total of £2.5 million from them. Derbyshire has lost teachers in each of the last eight years, a total of 1,361. When Ofsted inspected Northumberland’s LEA recently, they found that the council’s income had fallen in real terms every year from 1992 to 1998 with the result that, despite the council’s efforts to protect them, their schools had suffered an 11% cut in budgets while central spending on education had been cut by 36%. Since the late 1980s, budgets for secondary schools in Cheshire have fallen in real terms by 6%; student awards were cut from £9 million to only £0.5 million; adult education was cut by 30%. Staffordshire education had to cut £9 million out of its education spending. And on and on.
It was in the course of this long period of attrition that Mrs Thatcher explained: “I do not care what people’s background is, where they come from. I want them to have the same opportunities, I want to get totally rid of class distinction.” By 1991, two thousand state schools were contacting the BBC’s Children In Need project in search of money to repair buildings and hire more teachers.
The private schools, however, were doing well and part of the reason for this was that, with almost nineteenth century logic, they were receiving a very healthy subsidy from the state. Despite protests from the Labour party, the Conservative government continued to allow many private schools to enjoy the status of charity. This meant that they escaped all tax on income from stocks, shares, trusts and property as well as escaping all VAT, corporation tax on their profit, capital gains tax and stamp duty on their property transactions, inheritance tax on their new endowments and up to 100% of their business rates.
In 1996, the Independent Schools Council surveyed 838 of their members and concluded that they were saving £62.6 million a year. In 1992, however, the Master of Haileybury, David Jewell, suggested that if private schools lost their charitable status, fees would have to rise by up to 30%. This was quite a different proposition: those at the top end of Mr Jewell’s estimate would be receiving more financial support from the state than the state schools themselves. For the average ISC school, a tax break of 30% of their fees would mean they were receiving a state subsidy of some £1,945 per pupil – some £200 a year more than the state now invests in the education of a child at primary school. The average boarding school pupil would be enjoying an annual subsidy from the taxpayer of £3,760 – 60% more than the state pays for its own secondary pupils. In the top boarding schools, a tax break of that scale would grant the richest students twice the support from public funds which is currently provided for state secondary students. No one knows how accurate this picture may be. Neither the government, the schools nor the charities commission has ever produced the figures.
The private schools also continued to benefit from state money through the Ministry of Defence which pays fees for the children of some personnel (currently running at £72 million a year) and also through the Foreign Office which similarly pays fees for the children of some staff (currently £12.5 million a year). Arguably, they also enjoy an unrecognised subsidy in the universities which are used disproportionately by children from private schools. Almost 90% of private pupils go on to higher education – more than 20% of all university entrants.
All this subsidy was already in place when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. However, in 1981 she introduced a new and even more lucrative form of support, the Assisted Places Scheme which paid the fees of up to 36,000 pupils a year – some boarders and some day – thus providing the private schools with a guaranteed income from the state of nearly £900 million during the Conservative years. In this way, new money flowed through the same old channels that had been dug more than a hundred a years before, from the education of the poor towards the well-to-do, and in increasingly large amounts.
This financial aid was only one part of the bounty which the state now bestowed on the private sector schools. There was a time when these two systems were effectively sealed off from each other as each generation of children divided to follow the footsteps of its parents but this era saw the growth in schools of the One Big Market. Because the spending cuts were hurting the performance and reputation of state schools; because the income from fees and state subsidy was pushing the private schools still further ahead; because the Conservatives were cutting tax and putting more money into middle class pockets, enabling them to buy their way into private schools; because private schools saw it was financially and politically wise to invest in a wider range of pupils; because Kenneth Baker gave parents the right to choose state schools for their children; and because he then ordered that the funding should follow the children into the most popular schools, thus further damaging the reputation and performance of ‘failing’ schools: for all these reasons the number of children in private schools began to rise.
When Mrs Thatcher came to power, only 5.8% of the nation’s children were in the private sector; by the time she left, the number had risen to 7%. In Greater London, 12% of the children were in private schools. There was no doubt about where these children were coming from: according to the ISC, most parents who now send their children to private schools were themselves educated in the state sector. In many other ways, the two sectors of schooling remained separate; there were still many pupils who were born into one sector and could not conceive of entering the other; but in the centre, in this commercial sense, the private schools and the state schools had been pulled together, in competition with each other in the market for pupils. To reinforce the trend, the Conservatives encouraged state schools to opt out of LEA control, taking extra funds to become Grant Maintained schools with the power to select their intake.
As all this evidence unfolds, a clearer answer begins to emerge to the question of co-existence. No other country in Europe has a full-fledged alternative to its state schools. No other country in Europe ‘disinvested’ in its state schools. And what about the people who were responsbile for this disinvestment? Almost without exception, the ministers who increased the size of state classes and who assured everyone that it made no difference to the quality of education, then chose to send their own children to be educated in private schools which had spent a small fortune cutting the size of their classes. This is not simply a point about jealousy, that it was not fair. It is a point about politics.
In his book, We Should Know Better, the former Tory education minister, George Walden, argues with considerable authority that Britain’s state schools have suffered persistent negligence because the power elite has had no interest in protecting them. He writes: “The screening out of the sons and daughters of the affluent and influential from the rest of society… and the consequent indifference of their parents to what goes on in state schools is more than a traditional quirk in the English system. It severs our educational culture at the neck. … No country has evolved a high standard of public education while the top seven per cent of its citizens have nothing to do with it.”
In this crucial sense, the history of Britain’s education, from the birth of the old public schools through the hijacking of the free schools for the poor and the more recent diversion of favour from state to private during the Conservative era is precisely a story about the private sector actively damaging the state sector, by providing for the children of the rich and powerful a safe haven which leaves the state schools with only the most meagre political protection. In this sense, the co-existence never has been peaceful. Beyond this, the creation of the One Big Market now has introduced a second and equally important kind of damage: on a scale which they have never achieved before, the private schools are skimming bright children off the top of the state system.
Seven years ago, the National Commission for Education spotted the underlying trend in Britain’s schools. Contrary to popular legend, this was not that Britain’s system was in a state of collapse or that standards were so much lower than the rest of the world. The trend was in the gap between the best and the worst: “The gulf in outcomes between our best schools and our worst is big, much bigger than in most countries. The OECD… found that differences between English schools in levels of mathematical achievement were far larger than in any of the ten other countries studied, including Scotland, with the single exception of Switzerland.”
This is all about polarisation. That commission specifically warned about the potential damage caused by Kenneth Baker’s introduction, five years earlier, of an effective market in school places. We described in the first part of this series how those reforms had created a two-tier system of state schools, the successful school in the affluent suburb attracting more and more motivated, middle-class pupils, and more and more funds; while the failing school down the road became a ghetto, starved of motivated children, penalised with the loss of funds. Every time a government boosts the private schools, it reinforces that process of polarisation. The fact that the private schools run explicitly on a system of academic selection means that there is no ambiguity at all about what is happening (in the way that there may be some marginal ambiguity with the middle class state school): they are taking the brightest children. Which, in itself, adds another twist to the polarisation, by advancing their own academic results and depressing those of the state.
As a single example, take Bedfordshire, where according to County Councillor Tony Mitchell, 12% of the county’s brightest children are skimmed off by four private schools in the Harpur Trust. Councillor Mitchell, a former teacher and now a school governor, said: “In the heyday of the grammar school, a county like Essex selected only six per cent of the ability range.” In addition, the Conservative’s Grant Maintained schools, with extra funding from LEAs, select pupils and skim a further 27% of Bedfordshire children. “Some schools, all in areas of disadvantage, are threatened with closure while one GM school has 54% of its pupils from outside its catchment area.”
Yet, this is not quite the end of the argument. Events have moved on. The year after George Walden wrote his book, New Labour came to power. In its strange insecurity towards conservative Britain, it has drawn little attention to the fact that in amongst its rhetoric of partnership with the private schools, it has dealt them two rather painful body blows. This was the result apparently of a compromise with the party’s former radical position. David Blunkett, in particular, had argued with some passion, when Labour were in opposition, that the private schools must be stripped of their charitable status. In 1994, for example, he complained publicly that “all of us are paying for someone else to get a privileged education”. He lost the policy battle but he persisted in his efforts to impose VAT on private school fees. He lost that battle, too, and yet he did not lose the whole war.
One of Mr Blunkett’s first steps as education secretary was to kill of the Assisted Places Scheme. By the time he entered his first full year of power, 1997/98, the scheme had become a fat cash cow, delivering an annual £134.4 million pounds to the private schools. Mr Blunkett killed it, was sued in the High Court, was heavily criticised but stuck to the policy. Then he introduced tuition fees in university. It was a move that hurt almost all potential students. It also hurt the private schools by diverting some of the parental cash which might otherwise have gone into private sixth-forms. In the background, the collapse of economies in East Asia, whose affluent elite had become a source of succour for the private schools, delivered a third blow.
There are now signs of struggle in the private sector. The Independent Schools Council reported last year that the number of children at its schools had increased by 0.71%, but that disguised the real trend. The increase consists entirely of a surge in children going to private nurseries while the numbers taking both GCSEs and A levels has started to fall. More than that, there has been a steady and ultimately drastic fall in the flow of the most lucrative pupils, the boarders: in 1983, 27.7% of ISC pupils were boarders; lat year, it was only 14.9%. Last year alone, the number of boarders fell by 4.3%. In the 1980s, the schools found new boarders by opening their doors to girls, a novelty they cannot now repeat; and by pulling in far more students from abroad. But last year, the foreigners, too, began to turn their backs, their numbers falling by 1.4%.
Last summer (99), City accountants Pricewaterhouse Cooper reported that scores of private schools were likely to close in the next decade. Thirteen per cent of schools in their survey were running a deficit, many had been hurt by the removal of Assisted Places, they reported, and small schools for girls were particularly vulnerable. Richard Davison of the ISC said: “It is a free market and the weaker schools are going. It’s the ones who are very small, or who rely too much on boarders, or who have rural locations. They are vulnerable. Once you move away from the top schools, it is brutal.”
While Winchester and Westminster may soak up the applause in the centre of the stage, off in the wings, there are some deepy troubled private schools, suffering with an intake of poorly motivated children and very low fees. Ofsted’s annual report in 1997/8 pointed out that while 10% of private schools see every single pupil scoring at least five A to C grades at GCSE, there are 5% of private schools who cannot score a single A to C grade for any of their pupils. That year, they inspected only 411 private schools, but 60 of them “caused considerable concern”.
School inspectors reported: “Only one teacher has qualified teacher status… classrooms are unsafe and unhealthy and so unfit for the education of children…. excessive shouting at children, and signs of distress shown by several children as a result…. failure to carry out the required checks on newly appointed staff… failure to keep records of instances of corporal punishment… overall the quality of education is poor… the school is failing to provide a properly broad and balanced education for its pupils at any stage…. a school in decline, which is poorly managed on severely limited resources… the air of decay… the lack of resources… low paid teachers and a high-turnover in particular subjects…”
The private schools can see the threat and they are all suddenly buzzing like flies around old meat, desperately looking for some new device to secure their position. Some of them have been forced into a dangerous hike in their fees. A survey by Mintel, the market research group, last year found that in the previous year, fees had risen by 5.2% while inflation was only 3.3%. Others have launched financial appeals, the weak looking for survival, and the strong looking for even more strength. Stowe School in Buckingham, for example, is trying to win an edge over Uppingham by raising £6 million for a new Academic Resource Centre, a computerised library and audio-visual centre, electronically linked to classrooms. But Uppingham has already laid 50 miles of cabling through its 16th century buildings and is claiming to have one of the most sophisticated ICT systems in the country, with 1,500 terminals for its 650 pupils. Others are investing in sport – golf courses are big, for example – and Eton is raising more than £3 million (much of it through the lottery) to pay for a new music centre, arts complex and boating lake.
Where once private schools marketed themselves by sending the headteacher to preach in an outside church, the big private players are now playing the market game professionally. Two hundred and eighty private schools have formed the Association of Deveopment Directors in Independent Schools. Their chair, Felicity Rutland, told us: “Marketing professionals are no longer a luxury, they are key members of the school’s management team.” Many of them have already adapted to fit their markets. When the number of boarders fell, they abandoned tradition and let in girls; when middle class parents objected to the cane, almost all of them banned it before Parliament forced them to. There are now real niche markets – and friction between them. An overtly liberal head warned us that ‘the hothouse atmosphere’ in some of the most famous schools was damaging some children by marking them as failures, and that: “There is a vast rank of top and middling schools which are still in the nineteenth century, modelled on the army, named after generals, strong on uniform – and on children being uniform. Parents send their children there so the child won’t have to sit next to a dustman’s child, and they celebrate all the great moral certainties of Victorian Britain – the Anglican church, Kipling, not speaking out.” Conservative head teachers are equally disparaging of some of their competition.
As demand for their places has fallen, smaller schools have started to lower their entrance hurdles. It is an irony that the education pundits who criticise the very idea of comprehensive schooling and look with admiration on private schools fail to see that the biggest comprehensives in the country are in the private sector – and they are also the most successful because they are properly funded: Rugby, for example, is regarded by many private headteachers as a model comprehensive with a very wide range of academic ability, and a living example of what can happen when a comprehensive is given enough money to do its job.
In theory, the government that was willing to kill off the Assisted Places Scheme might have continued to defend the state schools in the One Big Market, allowing them to punch their weight in the market place. Indeed, in theory, that is what government policy is supposed to be. As the Prime Minister put it in his Channel Four News interview last autumn: “The best answer to the public schools is to develop state education of really high quality, and changes in fact are of course happening now.”
In terms of their funding, however, the disparity between private and state remains breath-taking. Last year, ISC found that their schools were charging on average £5,460 for a year, while state schools were receiving from all sources an average total of only £2,372 per pupil. To put it another way – setting aside tax breaks and other subsidies – pupils in state schools are receiving only 44% of the funding which is enjoyed by private school pupils. Bear in mind also that some of the most successful private schools receive a considerable income from investments and property which they can add to their income from fees, so that a school like Eton can spend some £20,000 per year on each of its pupils.
In contrast to the scything cuts in music, French and sport in the state primary schools, a survey last year (99) by the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools, found that 93% of private prep schools teach music, most of them with specialist teachers in specialist rooms; almost all of them teach French; two thirds of them teach Latin; a quarter teach German; and one in seven teach Spanish; and they enjoy an average of 18.3 acres of land, the equivalent of nine full-sized football pitches each. Since 1981, state schools have been forced to sell more than 5,000 playing fields; although Labour promised to end the sale, they are still being sold off at a rate of about 20 a year.
While private schools had been installing computers and linking them to the Internet and their own internal Intranets, the state primary schools in 1998 were providing only one computer for every 18 pupils; only 17% of them were linked to the Internet. in secondary schools there was one computer between nine pupils. By that time, private schools, like Bedale’s in Hampshire, for example, were leasing laptops to their students and aiming to provide one computer for each pupil. In an attempt to catch up, David Blunkett invested £310 million in the National Grid for Learning and saw the figures start to climb in 1999.
The end result of all this is a system on the edge of despair: Craven Park Primary School in north London is so short of money that when the filter on its swimming pool breaks down, it is forced to close the whole pool permanently; a successful comprehensive – one of the government’s favoured Beacon Schools – holds a sponsored spelling contest to raise money for GCSE textbooks. While David Blunkett tries to cut classes for infants down to 30, the Dutch have pledged to cut classes for all children – to 20. Since Mr Blunkett’s claim to be spending an extra £19 billion has collapsed in empty rhetoric, state schools literally cannot compete. They cannot raise or lower their fees, and their capacity to raise funds is quite different. Their efforts so far speak more of their current desperation than their prospective wealth.
Many have turned to their parents. The National Council of PTAs has said its members are raising an average of £3,000 for their schools and that most of it is being spent not on new attractions but on essentials – the repair of buildings and the supply of classroom equipment. Mayfield Primary School in Cambridgeshire has been asking parents for £10 a month in an attempt to keep classes below 30. Parents there have also been decorating classrooms and building a playground. The headteacher, Jaspaul Hill, said: “I do not feel right to be asking for donations. Our governing body does not feel it is right. It does not rest easily at all.”
Teachers, too, have become funders. When the Association of Teachers and Lecturers surveyed their members two years ago, they found that half of them had dug into their own pockets to buy resources for the literacy hour which was supposed to have been fully funded by the department for education. The association reckoned that a fifth of their members had paid out more than £50 and that, in total, across the country, primary school teachers had probably put as much as £5 million of their own cash into filling the gaps in funding in the campaign.
Corporations, sensing an opportunity, have moved to fill the gap. The National Consumer Council reported three years ago that industry was spending £300 million a year on sponsorship aimed at schools, but they found many sponsors had been quite unable to resist the temptation to promote their own products. Cadbury’s, for example, produced free sheets in which they mentioned themselves 55 times and told pupils as a ‘chocolate fact’ that “chocolate is a wholesome food… (and) gives you energy and important nutrients that your body needs to work properly.” Whiskas produced a booklet called Know Your Cat and advised children that “a steady diet of Whiskas kitten food provides a properly balanced source of nutrition for your kitten.” McDonald’s produced teaching packs for English, Maths and Geography for infants in which they used McDonald’s fries and milk-shakes as images for matching, and planted their own name in a word puzzle. British Nuclear Fuels produced a leaflet on Energy and the Environment in which they made no mention of nuclear waste remaining dangerous for many thousands of years and, after referring to the devastating accident at Chernobyl, continued: “Accidents happen all the time. Can you think of some accidents that have happened in school, at home, or locally?”
Beyond this weakness of resources, the failure of the state schools’ marketing and management is even more pronounced. While parts of the private sector are graduating into the slick world of educational one-upmanship, the DFEE is still in the kindergarten, making little palm prints in bright red paint. It is one of the central paradoxes of New Labour’s approach to education that they have preserved the market in schools which was created by Kenneth Baker and they have embraced the culture of private enterprise, and yet they have imposed a rigid old-fashioned regime of centrist diktat which means that schools and LEAs are quite unable to respond to the market in any creative way. While most private schools are free of Ofsted inspections, compulsory SATs tests and the national curriculum, state schools are free to adapt neither to the children in their classrooms nor to the market beyond. The old maxim that Britain’s state schools are centrally funded but locally delivered is collapsing: first, under the weight of the Standards Fund, which means that almost all spare cash is being directed from the centre; and secondly, and under a torrent of central instruction. (In his first two years, Mr Blunkett issued 322 directives to schools and LEAs and launched 52 centrally-managed initiatives).
Even the department’s most benevolent schemes suffer from central direction. In Ealing, for example, the drive to cut the size of infant classes to 30 has backfired in a school which previously housed 32 infants in one class with a teacher and a class room assistant. Forced to cut the number to 30, the school found they could no longer afford the assistant and so ended up with more pupils per member of staff than when they started.
Few other businesses are guided by advisers who insist that investment is an optional extra. Giving evidence to the select committee on education, Chris Woodhead contemptuously dismissed the idea that state teachers were suffering from a lack of resources: “They blame the government for a lack of resources, they blame parents for not producing intelligent enough pupils, and they blame the collapse of western civilisation as we know it.” This was on November 3 1999. Six months earlier, the headmaster of Winchester, James Sabben-Clare, told the Daily Telegraph that if independent schools were restricted to spending an average of £2,300 a year per pupil, as state schools are, the quality of education they could offer would be greatly diminished. Fees at Winchester run at £15,000 a year.
Few other businesses are marketed by managers who publicly denounce their product; attack their staff; savage their local managers; and sing the praises of the competition. No other organisation in the country is managed with the kind of organised public exposure which is experienced by schools and local education authorities. It is doubtful whether any other organisation – corporate boardroom, factory floor, legal chambers, newsroom – could survive that kind of scrutiny and denunciation. There are drunkards in alleys with a better strategy for self-advertisement.
All this means that the state schools remain highly vulnerable to the schools they are now encouraged to see as partners. The answer to the question of co-existence is that purely in educational terms, the private schools continue to inflict damage on the state sector, draining away political interest and bright pupils. Why does the DFEE not do more to protect them?
The former Tory education minister, George Walden, blamed some of the department’s problems on low-calibre civil servants. He argued that top-flight officials went off to the high-prestige departments like the Foreign Office, leaving education in the hands of the also-rans: “Able people have worked there, but on average the quality has not been commensurate with the importance of the work.” The problem, however, surely goes deeper than a mere shortage of managerial flair.
One of the battering rams used by critics to attack state schooling in the last 20 years has been a contempt for those who, in the words of Kenneth Baker, “seek to use education for social engineering”. It is this which is held to have poisoned the well of state schooling by producing the comprehensive system. It is this perversion which is blamed for a ‘levelling down’ in the classroom.
Now go back, for a moment, to the Schools Inquiry Commission and look at their confident assertion that there was no justification for “indiscriminate gratuitous instruction”. Well? Is there? The unemployed need no qualifications at all. Even skilled workers do not need A levels, let alone university degrees. The Conservative and National governments of the 1920s and 1930s understood this and resisted all efforts by the Labour party to introduce universal secondary education and to raise the school leaving age. On the eve of the second world war, working class children in this country were still entitled only to ‘elementary education’ to the age of 14; 10% of them managed to graduate into county grammar schools or direct grant schools, often paying fees. And that was it.
The impetus to allow the working class into the higher reaches of education was and remains political and moral – it enables the workers not merely to work but to aspire to break out of their class and move upwards. In that sense, any move towards educating the working class is guilty of precisely the crime of which it is so frequently still accused by its conservative detractors – social engineering. If you deny the role of social justice in education, you remove any logical justification for universal schooling. For all its humanity and social justice, it makes no economic sense at all. Any sane Treasury official, therefore, will resist it. Which is what they have done, very successfully.
The ideology of partnership has silenced talk of social justice in New Labour’s education policy and so, in one simple sweep of rhetoric, more than a hundred years of development is left hanging. The point is not that the DFEE or its ministers are part of some conspiracy to undermine the state schools. The truth rather is that, in an age of pragmatism, they have lost their politics and so they have no basis on which to fight a battle for public opinion to explain that they cannot fund a revival in state schools without raising taxes. They prefer to pretend that they have found the money, regardless of reality. In the same way, they will not challenge the received wisdom of the Conservative years but prefer to recycle the muddled half-truths of parental choice and funding formulae and Ofsted and league tables, offering no kind of leadership, no kind of insight, no kind of hope. And, in the meantime, the market continues to favour the strong.
RH Tawney, Labour party thinker, said in Equality, in 1931: “The hereditary curse upon English education is its organisation upon lines of social class.” Martin Stephens, High Master of Manchester Grammar School, one of the private schools which commands most admiration from the government, told us: “We have created a system of almost total confusion… I would now find it easier to explain the rules of cricket to a European than I would the English education system. It is basically a vision of chaos.”
Additional research by Helene Mulholland
