British private schools are a challenge to any progressive government. So small – they cater to just 7% of children – and yet so all-pervasive. So conspicuously unfair and yet so intricately embedded in the establishment. So very hard to uproot. In 1970, the philosopher Mary Warnock summed up the problem crisply: “They have sizable endowments, great prestige, and of course influence. They command a kind of loyalty which is largely irrational … It might be both difficult and unpopular simply to legislate them out of existence, and who knows by what ingenious dodges they might even so manage to survive?”
“Ingenious dodges” smacks of Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister and, as the most exciting chapters of this book document, private schools have indeed pulled some fast ones. Fastest of all, and perhaps the most superbly Sir Humphrey-like exercise in vested interest disguised as public virtue, was the process by which the “public” schools got their confusing name. The famous schools – Eton, Harrow and chums – had been founded on generous legacies for the education of local poor children. By the 1860s they had sunk into Tom Brown’s School Days style brutishness, and the legacies were being abused. The Clarendon commission enforced better governance and made the scholarships “public”; open to any boy who took a competitive exam – in the classics. This effectively meant that the scholarship money went not to the local poor but to rich men’s sons from the (scholarship exam) “preparatory” schools that soon sprang up, boys who could travel in from all over the country on the new railways.
The book is sharp, too, on how the schools responded to their new “public” role: replacing caddish Flashmans with pliable Tom Browns destined for the colonial service; exchanging anarchy and drinking for muscular Christianity; swapping toasting before the fire for obsessive sport and cricket 11s who “took flying kicks at junior posteriors, their white shoes marking the score”. Above all, the schools became skilled in building Warnock’s “irrational loyalty”: lasting bonds of senior to junior, good chap to good chap, Sir Humphrey to minister. Only Clement Attlee’s obsession with his school, Haileybury, the authors suggest, allowed the schools to survive a postwar consensus against them. Later, it was Tony Crosland’s bounderish love for “freedom”, engendered at Highgate, and fellow Labour minister Douglas Jay’s loyalty to Winchester, that preserved the fiefdoms of the private schools through extended Labour threats.
The interest falters in subsequent chapters. This may partly stem from a change of writer, as the suave, punchy, people-packed paragraphs of David Kynaston, familiar from his Austerity Britain, seem to give way to the less practised prose of his writing partner, economist Francis Green. Green is a scolding, repetitious writer: all lumpy metaphors – “It seems that learning and luxury have become conjoined in an ungainly coupling” – rhetorical questions and patronising italics: “What do Britain’s opinion formers, or influential commentators and politicians think about this issue?” But mostly it is because the narrative becomes distanced from the schools themselves: rather than footprints on bums we get aloof considerations of educational issues and pages of reportage of what “important opinion formers and politicians” thought about schools – what Michael Gove said about (former shadow education secretary) Tristram Hunt, or what Lord Waldegrave really thought about what journalist Peter Wilby thought about Oxbridge. What one chap said about another chap – the voices chosen are overwhelmingly male and the occasional woman referred to patronisingly – and what these chaps think of it: “taking these six years 2012-18 as a whole, ‘patchy’ would probably be the fairest description of the quality of the debate”.
No teacher speaks in this book. There is not – and there are screeds from the Daily Mail – even a line from the teachers’ paper, the TES. Teachers’ training and working conditions are barely glanced at and neither are any of the enormous recent changes in the school curriculum and exam system. This isn’t just dull: it leads to inaccuracy and irrelevancy. Green spends pages, for example, distinguishing between “luxurious” and “positional” spending in private schools – how much is spent to get one over on state schools, and how much merely to show off – but never inquires how much teachers need to be paid: the price of retaining a physics graduate in the southeast of England; the cost of building a lifelong career for a music teacher; or of offering German A-level. Yet attention to this, far more than luxury, is how private schools retain their advantages in exams and then medical school and Oxbridge. Just six private schools have their finances analysed in any detail here, and one of these is the Purcell music school, which has 90% state-funded students. With equal vagueness, the authors assert that private schools in the UK are not significantly state funded: but the state pays for teacher training and the private schools share the teachers’ pension scheme. This is not a small point: 16% of teachers work in private schools and they are paid better than in state schools, so theirs are more than 18% of the projected payouts of the scheme – a total of £4.79bn by 2024 – which is helping to drive the current wave of cuts in state schools.
Similarly, the recent influx of international students into private schools is gestured at, but not investigated, and, apart from scornful references to the indulgent lunch at St Paul’s and the luxurious bedrooms at Rodean, girls’ schools are abandoned in 1963. The authors’ solutions to the private school problem proffer the same mixture of self-importance and distance: they don’t think removing charitable status will apply enough financial pressure or that improving state schools is relevant or possible. They think VAT on school fees might work, but are most in favour of their own “fair access scheme” whereby schools (which sort of schools and whether primary or secondary is unspecified) would take state-funded pupils: “a proportion of 30% – one third – feels about right”. The schools themselves, they say, would like it.
No doubt the schools would eat such a vague scheme for lunch, as they did the Clarendon commission and then the assisted places scheme in the 1980s. For private schools are smart institutions, and all about specifics. In the last 30 years they have grabbed every opportunity and anticipated every turn of fashion. As we became obsessed with school data, so they became more selective and academic and dominated the league tables. When a feminist agenda became more important, girls’ schools captured it:, turning into academic powerhouses, pushing girls into science, educating, they tell us, the female leaders of the future. As our attention turned to mental health, so private schools came to the forefront of mindfulness education and wellbeing counselling. As the state schools have been starved of funds and bullied by curriculum changes, so private schools have picked up the dropped agendas, persecuted subjects and displaced teachers: first classics, then history of art, then modern languages, now music, drama and, cruellest of all, special needs education.
They have replaced bum-kicking with liberal lines on transgender pupils, colonial patronage with multiculturalism, dumb team sports with Olympic sailing, Flashman with Damian Lewis and “Jerusalem” with James Blunt. They have helped themselves annually to larger and larger slices of what we love and value most of the cultural capital pie, and all the time singing, with Sir Humphrey and Jack Horner, oh what a good (multicultural feminist artistic dyslexic-friendly) girl am I. They’ve boxed a terrific match and it would, sadly, take a much defter, subtler and better researched book than this to even lay a glove on them.
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