Tony Mitchell says it is preposterous that independent schools in Britain still enjoy charitable status
THE core business of the majority of Britain’s independent schools is to provide a luxury and selective education for the children of the most privileged people in our society – around 7 per cent of the population. Although many of them were founded on the principle of helping the poor, selection policies deny the vast majority any opportunity of a place at these schools. Yet they are able to enjoy charitable status so long as they can demonstrate that they provide “public benefitâ€.
The truth is that these peculiarly British class-based institutions do far more harm than good in our society by dividing it with their exclusivity. They have become bastions of selective schooling, alongside the 164 remaining state grammar schools. The result is a form of social and educational apartheid.
No one in their right mind can really believe that the likes of Eton and Harrow are charitable institutions. They have two responses to the requirement that they have to demonstrate public benefit in order to qualify for charitable status and the £100 million of public money that comes with it. Both responses are peripheral to the core business and leave it largely unaffected or enhanced.
The first response is the frenetic increase in the bursaries and scholarships they offer, claiming that these provide access to more people, particularly among the poor. In Bedford, where I live, just 182 bursaries were awarded in its four schools this year. That’s hardly sufficient to justify “public benefitâ€. And these scholarships are awarded only to able children. The greater the number of able students a public school attracts, the more its performance and reputation will be enhanced.
But this is a predatory activity. Taking scholarship children from state schools means those schools are severely weakened in terms of the balance of abilities which is so essential to the effective functioning of a truly comprehensive school. The effect is to reduce it to the status of a secondary modern, undermining the democratic policy chosen by the community. Where is the public benefit here?
When you add the fee-payers, many of whom are also very able, to these funded pupils, it soon becomes clear that the selective process is denying state schools, not just 7 per cent of the school population, but about one third of the top 20 to 25 per cent of the ability range. This damage is compounded by the practice of directly comparing the raw examination results of the independent schools with those of the state sector, which caters for the whole ability range, implying that private education is much superior.
In fact, when like is compared with like, research has shown that the most able pupils in comprehensives do at least as well – and possibly marginally better – than their peers in the private sector. They also tend to go on to get better university degrees. When appropriate adjustments are made for social background, the private school performance advantage disappears. Similarly, the state grammar school I taught in regularly matches the results of Bedford School, a private school.
There are also large question marks over the assumption that access and bursary schemes help the poor. The Charity Commission has suggested that families earning less than 60 per cent of the average wage as a measure of poverty. Using such a measure, currently less than 1 per cent (or 39) of the 4,000 children at independent schools in Bedford have full assistance. And assistance is awarded on a sliding scale. From 2008, the Bedford schools will consider awards on a scale increased to £50,000. So most of the awards will not be helping poor students and it is deceitful to suggest otherwise.
The defenders of private schools insist they enter into a variety of partnerships and grant-making activities to benefit education for all. These claims should be subject to some rather more stringent tests than have been applied up to now.
We need answers to questions such as: why they are necessary? How are they monitored? How long-term is the commitment? Who benefits? Who pays? And in what way do such activities justify charitable status for everything the school does?
In Bedford, it is proposed to increase the money spent on such activities and bursaries from £400,000 to £2 million by 2017. This sounds impressive, but it will still be under 5 per cent of the total spending. Commercial companies spend more on creating goodwill, without being accorded charitable status.
Bursaries are clearly no justification for charitable status. Community activities are marginally more acceptable, but even these should only be entitled to tax relief when they are truly of public benefit.
The essence of charity is to provide help that is otherwise unavailable for less fortunate members of society. That is not a definition that encompasses private schools. Ranging from a relatively small number of excellent schools to some of incompetence and pretension, 1,300 of these schools charge between £8,000 and £20,000 a year in fees; 161 charge between £20,000 and £30,000. Only 65 charge less than £5,000.
Most parents with children at private schools pay full fees; people who can afford to do that do not need charity. The amount of money spent on each pupil (roughly equivalent to the fee charged) is sufficient for there to be an overall pupil/teacher ratio of 10:1, compared with 18:1 in the state sector.
This gives class sizes of nine in the private sector at lower secondary level, compared with 24 in the state sector. This is luxury for the better-off and helps them to monopolise the top jobs in Britain. For instance, six out of the nine members of the Charity Commission have close connections with the private sector. One in four MPs went to Oxbridge and 42 per cent of frontbenchers to fee-charging schools.
Charitable status should not be abused to underpin privilege or reward those who try to buy an advantage, having chosen to opt out of their community and damaging it by doing so.
Charitable status will have been earned when all children have an equal chance of benefiting from private education. If 90 per cent of the pupils in independent education were children of the poor and disadvantaged in genuine need, not fee-payers, that really would be indicative of a charity offering real public benefit. But that isn’t what happens.
