Are English private schools too exclusive?
Private schools command a fee that parents must pay in order for their children to gain an education. With fees ranging from £8000 to over £20000, they are not cheap, especially considering that when additional items are taken into account, together with above inflation fee rises each year, a seven year secondary school education amounts to a serious amount of money.
As a lot of people, many of whom are hard working, do not have this money to pay for their children’s education, private schools are by definition exclusive. Instead 93% of pupils must go to a state school, which is free at the point of use.
Currently, the lucky few that do go to a private fee-paying schools, are at an advantage due to tax benefits that private schools receive. As registered charities, schools do not charge VAT and have other tax regulations that charities follow. Faced with state schools producing every lower grades (although they are frequently artificially inflated and may be in un-worthwhile subjects), the UK’s Labour government has decided that a solution to its problem may come in the form of removing tax concessions from private schools. This is through tougher rules enforced by the Charities Commission ordering that private schools must serve in the public benefit in order to maintain its charity status.
For the £150m in tax not paid by private schools, parents save the government an approximate £2bn by alleviating dependence from the state sector. Furthermore, academically selective private schools place gifted and talented children (who may be supported by bursaries) in an environment where they are surrounded by other willing and eager to learn, so that their excellence can be fully nurtured. These children will then go on to secure jobs in which their intelligence can be used to make vast improvements to the world, from medical breakthroughs to setting interest rates. Surely this is proof of the public benefit private schools deliver?
Hence whilst exclusive by definition, private schools foster a culture of learning, and alumni most certainly go on to serve for the public good, whilst their parents have saved the Chancellor from adding to the budget deficit through more school places. If people are fortunate enough to afford it, the state should not try to limit a good education.
Alex
Nice post-hoc rationalisation. There is no evidence that private school children put their priviledged brains to any better use the half-starved grey matter of those from the state system. Quite the reverse is surely true. Private schools encourage selfish and elitist attitudes which allow private medical care to flourish as well as perpetuating class division. Any foreign guest who has been in the UK for more than a few weeks is amazed by the inefficiencies and waste of perpetuating the British class system. Lets do what many of our European neighbours do. Maintain a few private schools for the intellectually challenged and religiously inclined, but put the blood and guts of society behind the state system. We should all practice what we preach. Go to your private school and send your children there too - but don’t pretend it is for the better interest of British society.
Unfortunately your perceptions of private schools are misguided. They do offer a superior education due to extra resources available and due to most students’ willingness to learn. And as evidenced by league tables, this does produce better results as children can fully perform to their potential; something that is not so easily fulfilled by a bright child in the state sector due to classroom distractions and limited access to resources in some instances.
However to suggest that private schools encourage elitist attitudes is simply an accusation based mainly out of misunderstanding. I am sure many private school students are aware of their extremely privileged position and know that many people are unfortunately not able to attend a fee-paying school. However this does not make them any better than others, in the same way that having a bigger house or faster car makes them none better than their peers. Their parents have worked hard to be able to pay for a higher quality of educational environment, and they should be entitled to spend their money on this, just as they can for any other higher quality goods and services.
I also doubt that private medical care is elitist. If people can afford the care, or have been able to afford the insurance premiums, they should be entitled to pay for a superior level of care, where they can have the privacy of their own room with en-suite bathroom, the flexibility of treatment when they want it and not when the state can fit it in, the luxury of satellite television, the convenience of family being able to visit at any hours and not those prescribed by a hospital, and the attentiveness of friendly staff who are not under pressure to work ever longer shifts whilst filling in ever more bureaucratic paperwork. Private health care is not elitist, its simply an achievement of a successful society where not all have to suffer if they can afford not to.
So whilst the government should continue to support state schooling, and saves £2bn by not having to educate the children of those who pay their taxes but choose private schooling, these private schools must continue exist. They save the government a tremendous amount of money, and provide privileged children with a better educational environment. Only having a few private schools would mean the system would be desperately overcrowded and underfunded, so all will suffer, just for the maintenance of an illogical principle.
Going to step in here. Alex, you shot yourself in the foot by saying ‘Their parents have worked hard to be able to pay for a higher quality of educational environment, and they should be entitled to spend their money on this, just as they can for any other higher quality goods and services.’
You’re suggesting people who send their kids to state schools don’t work as hard, and also saying that the state system is some sort of malady which people should work hard to save their kids from. Both are wrong.
Dear Alex
Thanks for your reply. Whilst there is an internal logic to your comments, they are made within a flawed concept of what education really is.
Surely education is not a commodity to be bought and sold in the way we buy cars or houses. Perhaps it is for some. But education perhaps is a little too important to be left to the marketplace, as someone once remarked:
“The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market”.
Since 1948, a few years after Gandhi’s quote, education became a human right as Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the UN General Assembly meeting in Paris on 10 December sixty years ago. It is indeed a principle for which many have died and which, in its essential form, can never be bought by the rich and privileged.
By the way, it is total rubbish to argue that closing private schools would overwhelm the state system. Most European countries, with the exception of Italy, get along fine with very few private schools – as does Wales for that matter. The private school thing seems to be a very English affair and a regrettable vestige of the class system that should be consigned to history. It has little place in a modern democracy trying to compete in a global marketplace – it creates inefficiencies and structural imbalances in society.
Private education segregates communities and undermines the state education system. Don’t you understand that one of the very reasons the state system fails is because the bright children bleed out into private schools? Those children who would more than likely do well at a local state school, and who would at the same time help raise the standards for all children in their community.
We work hard. Probably harder than many parents who send their children to private schools. We work hard: as school governors, fundraisers, parents and members of a local community because we care about children: ALL children and not just our own.