35 years in education and more than 18½ years as a Head have taught me that independent schools need to change or augment the way they understand and demonstrate their contribution to the communities we are all part of.
I have spent my entire life (since my teaching practice, at least) in the independent sector. Over that time I have seen its schools become less and less accepted as a valued part of the national education scene. Independent schools have never had fewer friends politically or in the media, and with the promised introduction of VAT on school fees in the first term of a likely Labour government, there is a good chance that a reasonable number of schools will go to the wall, as a significant number of families will not be able to afford the inevitably increased fees. It will probably be the smaller or less well-endowed schools, who arguably do most for social mobility, that will be the first to disappear.
But I don’t want to rehearse the arguments around this issue in this blog; others have done so with greater cogency than I could manage and with greater financial expertise that I possess.
What I want to do is to challenge schools like mine to think differently about their purpose, and thus their role in wider society. I believe that reframing that is the most likely way to reverse the tide of public and political perception.
Firstly, let me not beat around the bush: I believe that people have the right to spend their money on what they like. If parents wish to spend money on paying for private education, they should be able to; after all, they are paying their taxes (often at higher rates) to support state-funded schooling and not using it.
Nonetheless, I have been uneasy throughout my career with the idea that the schools I have worked in and led have possibly served to make our country less fair.
And, too often we as a group of schools respond to criticism on this level with the sort of ‘yes, but bursaries and partnerships’ line, which is helpful to a point, but hardly the clincher that it is sometimes assumed to be.
However many generous means tested bursaries schools offer to students from families who couldn’t possibly afford the fees and however much excellent partnership work they do supporting local state-funded schools in educating young people from very different backgrounds -and many schools are truly exemplary in doing those things- there remains no doubt that the clear majority of students in our schools are from already advantaged backgrounds, and become more advantaged as a result of their education. Indeed, I remember being appalled talking to an experienced Head before taking up my first headship when she told actually me that the main thing her school was selling was ‘advantage’. She wasn’t wrong, though…
In a recent article on the website CapX by John Claughton, esteemed former Head of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, responded really thoughtfully to criticism he had received -not least from some in the independent schools’ sector- to a letter he had written to the Times exploring some of the same sorts of doubts.
His conclusion/clarification was this:
Schools can and must do more than share their riches. They must also ensure, by the values that they espouse and declare, that their pupils are aware of their undeserved good fortune and their responsibility to make use of that good fortune, not in ‘getting and spending’, but in doing some good in the world. All I really mean is that schools have a moral, as well as an educational purpose, and they must have the courage and honesty to face the hard questions.
I agree wholeheartedly with him, but would take it a stage further.
For me, it all goes back to how we understand the purpose of education in the first place.
If, as seems to be the prevailing view (as far as there is one; see a previous blog), that education is almost exclusively about what it does for each individual student, then schools that take mostly already-advantaged students and help them to become more advantaged are going to struggle to justify their place.
But if we understand the goal of the education we offer to be less exclusively about what we do for the individuals we educate and much, much more about what we can do through those individuals for the local, national and global communities they are part of, I suspect that our schools would have a lot to say already that is truly positive.
Rather than largely justifying our value with reference to the percentage of our students on bursaries or the resources given to partnership work, we should also point to the impact for good that our alumni -and our more recent alumni especially- are having upon the world they inhabit. Those that work in caring professions, the armed forces, the third sector, the arts, politics (!) and so on. Those whose philanthropy makes a real impact. Those who in some significant way or other serve in order to make the world better for others, and thus live up to Claughton’s challenge. I believe we can do this.
As I end my career in schools this week, that is the one message I would leave to the many excellent and thoughtful leaders in the sector: if private schools could actively and concertedly embrace this richer, broader, decidedly pro-social understanding of the goal of their work -and evidence it robustly- their value to wider society might be more obvious, better understood and even, eventually, valued.