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John White WHAT’S WRONG WITH Private Education?
John White
WHAT’S WRONG WITH Private Education?
What’s Wrong with Private Education?John White
First published in 2015 by the UCL Institute of Education, University College London,
20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
ioepress.co.uk
© John White 2015
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Cover image: Harrow schoolboys and local boys outside Lord’s cricket ground,
1937. Photo by Jimmy Sime/Getty Images.
iii
Contents
1. Initial arguments 1
Private schools in general 1
Unfairness 2
Parents’ rights 3
Private schools in Britain 4
Back to unfairness 6
Social cohesiveness 11
A ruling class? 12
Back to social exclusiveness, unfairness, and parents’ rights 16
Conclusion 17
2. Widening the focus 19
Victorian class-based society 19
The role of school examinations 22
Private schools after 1944 24
The rebirth of private education 26
Blurring the divide 27
The new hierarchy 29
Conclusion 31
3. Back to arguments 34
Assessing the new hierarchy 34
Reconsidering private education 36
Conclusion 38
iv
4. Ways forward 40
Conclusion 46
Notes 49
References 51
1
Chapter 1
Initial arguments
A grammar school boy from Leeds, Alan Bennett first encountered the privately educated when he sat a Cambridge scholarship examination in 1951.
That weekend was the first time I had come across public schoolboys in the mass and I was appalled. They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy. Public school they might be but they were louts. Seated at long refectory tables beneath the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel we grammar school boys were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession.
(Bennett, 2014)
Less colourfully, he goes on to say:
Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been wasted.
Is Bennett right? Is private education wrong? And if so, is it wrong because it is unfair?
Not all of the UK’s 2,400+ private schools are ‘public’ schools in the British sense of the term. Public schools are an élite within the private sector: they are the HMC schools, that is, the 250 or so whose headteachers belong to the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference.
Whatever Alan Bennett or anyone else has to say for or against public schools may not bear on the wider issue of whether private education is wrong. I will come back later to public schools, but will start with this bigger picture.
Private schools in generalIn private – unlike state – education, parents fund their children’s schooling. If private schools are wrong, is it because parents pay? But why should this
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be a reason against them? People with money to do so pay for meals out and holidays on the Algarve. We do not say these things are reprehensible simply because they are paid for.
Then, is what is wrong with private schools that some can pay and others cannot? This can’t be right either. Not everyone can afford restaurants or foreign holidays, yet those who do pay for these things are not behaving improperly.
Perhaps the issue is really about the injustice of a system that enables some to enjoy such goods while others are too poor to do so. This would apply to private schooling as well as to holidays and meals. And it would bring us back to Bennett’s view that what is wrong with private education is that it is unfair.
UnfairnessOne stance on this would be to accept the charge of unfairness, but to deny this carries any implication that private schools should be penalized in some way or not be allowed to exist. Some may argue that, yes, some people get a raw deal in life and earn too little money to pay for more than basic necessities, that this is an injustice that needs to be remedied, and that we should remedy it by ensuring that they get more – either as a result of economic growth or through income redistribution. In education, this could point to a policy of ensuring that everyone has enough money to pay for private schooling.
But should we agree that private education is unfair? Bennett says that it is. As he presents things, he makes this seem like a self-evident truth. But is it?
Suppose all state schools are doing a good job and are popular with parents. Suppose, too, that the few private schools that happen to exist are those that parents want for what others see as idiosyncratic reasons, even though the education they provide is, by anyone’s reckoning, mediocre. Neither do parents choose them for class size, since sizes are comparable with those in state schools. Nor do they choose them for exam results, for these are poor. In this case, they prefer them because they went there themselves, say, or because they provide extra religious instruction in the beliefs of their own unusual sect.
This scenario is perhaps not realistic. But it is useful because it helps us to put a finger on what, if anything, is unfair about private schooling. Unfairness would be a hard charge to level against our imaginary examples. The children who attend these schools are not getting something that parents within the state system would want their own children to have. We might
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Initial arguments
still object, on other grounds, to the parents in the story going private. We might say, for instance, that they don’t have the right to choose schools according to their own beliefs. But we can make a charge of unfairness stick only if privately educated children gain some kind of significant advantage that state school students lack. I emphasize ‘significant’ because if the advantage were trivial – for instance, if all of the private schools in our imaginary society were more spacious than state schools by a few cubic metres – the cry of ‘unfair!’ would be unlikely to be heard. We would have to be talking about something more substantial, such as vastly different class sizes, a richer curriculum, better chances of going to university, or getting a top job.
All this shows, I think, that there is nothing intrinsically unfair about private education in the abstract. If it is unfair at all, this must be because of features attached to private schooling in particular circumstances. Alan Bennett may be right in his objection – not because the institution is unjust per se, but because he has in his sights a particular manifestation of it, the form it takes in British society today. I will come back to this in due course.
Meanwhile, are there additional objections in principle to private education other than alleged unfairness? Could it still be wrong in itself, but for different reasons?
Parents’ rightsPerhaps one objection to private education might be that it brings with it parental choice of school. Can we validly argue that parents have no right to choose – morally, that is, whatever legal right they may have to do so?
Maybe. But we would need some backing for this. One such could be the inadequacy of arguments put up in favour of parents’ rights. If a supporter were rash enough to claim that children belong to their parents, so the latter are entitled to decide how they should be educated, an objection would soon be at hand. If something is your property, you may well have the prima facie right to do what you will with it, but parents do not own their children.
A better supporting case might be that parents are responsible for their children’s welfare and so should do their best to see they go to a school that promotes this. This looks reasonable as a premise. But does it support private education? It is compatible with all schools being state-provided. Parents could in principle choose the best school for their child among these, so parental choice does not necessitate parental choice of private schools.
But neither does the premise support parents’ choice even among schools in the state sector. It is compatible with all children being allocated
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to a local school. Parents would still be responsible for keeping tabs on how well the school is doing for their child, and there are obvious ways in which they can do this – via parent–teacher meetings, for instance, or by becoming a governor, or collaborating with other parents.
A response to the last two paragraphs could be that this is not always how things are. In Britain and elsewhere, for instance, children are not all allocated to schools; and not all schools are state-run. Where private options exist, as here, parents are fully justified in choosing one if they think this will be best for their child.
Fair enough. But does the new move really help the case for private education? In taking as its starting point the existence of private schools that parents may wish to choose, is it not begging the fundamental question of whether such schools should be allowed to exist?
On the other hand, it is hard to make a case in principle against allowing parents to pay for their children’s schooling. The strongest reason for allowing them seems to be this: people should be free to do what they want with their own money as long as this causes no harm to others. This is a specification of the principle of liberty, as formulated by John Stuart Mill, that lies at the heart of liberal-democratic thinking. If parents want to spend money on their children’s schooling in the belief that this will be good for them, this is unobjectionable as long as it does not harm other people – the children themselves or others (Cohen, 1981).
If this is right, there seems to be no reason in principle why private schools should not exist – along with private tuition or home schooling.
Private schools in BritainI suggested above that Alan Bennett may be right in his opposition to private education if he is thinking of the form this takes in Britain, rather than in an in-principle way.
What features of British private schooling in particular might provoke his and others’ objections? First, a few facts. The 2,400+ private schools in Britain educate some 7 per cent of the population. Of these, 1,600+ are primary and just under 800 secondary. Among the secondary schools are 250 or so HMC schools, generally known as ‘public schools’. Fees across all schools range from £3,000 p.a. to £21,000+ for a day pupil, rising to £30,000+ for a boarder. The pupil–teacher ratio, at about ten to one, is much lower than the 17+ to one found in maintained schools.1 This allows for more individual tuition. Private schools also tend to have better provision for extra-curricular activities than state schools. They are
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Initial arguments
free, too, to determine their own curricula, tending to favour a traditional academic model but with opportunities for ranging beyond this.
In terms of examination results and university entry, private schools do well. According to the 2012 A level results:
Almost a third of pupils from the independent sector gained at least three As … compared with just over one-in-10 attending Government-funded schools and colleges.2
Privately educated students also score on university entry:
In 2010/11, an estimated 86 per cent of pupils from English independent schools progressed on to any university course compared with 70 per cent of those from the state education system – a 16 percentage point gap.
But the gulf was even wider when analysing entry rates to ‘the most selective’ universities – the third of institutions with the highest entry requirements. This includes Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London and other members of the Russell Group.
According to figures, 64 per cent of students from independent schools went on to these universities in 2010/11, compared with 24 per cent from state schools – a 40 percentage point gap.
The gap widened from 39 percentage points a year earlier and 37 points in both 2006/7 and 2008/9.3
In 2012/3, 42.6 per cent of entrants to Oxford University were from private schools.4
Among private secondary schools, those in the HMC, the public schools, do even better. The Sutton Trust revealed that in 2013 five élite schools, four of them private, sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge universities than nearly 2,000 schools, which make up two-thirds of the entire state sector.5 The HMC website states that ‘one in ten of all those attending the UK’s top ten universities come from (its) 253 schools’.6
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given these figures, people educated in private schools are disproportionately represented in top professional jobs. In 2007, Sutton Trust research found that over half of 500 people holding leading positions in law, politics, medicine, journalism, and business were privately educated.7 Again, top HMC schools do even better. In 2012 The Daily Telegraph reported research, also by the Sutton Trust, showing that
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ten élite fee-paying schools produced 12 per cent of the high-flyers featuring in birthday lists of national and Sunday newspapers in 2011.8
In June 2014 the Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazalgette, complained that top private schools are too dominant in acting. ‘I personally don’t see why all the male actors getting Baftas should come from Eton,’ he told Sheffield Doc/Fest, adding, ‘Good for them, and great actors, but why should they all come from Eton?’9
The most recent data on jobs comes from Elitist Britain, the August 2014 Report from Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission:
71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of Permanent Secretaries, 53 per cent of senior diplomats, 50 per cent of members of the House of Lords, 45 per cent of public body chairs, 44 per cent of the Sunday Times Rich List, 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, 36 per cent of the Cabinet, 35 per cent of the national rugby team, 33 per cent of MPs, 33 per cent of the England cricket team, 26 per cent of BBC executives, and 22 per cent of the Shadow Cabinet attended independent schools – compared to 7 per cent of the public as a whole.10
For the moment, that is more than enough factual information about private schooling in the UK relevant to our discussion of objections to it. Let me come back now to those.
Back to unfairnessI began with Alan Bennett’s claim that private education is not fair. We saw, when examining in-principle arguments, that for this charge to stick, those who go to private schools must – as a necessary condition – gain some kind of significant advantage over those who do not. The facts supplied above give abundant evidence of this. The 7 per cent of private students have more individual tuition, are in smaller teaching groups, have better facilities, have richer curricular and extra-curricular opportunities, do better at A levels, are more likely to get into universities, especially the more highly-rated ones, and figure disproportionately well in lists of those with the best jobs.
There is little doubt about these advantages. It is true that defenders of private education sometimes challenge the first two points, about more individualized teaching and learning. They point to studies that purport to show that reducing class sizes in maintained schools is less effective than is
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Initial arguments
often thought. Take, for instance, the DfE’s 2011 report on class size that states (p. 2):
The evidence base on the link between class size and attainment, taken as a whole, finds that a smaller class size has a positive impact on attainment and behaviour in the early years of school, but this effect tends to be small and diminishes after a few years.11
Actually, the evidence is more complicated and more mixed than this overall statement suggests. One factor is the size of the class difference. It would not be surprising if a fall of a couple of points had less effect than a larger disparity. Where there is a big class size difference, for instance, a reduction from 30 to 15, as in Blatchford’s (2008) study of low-attaining secondary school pupils, there was ‘an increase in the probability of on-task behaviour by around 10 percentage points from 78% to 88%’.12 Where we are comparing private with state provision, it is differences of this magnitude (two to one) that are the relevant ones. And it is because of their vastly smaller teaching groups that parents often prefer private schools. They would be likely to think twice if these in fact did not deliver the goods.
As for the other goods that private schools provide, these are hard to gainsay. What ordinary state school could match this passage from Harrow School’s website?
Our playing fields are extensive and include two all-weather pitches that can be used for rugby practice, soccer and hockey. The Sports Centre has an eight metre indoor climbing wall, a weights room, a 25m swimming pool and a sports hall. The cricket facilities include ten grass squares, grass nets, six artificial outdoor nets and two indoor nets. There are courts for tennis, rackets, squash and Fives and the School has its own nine-hole golf course. Our athletic facilities include an Olympic-standard running track, facilities for long jump, high jump, discus and all the main athletic events, plus a water jump for the steeplechase and an area for the pole jump event.13
Are these and the other advantages enough to justify the charge of unfairness? If something is unfair, that suggests it is morally wrong. Is this true of the extra benefits that private schools bring with them?
Their defenders may argue that wanting to remove or at least reduce these differences between the two sectors betrays an ideological attachment to egalitarianism. This ideal is that everyone should have
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the same. But, they may say, there is no good reason to believe this. Equality is not good in itself. Revolutionaries may have bracketed it with liberty and fraternity as democratic values, but it is different in important respects. Making people’s lives, goods, opportunities more equal does not necessarily bring about a benefit to anyone, as realizing these other values does. For suppose that, while state school provision remained the same, the better provision in private schools were reduced by 50 per cent. No one would benefit from this move. A reply might be that the advantage would lie in the greater equality itself, since equality is intrinsically valuable. But it is presupposed that if something is of intrinsic ethical value it is beneficial to at least one person. This is true if we are talking of the realization of autonomy, physical health, intimate relationships, helping those in distress, enjoying music, or any other such value. Engaging in an intimate relationship, for instance, is valuable in itself, and this could not be so if a conceivable instance of it benefited no one. The fact that in our example of equality as an intrinsic good nobody became better off is a reason for concluding that equality is not valuable in itself (Raz, 2008).14
While I agree with this anti-egalitarian argument, it leaves open the possibility that equality is instrumentally, as distinct from intrinsically, valuable. Reducing the advantages that private schools possess – such as smaller classes and better facilities – may in some way be a means of benefiting existing state school pupils. This would have to be shown, not assumed, to be the case.
Building on a suggestion made earlier, suppose all children who attend state schools get a pretty good deal. Although this is not as good as at Harrow or Eton or even at a little-known St Mary’s convent, it still means that they enjoy school, do well in their exams, are able to go on to higher or further education if they want to, and manage to secure a fulfilling and adequately paid job. Why not leave the more fortunate with all that they have, given that no one else is getting a raw deal?
That might be fine in theory, an opponent may reply, but the real world is not like that. Many in Britain today live in poverty, are poorly fed and housed, do unpleasant menial jobs, have no time to themselves, are stressed, fall into despair … Their children tend to go to the worst schools, with poorer teaching, more discipline problems, worst exam results … It simply is not fair that these children have such a poor start in life, while Harrovians enjoy their nine-hole golf course en route to Trinity College Cambridge and life as a High Court judge.
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A defender of private education has an answer:
The problem here is poverty. It is not to do with comparisons between different groups. If it is poverty we need to reduce, let us work out the best ways of doing that, rather than being diverted by how much better other people are doing. We should think of how we can raise our gross national product so as to erode the poverty that capitalist advances have already done so much to diminish since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Private schools have helped in this process from those early times by furnishing the nation with its industrial and other leaders who have done so much to transform the lives of ordinary people.
If schools in poor areas are not generating the exam results that get underprivileged youngsters into Oxford and Cambridge, it is there that we should be concentrating our efforts. We need Sir Michael Wilshaw, now in charge of OFSTED and once an amazingly successful secondary headteacher in a poor area of London – with ten students at his Mossbourne Academy in Hackney offered places at Cambridge University in 2011 – to inject his tough love remedies.15 We need strict controls on behaviour, relentless concentration on examination success, threats of parental fines for truancy or ignoring homework.
Left-wingers may still prefer to dwell on their comparisons. But what does this show? It is irrational to brood on these, given that the other approach is so much more task-focused. One can only think that it must be some sort of envy that is driving them. They see all the superb teaching, the Olympic running tracks, the sparkling A level results … and dream that they or the downtrodden for whom they speak also had these things.
This accusation of envy is often heard in these debates. I suspect it is not based on empirical evidence as much as speculation. But the more central argument – that if poverty is the problem we should direct our thoughts to that – is more telling. If the opponent of private education could show that the only way, or the most effective way, of tackling it is by removing resources from the better-off, including their educational advantages, this would seem a strong counter-argument. But how could he or she show that? We know that there are other ways of lifting people out of poverty such as economic growth. Whether, or how far, redistribution of wealth is also necessary – to alleviate not only extreme want, but also other causes of
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distress such as lack of free time – is a further question. It takes us far beyond arguments about private education in particular and into general politics.
There is another, more narrowly focused, kind of ‘egalitarian’ challenge that has to be met. This also involves an appeal to equality not as an intrinsically valuable good, but as of instrumental benefit, in that reducing certain advantages possessed by private students would benefit some state school pupils.
This argument is built around the claim that education is in part a positional good.
What matters is not how much education one gets, or how good that education is, or even one’s results, but one’s position in the distribution of those things. Children who, by going private, do better than they would have done at a state school are gaining competitive advantage over others. They are jumping the queue for university places and well-paid or interesting jobs.
(Swift, 2003: 23)
The threat here is to equality of opportunity, in that state school students have fewer opportunities than they would otherwise have had of getting into university (especially one of the élite universities in which private students are abundant) or a good job (especially, as we can also see from statistics presented above, a ‘top’ one).
How are we to assess this argument? As Swift says, the fact that most top jobs in different fields are held by private school alumni reduces the chances of state school students getting one. But would this necessarily be harmful to them? There must be many from state schools who are not blind to the competitive nature of modern existence, and would like to have a reasonably well-paid and interesting job, but who are not interested in having one towards the top of the tree, and whose overall well-being would not be diminished if they did not get one. How could such people be harmed if their chances of becoming an admiral, a CEO, a bishop, or a cabinet minister were reduced?
State school students who do aim at such heights may well be disadvantaged, but even this is not obviously true. It might be true on a definition of well-being based on how far one’s major informed desires are satisfied; for if a state school alumnus wants above all to end up in this top bracket and fails to do so, his or her well-being is diminished, and it is plausible to say that he or she has been harmed by the advantage that the privately educated have in this area. But whether the informed-desire-satisfaction notion of well-being is correct cannot be taken as read. It has
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been often challenged – and, to my mind, effectively so.16 Suppose, for instance, a person has a burning ambition to reach the very top, does so, and then finds he or she has nothing now to live for and falls into depression. Even though this person has achieved his or her foremost goal in life, he or she may be far from flourishing.
The upshot of this discussion is that it is not as clear as it may have seemed that the dominance of private school ex-pupils in top jobs, and the reduction of opportunities for others that this brings with it, is unfair to these others, where this term implies that they have been harmed in some way.
This is a brave attempt at a defence of private schools, but it lacks persuasiveness. While some state school students may not be worsted by what Swift calls ‘queue jumping’, others still could be. This is at least in part an empirical matter.
Social cohesivenessA second complaint about British private education is that it is divisive. Its students live in a world apart, scarcely interacting with ordinary people, knowing very little about them, and often seeing them as inferior to themselves. This is especially true of boarders, since they live in their own gated community twenty-four seven. But it is also largely true of day students, since for all of the time they are in school and often beyond this they are interacting only with others like themselves. Bennett’s Cambridge rowdies, bellowing down the table at each other, provide a vivid example of how such enclosed worlds can persist. A state school class, on the other hand, is frequently a microcosm of society itself. In some people’s eyes, being a member of it can be, if schools manage this well, a civic preparation in itself, a daily induction into life within the larger society.
How far these charges are true is an empirical question. But suppose they were. Would that be enough to show that private schools were doing something wrong – that they should be curbed in some way, perhaps even abolished?
We should separate living in a world apart from looking down on people. In terms of the first, an appeal to the principle of liberty might suggest that there is nothing wrong with leading a life apart from that of most people as long as one is causing no harm. Monks, nuns, and scholars often do this, but we do not look askance at them for that reason. If ex-private school pupils prefer to fraternize among themselves, and their doing so does not make other individuals’ lives any less flourishing – as these can still get on with their own concerns without interference – what room is there for moral censure?
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The second charge looks more reprehensible. It is indeed wrong to lord it over other people, to see oneself as a superior being. But insofar as the privately educated are guilty of this – and we do not know how many, if any, of them might be – they would be no different in this from many more ordinary people who look down on immigrants, benefit scroungers, other racial groups, blue-collar workers, those in social housing. Wanting to reinforce one’s place in the social pecking order is a common human desire. If it is undesirable, as I believe it is, attacking private schools would do little to undermine it. In any case, as I have said more than once, how far the privately schooled do in fact engage in demeaning others is an empirical issue and one that should not be prejudged.
So far, we have examined two complaints against private schooling: that it is unfair, and that it leads to social divisiveness. Although both have some weight, there is a third, and in my opinion more telling, objection.
A ruling class?
In 2007 Sutton Trust research found that over half of 500 people holding leading positions in law, politics, medicine, journalism and business were privately educated.17
The predominance of the privately educated was confirmed in the 2014 Report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, quoted above.
I don’t know how many of these 71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of Permanent Secretaries, 53 per cent of senior diplomats, and so on, are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps, because of their schooling, a lot of them are. But the argument that follows would still be cogent if all private schools took steps, as some may well do, to bring home to their students how the other half (or, more accurately, 93 per cent?) live, and encouraged them to minister to their welfare.
The third reason to challenge private education is its role in producing national leaders. This has traditionally been a central aim. From the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, the private system made no bones about this. Over much of this period, Plato’s Republic was a favoured text used in defence of a public school education – before Popper’s demolition of it in The Open Society and its Enemies in 1945 (McCulloch, 1991: 66–7). Its notion of a ‘Guardian’ class legitimated, or so it was thought, the dominance of its ex-students in public life both in Britain and in its Empire. The idea was influential directly and indirectly. It was promoted through the classical education common to the upper classes.
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Benjamin Jowett’s celebrated translation of the Republic in 1888 – based on earlier versions dating from 1871 (Faber, 1957: 433–4) – expanded the numbers of those acquainted with the Platonic conception of an élite ruling group. This conception was also influential indirectly, via the idea of a state based on Platonized Christianity that influenced Coleridge from 1816 onwards and took shape in his notion of a ‘clerisy’, a guardian-like élite more cultured than a traditional aristocracy that would help to diffuse civilized attitudes and knowledge across the population (Keane, 1994: 78). Coleridge’s ideal permeated much of mid-nineteenth-century thinking, partly via its expression in the works of J.S. Mill, Thomas Arnold, and Matthew Arnold (Gordon and White, 1979: 5–6; McCulloch, 1991: 16). In the more democratic age that has followed we have heard much less on these lines, about rule by a special élite. Yet the data already mentioned on the top jobs is, as I shall show, disturbing.
A brief reacquaintance with the Platonic argument for Guardian rule once so influential in public schools will help to show why private school dominance is not tolerable. Plato’s perspective is attractive. His ideal education system provided higher education only for the intellectually most able. Ten years of mathematics and a further five of philosophy gave them an insight into the structure of reality and the nature of the good life denied to the rest of the free population. The understanding they gained of the nature of the good society, as well as the devotion to its flourishing that this engendered, equipped them as rulers of the state. Although reluctant to give up the delights of philosophy for practical involvement in politics, they dutifully spent their later lives in what they had been trained to do.
Generations of public schoolboys were brought up under the aegis of this doctrine of the incorruptible and dedicated public servant. Its hold on them gained strength from Plato’s argument that the Guardians were born to rule. In his metallurgical image, they were the people of gold, innately equipped with a high-powered intellect denied to those of silver, their auxiliaries, or those of bronze, the common people. There was no question, either in the Republic, or among the British upper classes, of rule by the many. Their intelligence was simply too low.
Plato’s foundations are, however, shaky. I will not go further into his psychological views about the distribution of intellectual ability, except to say that they rest on the premise that there are innate ceilings of intelligence that prevent ordinary people from possessing the understanding required for political leadership. But the proposition that these upper limits exist is an unjustified assumption, in my view both unverifiable and unfalsifiable (White, 2002: 90).
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We can also leave out of any further account the Republic’s fifteen-year curriculum of abstract enquiry. What is more relevant for us is Plato’s belief that a high-level education gives his benevolent rulers authoritative knowledge of what is in the best interests of the ruled. The premise on which this is based is that theoretical knowledge of the nature of goodness is enough to rule well: the better you know the good, the better equipped you are to do the good.
Once we isolate the premise in this way, it is not difficult to see its weakness. Knowledge is not sufficient for virtue. Someone can have all the understanding in the world of the nature of the good life yet fail to live up to this in practice, whether through weakness of will or downright wickedness. The same is true if we give such knowledge more body and greater contemporary relevance than Platonic abstractions about the meaning of goodness. Possessing insights into how to run a modern society signalled by a first-class Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics does not mean that one will be a good leader working for the good of all. An unscrupulous person could put his or her knowledge and skills to purely self-interested purposes.
Even if we could in some way guarantee that modern Guardians were benevolent, there would still be a problem. If they are to serve the good of all, they have to know what this consists in. They may have a general grasp of what, from a philosophical point of view, goodness consists in, but they need more than this. The people over whom they rule may run into many millions. There is no reason to think that one person’s interests coincide with those of others. We flourish in all sorts of different ways. Intimate relationships, reading biographies, gardening, travelling, surfing, teaching, and countless other pursuits are constituents of fulfilling lives. In a modern society like ours, nearly all of us are brought up to make our own autonomous choices about the kinds of activities that contribute to our well-being. We each have our own priorities about our own personal mix of these. How could modern Guardians, acting for the good of all, possess all of this detailed knowledge?
Wolff (1996: 80) suggests that opinion polling could help. To this, in our more digital age, we might add the use of the internet, including social media, to discover individuals’ preferences. But whether satisfying such preferences would necessarily be promoting their well-being is, as we saw when this issue came up earlier, a further question. The fact that my considered preferences include heavy smoking or watching endless soaps on TV may say little or nothing about my well-being. If the Guardians could find out what we each of us want, would they know what is good for us?
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Issues open up at this point about how we are to conceive well-being if it is not a matter of preference satisfaction (White, 2011a: Chapters 7, 8). But even if we ignored them and adopted a preference-satisfaction account of well-being, should Wolff’s suggestion incline us towards Platonic rule? There is still a problem. However fine the mesh of knowledge about preferences the rulers might acquire, it would still remain general – in the sense that it could tell them only that person A has preferences a, b, c … x, while B’s are d, e, f … y (etc.). This would not enable them to understand what it is like from the inside to experience – to desire and feel – these things, including the specific meanings they have for the agents and the subtle interconnections between them in their lives. Insofar as the rulers made decisions on behalf of the ruled, they would be failing to respect them as individual agents (see Wolff, 1996: 112). They would be treating them not as active persons, able to make their own decisions about things involving themselves, but as passive beings, ready to accept what the rulers lay down for them. This is at the heart of the argument, first elaborated by J.S. Mill (1861: Chapter 3), for involving all individuals in government.
What bearing does all of this have on the disproportionate numbers of privately educated people in top jobs? It is not surprising that, in a Britain formally democratic since 1928, the Platonic defence of private schools as cradles of national leadership self-sacrificingly devoted to the common good has now become more muted than in earlier decades. I say more in the next chapter about how this came about. On websites today you can still find references to leadership among the aims of particular private schools. Examples I have unsystematically discovered include Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough, Haileybury, Tonbridge, Manchester Grammar School, Mill Hill, City of London School for Boys, and Haberdasher Aske’s School for Boys.18 No rationale is given on these websites, and if any were, I doubt whether Plato would now figure in it. But many well-known private schools do not include leadership among their stated aims at all; for instance, Berkhamsted, Highgate, St Paul’s Boys’ School, Sedbergh, Eastbourne College, Lancing, and Bishop’s Stortford.19
Whether ‘leadership’ appears on website lists of aims or not, like Plato’s Guardians private school students have been brought up with the expectation that many of them, at least, will end up in positions of power. Unlike the Guardians, they are working within the framework of a representative democracy, so there are constitutional and other legal checks on the power they wield. Neither are they the sole people in these powerful positions: state school products also hold a sizeable percentage of them.
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One might think these factors are enough to remove any possible threat posed by their private education to democratic rule.
Yet some danger remains. The fact that private school alumni nearly all come from a similar background, and one made possible by family wealth, is relevant. It puts them in a commanding position even in occupational areas shared with a large number of state school alumni, for the backgrounds of the latter are so much more diverse. It suggests three possible threats to democratic values. One is that networks of contacts built up within and between domains of power may be used to further the interests of those in their own social group. The second is that, even without such collusion, shared assumptions deriving from a common background may affect, in aspects that are hard to regulate, how well suited they are to use their power in a way that encourages democratic agency and does not treat those outside their circle as passive recipients of the services they provide for them. The third is that, their power being based on family wealth, it is likely to continue from one generation to the next, thus reinforcing over time the first two dangers. Making top jobs more socially mixed is a way of confronting these challenges to democracy.
This, the third of our criticisms of private schooling in Britain, is the most telling, as it concerns the bedrock of our common life. If none of the privately educated went into top positions (suppose all of them opted for a hedonistic life style funded by private wealth), we might still be disquieted, but we would not have worries about a concentration of power in a few hands. Although we have been formally a full democracy since universal suffrage arrived in 1928, we still have, nearly 90 years later, some way to go in seeing democratic attitudes and procedures permeating areas of life beyond voting in elections. The dominance of the privately educated in key posts long pre-dated the 1928 reform, has long outlasted it, and continues to be an obstacle to further democratization.
To add a word of caution: the criticism depends on data about the future leaders private schools were educating two or more decades ago (see Walford, 2006: 30) and assumes that they will continue to educate these in the future. We will not have data on the latter, of course, for some time.
Back to social exclusiveness, unfairness, and parents’ rightsIn the light of this central – anti-democratic – criticism, the previous objections, to do with unfairness and exclusiveness, appear more substantial, as do the doubts that critics of private education may have about its supporters’ appeal to parental rights.
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The arguments about social exclusiveness are that the privately educated tend to live lives apart from those of ordinary people and that they see themselves as socially superior to them. (We will assume here what should be questioned elsewhere, that these claims are empirically grounded.) When we looked at these arguments before, we concentrated on the harm, if any, that this was likely to cause individuals outside of the favoured group. The anti-democratic argument adopts a communal rather than an individualistic standpoint: it is about the dangers to a political community rather than any threats to the well-being of some individuals. In this light, it is easier to make a case against social exclusiveness. If a large proportion of those in top leadership roles are out of touch with how less privileged people live and/or look down on them as inferior, this underlines the undemocratic nature of our political arrangements.
Something similar can be said about the claim that private education is unfair. Again, when we looked at this before, the angle was individualistic – about whether people who hadn’t been educated at private schools were being worsted by the fast-tracking these institutions provide to good universities and top jobs. Bennett’s complaint about unfairness gathers force if we have our sights on restricted access to leadership roles as a threat to democracy. The more these roles are filled by a cross-section of the citizenry – not only top roles, but, following the requirements of a more participatory form of democracy, leadership responsibilities at every level of institutional life – the better for our civic health.
Finally, parents’ rights. We saw no strong argument against appeals to these in defence of private schools. But things may change if we look at parents’ responsibilities not only individualistically, as promoting the well-being of their child, but also from a civic point of view. If the extrinsic reasons why parents choose private schooling are about furthering their son’s or daughter’s chances of getting a prestigious job, this may be condonable if we see these parents merely as private individuals, intent on doing their best for their child. From a democratic perspective, parents have a responsibility to bring children up to be good democratic citizens. This excludes certain ambitions they may have for them, for example, that they become members of a plutocratic power-élite.
ConclusionAlan Bennett has criticized private schools for their unfairness. Others censure their isolation from ordinary life and their sense of superiority. In the British context, while both of these objections have some purchase, neither is conclusive. Each gains strength when taken in conjunction with
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the third argument about the domination of leadership roles as a threat to democracy. That is why it is the most persuasive.
But it is so only on one assumption: that the top jobs in question are disproportionately occupied by an élite that endures over time. If the composition of this top tier was frequently to change so that people from all parts of society were included in it without its ever being monopolized by a single group, the danger to democracy would be lessened. But as long as private schooling is, scholarships apart, only for a minority of affluent people who can afford it, this alternative is ruled out. If many, sometimes most, leadership roles are, and remain, in the hands of 7 per cent of the population, this looks less like a democracy than an oligarchy, or plutocracy, in all but name.
This, then, is a central difficulty about private schooling in Britain. As we shall see, this ‘democratic’ objection is not self-contained, that is, applicable only to private schools as a separate group. Exploring it in its contemporary – early twenty-first-century – form will take us into wider issues applicable to the whole educational system, state as well as private.
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Chapter 2
Widening the focus
Over the past hundred years we have come to see ourselves as living in a democratic country – a society whose citizens rule themselves and who are no longer under the domination of a rich minority. If the facts and arguments presented in Chapter 1 are correct, we may have been deceiving ourselves. We all know that democracy takes time to build: in Britain, it did not spring fully into being as soon as the final adult got the vote in the 1920s. We know that what starts as a grossly imperfect institution needs years of gradual improvement before it can come anywhere close to realizing its ideals. We also see that in many areas this improvement has indeed been taking place – in the creation of a welfare state, the growth of equal opportunities in education, the erosion of illiberal attitudes towards homosexuals and other minorities, and the fairer treatment of women. It has been easy – perhaps too easy – for us to think that the battle for democracy is well on the way to being won. It is here that we may have been prone to self-deception. For eight decades have already passed since the arrival of universal suffrage. Yet the figures on private school domination of élite university admissions and of leading positions in society suggest that elements of a pre-democratic social order are still very much with us.
A brief closer look at the fortunes of private schooling before and since the coming of formal political democracy may help us see how and why this apparent paradox has arisen: a common belief that we are progressing towards a more perfect democracy, set against evidence that society remains dominated by an élite.
Victorian class-based society Politicians in the 1860s were not coy about acknowledging the class-based nature of British society. This comes out clearly in the three great commissions of that decade devoted to school reform. The Clarendon Commission of 1861–4 covered the nine leading public schools – seven boarding schools: Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, and Winchester; and two day schools: St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’. While Clarendon catered for the upper classes, the remit of the Taunton Commission of 1864–8 explicitly looked at ‘middle class schools’, that is, all secondary schools below the nine Clarendon schools and above
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the elementary schools for ‘boys and girls of the labouring class’ that had been considered by the Newcastle Commission of 1858–61. Taunton proposed a classification of these schools into three grades, of which ‘first-grade schools’ for an upper-middle-class clientele, leading on to university and the older professions, included costly boarding schools such as Malvern, Clifton, Oundle, and Repton. The other two grades were for the lower echelons of the middle class: day schools for students leaving at 16 on their way to one of the newer professions such as the army, medicine, engineering, and business; and day schools ending at 14 for children of small farmers, tradesmen, and superior artisans (Walford, 2006: 84).
We see in this picture of British schools a broad division between those for the working (or ‘labouring’) class and those for others. A leading politician of the 1860s, Robert Lowe, reflected common opinion among the élite in his remark in 1867 that:
The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties cast upon them. They should also be educated that they may appreciate and defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it; and the higher classes ought to be educated in a very different manner, in order that they may exhibit to the lower classes that higher education to which, if it were shown to them, they would bow down and defer.
(Quoted in McCulloch, 1991: 17)
This division between schools broadly coincides with another: between elementary schools financially supported by the state (since 1833) but soon to be state controlled (after 1870); and schools independent of the state, financed from parents’ fees and privately run.
In the private category, there is again a broad dichotomy between schools for people whose income would not often come from paid work; and schools for future employees (of a non-labouring sort). The first covers the Clarendon schools for the upper, largely landed, classes; and the second, the Taunton schools for various sections of the middle classes.
The last two-thirds of the nineteenth century witnessed a political struggle between the old upper-class establishment that had ruled the country for over a hundred years and the middle classes, which had grown in influence and economic power on the back of the Industrial Revolution. There was no outright winner in this battle. What happened instead was a gradual merger between the two power groups, but still within a broadly hierarchical structure. At the top was the aristocracy, with its close links to royal circles, then the gentry and the older professional classes, followed
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by the newer classes as described above, and finally the lesser bourgeoisie. In party political terms, the mid-nineteenth-century opposition – between Tories who largely represented landed interests and Liberals concerned with commerce and industry – had been replaced by the 1920s, when the social coalescence was already well advanced, by a more unified political voice, that of the Conservative party in its twentieth-century form. The big political divide was henceforth between the more affluent classes taken together and the larger, less well-off part of the population in blue-collar jobs and represented by the Labour Party.
The gradual merger between the top end of the middle class and the old establishment was the product of many factors, including intermarriage, the purchase of country estates by entrepreneurs,20 and the fact that many aristocrats were owners of coal- and other mineral-bearing land. Private education also had a major role. The nine top schools in Clarendon’s remit and those just beneath them such as Malvern and Clifton in the first tier of Taunton’s middle-class schools came together in 1871 in the shape of the Headmasters’ Conference (HMC), whose membership had increased from 50 to 150 by 1914. These ‘public schools’ became the nursery in which the grafting of one stock onto the other had originated somewhat earlier in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. Largely under the influence of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby and the Platonic vision of leadership described in Chapter 1, public schools tended to see their mission as the nurturing of upright ‘Christian gentlemen’ (and later ‘ladies’) habituated ‘to treat community service as the price of material privilege and the hallmark of social prestige’ (McCulloch, 1991: 15, quoting Wilkinson, 1964). At a time when the British Empire was growing fast, it was these that raised the top administrators, lawyers, merchants, and generals who ran India and other territories, as well as providing their equivalents back home.
Below this élite tier of HMC schools came the rest of Taunton’s middle-class schools, chiefly endowed grammar schools of varying degrees of competence. This patchiness gave way after 1902 to something more systematic with the introduction of the first state secondary schools, all following a state-directed curriculum of largely academic subjects. These schools remained fee-paying, although a ‘Free Place’ policy after 1906 increased the number of boys and girls on scholarships from the elementary sector. There were also other fee-paying schools apart from HMC and some girls’ secondary schools that remained wholly outside the new system of state secondaries. These included a number of preparatory schools feeding into the public school system.
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The role of school examinationsHelping to bind together all of these fee-paying schools from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was the new institution of the competitive examination, opening doors to the universities and the professions (White, 2014: Chapters 5, 6). The middle classes were foremost in promoting this – not surprisingly, because until the early nineteenth century sought-after jobs were secured via a patronage system under the control of the old establishment. It suited the new middle classes, especially the less socially well connected of them, to replace this by a less partial instrument. Impersonal examinations seemed to meet their requirements perfectly. They were created both at career-entry level – for the Indian and Home Civil Service, as well as for work in law, medicine, engineering, surveying, and accountancy – and for older secondary students of around 14–15 and 17–18 years of age (Roach, 1971: 82). Success in the latter of these, the Higher Certificate Examination, opened the way to a university education. Examinations, not least those devised for schools by London, Oxford, and Cambridge universities after 1858, promoted the widespread middle-class ambition that their children remain at least of the same social status as themselves, and if possible to better this. As the Taunton Commission reported in 1868:
The great majority of professional men, especially the clergy, medical men and lawyers; the poorer gentry; all in fact who, having received a cultivated education themselves, are very anxious that their sons should not fall below them … (They have) nothing to look to but education to keep their sons on a high social level.
(Quoted in McCulloch, 2007: 16)
Even those perhaps less anxious about the threat of dropping in the social scale, the upper and upper-middle classes whose children were in the HMC’s ‘public schools’, quickly embraced school examinations as a route to Oxbridge and a top profession. Following negotiations between the HMC, Oxford, and Cambridge, 1873 saw the creation of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board. By 1903 it was examining 100 boys’ schools and nearly the same number of girls’ schools (Roach, 1971: 233–4).
The secondary school examination system constructed between the 1850s and the 1870s powerfully shaped the future of the fee-paying sector – and, indeed, the elementary sector – through to 1945, and still leaves its
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imprint on the whole school system we have today. Concentrating on the 1870–1944 period, we can say, first, that it proved to be a major factor in the rapprochement between the upper and upper middle classes. Increasingly, they sat the same kinds of exam at school, and grew used to the idea that the best scholars from any of these élite backgrounds would go to the best universities and be in line for the best jobs.
The exam system, secondly, required a move towards curriculum uniformity. This period witnessed the consolidation in the secondary schools of what we now call a ‘traditional’ curriculum largely built around a small number of academic subjects – English, mathematics, the sciences, history, geography, foreign languages – all of them rich in examinable knowledge. Another indication of the coming together of the middle and upper classes was the victory of this curriculum, with its strong historical links to middle-class culture (White, 2011b: Chapters 5, 6), over the establishment’s traditionally classics-based curriculum in the leading public schools.
The third and final point is that this period, 1870–1944, saw a dramatic reinforcement of the élite’s belief that school examinations as stepping-stones to a fulfilling life were for them alone and not for the labouring classes. By 1900, able students who had come through the elementary system were staying on in the advanced classes it provided and sitting various kinds of examination. This was a threat to the élite’s monopoly of this institution and its fruits. Numerically, the elementary sector was far larger than the fee-paying. If the growth of these ‘higher-grade’ elementary classes were to be the thin end of a very large wedge, the more affluent might well lose out in the new competition, actualizing their anxiety that their sons – and daughters – ‘should not fall below them’.
The response was swift. Balfour’s Conservative government of 1902–6 saw to it that elementary students – all except the winners of scholarships – were debarred from entering the examination stakes and obliged to follow a non-academic curriculum without opportunities for advancement. At the same time, they sharpened the division between what has been called ‘education for leadership’ and ‘education for followership’ (Eaglesham, 1967: Chapters 4, 5) by creating the fees-based state secondary schools mentioned above, with a statutory curriculum of discrete, examinable subjects (White, 2014: 25–6).
Private schools after 1944Until 1944, the social dichotomy created by the commissions of the 1860s remained broadly in place: a hierarchy of fee-paying schools for gradations of the élite and offering an examination route to higher education and
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good careers, and free, as well as exam-free, elementary education for the rest. This no longer quite corresponded to the post-1870 clear-cut division between private schools and state schools, as the state secondary schools that came on stream after 1902 still had fee-paying clients.
By 1944, Britain had become, at least in outward respects, a democracy, the full franchise having been in force for 16 years. Its new self-conception stood in an uneasy relationship with the class-based dualism just mentioned – as reflected in the growing criticism of the public school system during the Second World War (McCulloch, 1991: Chapter 3). The Conservative Minister of Education R.A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act and its aftermath seemed to promise an at-least-partial resolution. The elementary system was scrapped in favour of universal primary education leading to universal secondary education, all of it non-fee-paying. The old division between schools with an examination route to higher things and those without was preserved in the shape of secondary grammar schools as distinct from secondary moderns. In the new democracy, however, allocation to the former was no longer by purse, but by superior intellectual endowment. Since a child’s academic ability, as revealed by intelligence testing, was thought, as in Plato’s Republic, to be genetically determined, the new system seemed to provide a level playing-field for people of all classes. The grammar schools – descended as they were from the lesser grades of Taunton’s middle-class schools – were no longer, as they had been before 1902, in every sense private; or private in the sense of fee-paying, even though part of the state sector, as they had been before 1944. They were now totally within the public as contrasted with the private domain.
After the Education Act of 1944, too, and influenced by the Butler-initiated Fleming Report of that year on improving links between the public schools and state schools, this public domain extended still further into once-private territory through a new version of an already existing system of ‘direct grant’ private secondary schools. To qualify as such, schools now had to have at least 25 per cent of their pupils on free places, paid by central government (Walford, 1990: 26).
These arrangements remained in place through the Labour governments of 1945–51 and their Conservative successors of 1951–64. It may be surprising that Labour did not capitalize on its massive majority in 1945 to take more radical measures against private schooling. Public schools had attracted hostility in the early war years as the Platonic ideas of leadership that had inspired them for a century were associated with Nazi ideology, not least since Adolf Hitler had modelled his own schools for leaders on the English pattern (McCulloch, 1991: 27–30). Intellectually,
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these ideas had been crushingly despatched by Karl Popper’s 1945 classic The Open Society and its Enemies, which bracketed Plato with Hegel and Marx as having erected the intellectual pillars of totalitarianism. As McCulloch (1991: 66–7) has argued, ‘Popper’s criticisms helped to undermine the idea of the “philosopher-king”, and indeed the view that a particular group within society should be chosen for a distinctive kind of education to train them for social and political leadership.’
To some people, the last days of the public schools seemed at hand. That they were saved was partly due to the post-Fleming compromise, just mentioned, and also to the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee’s fondness for his own public school, Haileybury, and a reported statement after his visit there in 1946 that ‘He saw no reason for thinking that the public schools would disappear … He thought the great traditions would carry on, and they might even be extended’ (Kynaston and Kynaston, 2014).
Now we come to the early 1960s. By then, opposition had been growing on the left to Butler’s post-war settlement. Grammar schools had been admitting predominantly middle-class children, thus challenging the claim that the 11+ was culture-free (Walford, 1990: 28). Direct Grant schools followed a similar pattern, with three-quarters of pupils coming from white-collar homes (Donnison, 1970: 51, 77). It was becoming clear that the sort of families who, before 1944, had paid fees for their children’s secondary education, either at state grammar schools or in private schools, were now often getting similar provision for free.
The replacement of nearly all grammar schools by comprehensives (in the periods when Labour were in office between 1964 and 1979) and the ending of the Direct Grant system in 1976 show Labour trying to contain the continued advantages that the middle classes had been enjoying. This did not apply to everyone in that broad category, only its lower strata – the modern equivalent of families using Taunton’s second- and third-grade schools. The upper middle classes, who had always placed their children in expensive private schools and still did, were unaffected by the comprehensive revolution.
The battleground between left and right was changing. By the 1970s its focus had become the distribution of opportunities within the state system, and this has remained the focus for the near half-century to date. Although Labour had set up a Public Schools Commission in 1965 to seek the integration of private schools into a comprehensive system, nothing came of its first report’s recommendation that these schools should accept boarding pupils from the state sector; and while the second report’s conclusion that Direct Grant schools should be abolished was, as we have seen, translated
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into action, the net effect of the commission was that public schools were allowed to continue to exist. This meant that they also continued to provide the country’s leaders. In 1970–1, they had educated 62 per cent of top civil servants, 83 per cent of foreign ambassadors, and the same proportion of directors of clearing banks. In 1982, 42 per cent of MPs had been to public schools, a fifth of them to Eton (McCulloch, 1991: 39).
We have seen from 2007 Sutton Trust and 2014 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission evidence (above) that a disproportionately high number, often a majority of top office holders, still come from private schools. Nineteenth-century patterns of governance are still with us. When in power, Labour was reluctant to take on the private sector, especially its public school core, both in 1945 and after the damp squib of its Public Schools Commission in the 1960s (Walford, 1990: 31). Its disinclination, apart from occasional challenges to the schools’ charitable status and other sorties, has lasted until our own time.
One recurrent reason for its inaction has been its greater preoccupation with improving the state system. Its ideal in the 1950s and 1960s had been to build up a first-class comprehensive system that would, among other things, attract families who would otherwise have paid for private schooling. Labour would thus promote the mixing of social classes within the same schools (Walford, 1990: 28–9). Many on the left must have hoped that the private sector would gradually wither away.
The rebirth of private educationVery soon, the opposite began to happen. By the early 1970s the closing of grammar schools left many middle-class families reluctant to stay in the state system, seeing that comprehensive schools were the only ones available. The private sector – and not just the public school core – started to woo them by paying particular attention to their educational preferences and promising them good value for money. High on their list were good examination results and entry to good universities. Private schools, the number of which had been steeply declining from 1964 until the mid-1970s, responded to the new opportunity through an increased focus on academic achievement, and by the later 1970s they were increasing once more in student numbers (Green et al., 2010: 6–7; see also Figure 1, p. 27). The success of their policy can also be seen in the increase in private school students accepted for Oxford or Cambridge, rising from about a third of all admissions in the mid-1970s to just above or just below a half from the late 1980s to 2006 (ibid., Figure 4, p. 28).
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This new academic focus has continued to date. A glimpse at school websites shows this. The nearest private school to my home is St Martha’s Roman Catholic girls’ school in Barnet, North London, a school not known locally some 30 or 40 years ago for an intellectual orientation. It is a small day school for some 300 students aged 11–18. One of the first things stated on its Headmaster’s Welcome page is:
Key to our success are the small classes in which traditional high expectations are combined with modern teaching methods, ensuring each student achieves her best possible academic results.21
A click on the last four words leads to a page on ‘Academic Excellence’. This states that, taking the Value Added Score22 into account, the GCSE and A level results are in the top 40 of independent schools in the UK. In 2013, 90 per cent of St Martha’s girls got A*–C at GCSE, and 83 per cent got A*–C at A level. Note that the website also emphasizes small classes. The school has a pupil–teacher ratio of about ten to one (as compared with the state school average of around 17 to one). Like other private schools, St Martha’s stresses attentiveness to students’ individual needs and the range of extra activities on offer (for many of which state schools would not always have equally good facilities). The Headmaster’s Welcome goes on:
School days have a powerful influence on future success in life and we believe a St Martha’s education provides the best start. Our girls not only achieve excellent academic qualifications, but enjoy a wide range of activities and receive outstanding pastoral care.
With school fees at £12,540 per annum, St Martha’s parents can reasonably feel this is money well spent.
Blurring the divideAll in all, therefore, the private sector, far from withering away, is today in good shape, as is the public school sub-sector within it. Two further developments since 1979 have also helped its fortunes.
Point 1: The first is a major blurring of the line between state and private education. We have already seen this at work at times in the past. Were the state secondary grammar schools that came on stream after 1902 state or private? Local education authorities subsidized existing grammar schools and set up new ones. The curriculum followed by the schools was laid down nationally by the Board of Education. On the other hand, free-place children aside, parents still paid fees. If the fact that a public authority
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runs, sets up, finances, or provides a curriculum for a school is taken as a criterion, these were state schools; if parental fee-paying is the yardstick, they were private. The schools were neither like Eton, which was plainly private on all counts, nor like a local elementary school, which was private on none of them.
A later and different example of blurring was the creation of Direct Grant schools after 1944. Since the state paid at least 25 per cent of these schools’ fees, it participated in financing them. In 1969, in more than half of the schools, the state was paying 50 per cent or more (Walford, 1990: 26). If this percentage had increased to, say, 85 per cent, would we have been inclined to say that these once-private institutions were now virtually state schools?
Since 1979, and especially after the Coalition came to power in 2010, the blurring of the state–private boundary has intensified. The Assisted Places Scheme (APS), introduced in 1980, shared features of the Direct Grant idea, in that the state helped pay fees for able children to attend private schools in cases where their parents were unable to afford these. Part of the motivation for this, according to Walford (1990: 69–72) was to promote the idea that private schools were better than state options, giving abler children a better chance of success. The fact that the private sector benefited in the examination stakes by creaming these students off from the state sector helped to give this some substance. Walford also argues, plausibly, that the APS was part of a larger picture, in which schooling was treated as a consumer product, with parents encouraged to shop around for the best option. This, too, contributed to the blurring under discussion, since it suggested that state and private schools were all part of the same consumer market.
A further contribution to the process came from the City Technology Colleges (CTCs) founded after the 1988 Education Act. These were state-maintained, but officially designated ‘independent schools’, with finance from private industry and commerce, their own conditions of service, and governing bodies dominated by industry (Walford, 2009: 725).
The Assisted Places Scheme was axed by New Labour after it came to power in 1997, but the blurring of the two sectors continued apace under the Coalition from 2010. Paradoxically as it appeared to some, New Labour policies contributed to this. Its City Academies (later simply ‘Academies’) were part-modelled on the CTCs, in terms of being largely state financed but with private sponsors and independent governance, and also being officially called ‘independent schools’. But they covered a greater range of subjects, and were intended for inner-city communities with traditionally
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low educational expectations. New Labour also encouraged, and provided finance for, partnerships between the private and the state sector (Walford, 2009: 726).
Since 2010, we have witnessed a vast expansion of the Academies programme, from around 200 when Labour left office to over 3,000 schools by November 2013.23 They are state-funded, independent schools, run by charitable trusts. Like traditional private schools, they do not have to follow the National Curriculum, except – in their case only – the core subjects of English, maths, and science. ‘Free schools’, a Coalition innovation, are a kind of Academy set up by parents, education charities, and religious groups.
With over half of England’s secondary schools now being Academies – neither fully private nor fully state institutions – the Coalition has done far more than any previous government to erode the sharp line that once existed between the two sectors. This is the first of two developments since 1979 – both of them pushed on apace since 2010 – that have helped the (fully) private schools to maintain the flourishing position they have achieved over the past 30 years. The erosion of the state–private borderline has meant that the fully private schools have become less clear targets for criticism.
Adding to the conceptual confusion has been what has been termed ‘marketization’ (Marquand, 2013: 110). Where ‘privatization’ involves state assets joining, or partially joining, the private sector, ‘marketization’ refers to state institutions buying in private services. Examples in the case of schools would be in areas such as catering, cleaning, teacher education, testing, and examining. All of this muddies still further the once far clearer concept of the private.
As the privatization of state education through the Academies programme has grown swiftly, there has been increasing confusion about where private education begins and ends. Government-sponsored promotion of the virtues of their new Free Schools and other Academies has been partly designed to convince the public that introducing elements from the private system into state schools has been a good thing. The fully private schools have benefited from this confusion and this positive disposition towards their values, consolidating their position as a seemingly indispensable feature of the educational landscape.
The new hierarchyPoint 2: The second post-1979 development to have similarly helped these schools has been the encouragement of parental choice. The crucial event in establishing this was the introduction of school league tables in 1992. These now give annual details of how each school in any locality – state
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schools in the case of primaries, and both private and state secondaries – performs on a range of measures. These include primary school Key Stage 2 tests in English and mathematics, and secondary school GCSE and A level examinations. Parents can see at a glance from the maps and data provided what the best-performing primary schools are in their area, and which secondary schools offer their children the best chances of good results at A level and hence of getting into a good university.
Again, the coming of league tables has obscured the division between state and private sectors, this time by intermingling results from both in the secondary data. It has also intensified the tendency, identified by Walford as having begun with the Assisted Places Scheme in the 1980s, to view education as a consumer product. It encourages parents to seek the best buy, academically speaking, not only as between private and state schools in the case of secondaries, but also among state schools themselves at both primary and secondary level.
Seeking does not automatically bring with it success. But once a family has targeted a preferred school, it can take steps, if it has the wherewithal, to make acceptance by that school more likely. Affluent parents can buy or rent houses in the school’s catchment area, forcing up property prices in the area and thus threatening to make the school even more restrictive in its social mix. This happens not least at the primary stage, suiting parents who may or may not go private at secondary level and who are looking for first-class free schooling for their children up to the age of 11.
Good results at primary school can help students to get into one of the better secondaries (‘better’ here, as elsewhere in this part of the paper, connoting higher-than-average exam results). Where religious schools in the state sector – primary or secondary – are concerned, evidence of the family’s belonging to the denomination in question can help a child’s admittance, as can further signs of commitment such as participating in a church choir or bell-ringing. Many of us can testify to parents’ exaggerating their devoutness and even feigning a faith that they, as non-religious people, do not hold, simply to maximize their child’s chances of admission to a religious school with an excellent examination track record (and indeed many religious schools do have this).
The effect of, and perhaps intention behind, these league tables has been to establish a rough hierarchy among our schools, with those tending to produce better test and exam results towards the top, and those with worse towards the bottom. Importantly, the hierarchy is not only among state schools (including academies), since the secondary tables also include private schools of all kinds, including Eton and other élite establishments.
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Before league tables came on the scene, Geoffrey Walford, writing in 1990 at the end of Thatcher’s reign, foresaw the way things were likely to go. He believed that ‘the long-term aim, then, is a blurring of the boundaries between private and state provision’ (Walford, 1990: 113–14). He envisaged a hierarchy of schools across the two sectors, with public schools at the top, followed by lower-ranking private schools and highly regarded state schools, and so on downwards. True, he thought this would be within a varying fee-paying structure throughout, except for schools at the bottom providing a minimum entitlement. But on the essentials he was prescient.
In one way the hierarchy now created has been more advantageous to the better-off than the one Walford imagined. They are not only able to use league tables to identify top-flight and other good state schools, but are also able, if their children are admitted to them, to acquire academically excellent schooling for free. If at the secondary stage they decide to go private, they can be spared preparatory school fees before the age of 11 if their child goes to a first-class local primary.
The hierarchy we now have may well have been better for the private schools, too. Walford’s hierarchy is built around the almost total transformation of the state system into a fee-paying one. In heightening the visibility of the private education tradition in this way, it would make it more of a target for opponents. As things actually are, however, the presence of private education in the hierarchy is kept out of sight, unless one happens to click on one of the local lists in the league tables. The more the public comes to take league tables as part of the educational wallpaper, the more firmly it will be established – in a low-key way – that private schools are a regular part of the school scene and here to stay.
ConclusionThis chapter began with the hierarchical nature of society and schooling in the 1860s. There was then no attempt to hide this feature of them. Why would there have been? The country was run by a coalescing élite of landowners and men dependent on industrial and commercial wealth. A democratic Britain, electorally speaking, was over half a century in the future. It was no secret to anyone that there were, broadly, three social groups: the upper classes, the middle classes, and the labouring classes. The educational commissions of that decade arranged a pattern of schooling to fit this pattern, with further subdivisions within the second category to mirror groupings within the rapidly expanding middle classes.
When I was a young man in the 1950s and 1960s, it was easy to think that this older way of perceiving society was irrevocably passing into history.
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There were, true, still all sorts of status markers left over from the earlier era, from accents heard on the BBC to lists of attitudes, activities, and objects held to be ‘U’ (for ‘upper class’) or ‘non-U’. But the trend, most of us felt, was towards the flattening out of these social differences. Britain was now a functioning democracy, with massively high income taxes at the top end, a welfare state, a comprehensive school system that was replacing a divided one. As we looked forward, even those of us trained as historians – sceptical of the Victorians’ belief that history is an account of the irreversible progress of mankind – thought that the momentum of the social improvements we had witnessed since the end of the Second World War would carry us and our co-citizens at least through the next few generations.
We should have known better. If Thomas Piketty is right, the greater equalities of wealth and income that we were then experiencing in Britain and comparable countries have proved to be a temporary interruption in a longer-term trend.24 Since the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor has grown again, bringing with it a hardening of old hierarchies.
We can see the educational form this has taken in Britain from the account given in this chapter. The hierarchy of schools is not so sharply drawn as in the 1860s. We cannot identify three relatively discrete social classes for which they are designed, the topmost just short of royalty but connected with it in multiple ways, and monarchy itself still imbued with vestiges of celestial attachments. Social categories are now more complex, shading into each other along the length of a registrar-general’s scale. Yet where we once expected fluidity – constant movement up and down the social ladder – we now have in prospect increasing rigidity.
At the pinnacle of the 1860s educational map were the public schools, stretching down from upper-class Eton and Harrow to upper-middle-class Oundle and Repton. They have retained their pre-eminence, despite threats to them in the more egalitarian years, for 150 years. Today, they are safer than they have been for a long time, surrounded by protective layers of excellent to very good or good secondary schools belonging in no clearly hierarchical way to either the state or the private sector. The private sector of which they are a part no longer has the exclusivity with which it was once associated. Henrietta Barnett School for girls in Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London, an excellent state school, has all of the cachet of the nearby Camden School for girls or City of London School for girls, both private. As far as examination success goes, the not quite so well-known Queen Elizabeth School for boys a few miles north in Barnet would knock spots off virtually any private boys’ school for miles around. The new hierarchy
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in English schools revolves around their prowess in the examination stakes, not around parental ability to pay fees.
All of this strikes at the heart of the project on which I embarked in Chapter 1. This was to ask what, if anything, is wrong with private education – first of all as a general concept, and then in the British context. I looked at the strengths and limitations of a range of objections to private schools – that they are unfair, that they detract from social cohesiveness, that their legitimacy cannot be based on an appeal to parents’ rights, that they nurture a ruling class. All of this is now cast into confusion if private schools no longer form an importantly demarcatable category, but have to be considered as part of a wider canvas on which all state schools also figure.
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Chapter 3
Back to arguments
It is beginning to look as if the old disputes over the acceptability of private education in the British context have to be shelved. With the borderline between private and public now shot away, there is no longer any easily discernible target to attack or defend.
Assessing the new hierarchyThat is not to say that there is no longer room for argument in the area. There is, but its focus has shifted – away from the pros and cons of private education and on to the pros and cons of the new hierarchy described in Chapter 2. It will be helpful to spend a little time examining these. What, if anything, is wrong with the kind of hierarchical school system now being created in England?
One form of objection is that it depends on the use of examination results to grade schools, and that examinations have a deleterious effect on the quality of the school curriculum, on the psychological well-being of students undergoing them, and on the kinds of pedagogy used by teachers. I have explored these harmful effects elsewhere and will bypass them here (White, 2014: Chapter 1). One reason for this is that schools could still, in principle, be arranged in a hierarchy even if examinations were abolished: some other way of comparing their quality might always be found.
Another objection is that a hierarchical system is unfair. This brings us back to arguments left unresolved when we looked at the same charge against private schools (see above). I pick these up around the point where egalitarianism – as the view that everyone should have roughly the same benefits – was rejected, on the grounds that this is compatible with everyone leading lives of the same level of misery. I then suggested that what many who call themselves ‘egalitarians’ are really concerned about is not that everyone should have the same but that the position of those who are badly off should be improved.
If we apply these thoughts to hierarchical school systems, they do not show them to be necessarily undesirable. For the education provided by schools lowest in the hierarchy, as well as their ex-pupils’ later quality of life, could still be very good, even though worse than in other schools.
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But hierarchical systems may well not be like this. The quality of education in the least favoured schools may be wanting, whether this is down to difficulties in motivating pupils to learn, poor teaching, lack of discipline, inadequate resources, or a combination of these and other factors. The jobs that alumni take up – where they have employment at all – may tend to be tiring, boring, ill-paid, insecure, at inconvenient times, or a combination of such things. Coming from a poorly regarded school and ending up in a poorly regarded job may also be psychologically debilitating if it leaves people throughout their lives with a low opinion of themselves as compared to others.
Insofar as a hierarchical school system is at least partly responsible for generating such distress, this counts against it. If the system we have in England today fits this pattern, it is unacceptable. I will not go into empirical data relevant to either the more general point about the causal influence of hierarchies, or to the situation in this country. My interest in this section is more in the soundness of arguments at a more abstract level.
This brings us to another kind of objection to a hierarchical system of schools. Suppose its upper echelons but not its lower end tend to produce students who get excellent exam grades, go to the best universities, and have careers in the most prestigious professions. And suppose, further, that their children and later descendants tend to follow them along the same path. Such a scenario would undermine what we have taken to be a central feature of a democratic form of government – that its citizens, as autonomous beings, rule themselves and are not under the domination of a section of the population. For this is what would happen if the top posts in politics, law, medicine, business, the media, and academia were held, by and large, by members of the same families. The polity might still be democratic in name, and its members might still think of themselves as living in a democracy, but ‘oligarchy’ would be a more fitting name.
How far the school hierarchy currently under construction in this country fits this template is a further question. The threat to democracy does not depend on its fitting it up to the hilt. It is a matter of degree. The more restricted the group of leaders is to the alumni of the more highly rated schools, and the more extensive their dominance across generations, the greater the peril to democracy. The hierarchy of schools in this country, dependent as it is on the arrival of league tables in 1992, is a recent phenomenon and indeed one as yet incomplete. Thus, it is not clear that we will have reliable evidence on how far a shift in an oligarchic direction is, or is not, under way until several decades have elapsed.
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This is not the first time in this paper that we have discussed a political argument about the threat to democracy posed by the concentration of power in a section of the population. We examined it as a possible objection to the existence of private schools – not in general, but in the British context. We have now moved away from a discussion of private education and are looking at a hierarchical system of schooling. Such a system need have nothing to do with private education. We can imagine a society in which all schools are state run and private options are outlawed. There is no reason why these state-run schools cannot be arranged in a hierarchy, with questions raised about how far this privileges a small group of families and leads to some kind of oligarchical rule. Charges of this kind were made in the days of the USSR about the dominance of top members of the Communist Party and their use of élite state schools; and one hears similar ideas today coming from Beijing.
Reconsidering private educationI suggested at the end of Chapter 2 that the blurring of the line between private and state schools in recent years has derailed the debate about the acceptability of private education. The debate has gone on for many decades, exercising academics as well as politicians. In my own field of educational studies, it has engaged both philosophers and sociologists. Nearly all of these writings, speeches, national committees, and royal commissions of the past 70 or 80 years have been based on the assumption that private schools form a clearly demarcatable group. They are schools where all or nearly all of the parents pay fees, which, together with endowments and investments, are used to fund school costs from buildings to teachers’ salaries, and where the governing body and the school together decide on the curriculum the school is to follow.
The academies programme has helped to destroy the neat division between public and private since academies share features of both systems. So have league tables. They have encouraged us to see all schools – fully private, semi-private, non-private – as belonging to a new ranking based on exam results. Whether an institution is to be called ‘private’ or ‘state- run’ is far less important than its position in this new hierarchy. The old debate about whether private schools should exist now seems otiose.
But is it? If the fully private schools tended to be towards the bottom of the league tables, there would be no reason for concern. But they tend to be towards the top. Public schools do especially well, but not far behind are the more obscure private schools that have done so much in the past 30 years to attract parents wanting value for their money in the shape of
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good qualifications. Because of their success, the (fully) private sector is in better shape than at any time in the past. Far from withering away, as leftish opinion in the 1960s had hoped, these private schools have been entrenching their position in a new national system.
Private schools do not occupy all of the top places in the league tables. Some state schools also shine. But the success of the private sector is commanding enough to prompt us to revisit the objections made to it in Chapter 1. The most telling of these was the political one, concerning the threat to democracy if a small section of the population dominates the most powerful positions in society. We have returned to this in the present chapter in connection with a hierarchical school system, not with private education. But if in Britain, unlike many other countries, private schools are prominent towards the top of the hierarchy, the more recent argument applies to them, too.
This more recent argument was expressed hypothetically. If it can be shown that a hierarchical system tends to concentrate power in a few hands, from a democratic perspective this is a solid point against it. Since the hierarchical system we now have has existed for only a couple of decades, we may have to wait some time – I suggested – before we are in a position to judge.
Should we reserve judgement, too, on whether the system of private schools we have in Britain is an affront to democracy? Although, as just observed, the private school system is inseparable from the hierarchical system as it forms a large part of its upper reaches, its history is different. The hierarchy, in the form we have it, is a new phenomenon, but private schools have existed for centuries. We already have data showing their ascendancy in supplying those who hold the most powerful positions. It is true that, as Geoffrey Walford (2006: 30) reminds us, any data we have about positions filled today reflects what private schools were doing several decades back. If we are to see the effects of what they are doing now, we will have to bide our time. On the other hand, given that through its new single-mindedness in pursuing exam success the private sector is sitting prettier than ever, the likelihood is that its alumni will continue to be well represented among the top jobs. In the light of their track record, this is even more likely to be true of the aristocrats of the private sector, the public schools.
The latter are especial beneficiaries of the new hierarchical system. Around the time of the Second World War, as I said earlier, they suffered heavy fire. They were in an exposed position, tarred with the cult of leadership on which they had been reared, and the object of Nazi emulation. Now they are far less visible. They are surrounded within the private sector itself by
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rings of schools newly adept at winning exam prizes, if not always prizes as illustrious as the ones public schools win themselves. This whole private sector is intermeshed with top state schools, and surrounded by layer after layer of decreasingly well-rated ones. The hierarchical system is the public schools’ new protector. I am not saying that this reflects a deliberate policy. I do not have evidence either way on this. (But whether calculation has been involved might be an interesting question to pursue.)
At the end of the long discussion in this paper, we have come back to the original challenges we examined to the existence of private education. The strongest of these, applicable not generally but to the British case, was the ‘constitutional’ one about the challenge to democracy. This is again at the forefront. I have not returned to the other three contenders – Alan Bennett’s charge of unfairness, the problem of social cohesiveness, and doubts about a defence of private education based on parents’ rights. We did, however, see how much more persuasive they are when viewed as adjuncts to the ‘constitutional’ argument.
ConclusionIn the past three decades, private schools, and not least the public schools at their core, have attracted less criticism than in the previous three. The rightward shift of British politics under Thatcher, Major, Blair, and now Cameron is reason enough to have expected this. But as part of this shift, a more particular reason has been the erasure of the clear line that used to exist between private and public. Private schools have become incorporated in a national system of school ratings – at the same time as schools within the state system have been encouraged to adopt the independent status and curricular freedoms associated with the private sector.
This has made private schools less of a target for attack. We have now grown used to seeing all schools, the old private institutions and the old state establishments, as forming a hierarchy of alleged excellence, in which a school’s position on either side of the traditional divide has receded in salience as compared with its position in a new pecking order of grade results.
The new hierarchy raises fears, akin to those discussed by Michael Young in his The Rise of the Meritocracy over half a century ago (Young, 1958), about the creation of a self-perpetuating élite holding down most of the top positions in public and private life. If our demands on democracy go farther than requiring regular national elections at which all adults can vote, and include wider participation in the running of all large enterprises, we need to take this threat seriously.
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We also need to remove the camouflage that has made private schools less visible. For along with a few élite state schools it is they who occupy the upper rungs of the hierarchy, with public schools at its top. We cannot have firm evidence at present that they will still dominate leadership positions 50 years hence, as they have hitherto – but, equally, there is nothing to say that their fortunes will turn. The old charge against private education still stands: the danger they pose to a democracy that is not only in name. Other familiar objections to them fall into place when seen as aspects of this more fundamental complaint.
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Chapter 4
Ways forward
What should be the future of private education in Britain? As it is now part of, and protected by, the hierarchical system, its fate cannot be considered independently of the latter’s. I begin, therefore, with the hierarchy and then move on to private schools.
The hierarchy has to be dismantled. It encourages a new kind of selection, with sought-after schools – private, state, or in-between – at the top and a neglected tail below. It disadvantages students at its lower end, and threatens to create a self-perpetuating élite at its upper. Part of its dismantling will require the removal of the foundation on which it rests – league tables. These in turn are based on national test and examination results. There are reasons independent of the existence of league tables to look askance at school examinations. They do little to test deep understanding, they blight the secondary curriculum, cause students great anxiety, and pervert the job of teaching. These alone give us reason enough to replace the examination system, not least at GCSE and A level, with something without these blemishes (White, 2014: Chapter 3). But exams’ role in protecting the route of the already privileged to a good university, interesting work, and a comfortable life provides another motive. We should work out how we can move towards a student record system as a replacement for high-stakes examinations. This will no doubt have to be done gradually – first, perhaps, by replacing exams set and marked by outside boards with exams marked in-school with appropriate moderation; then, in our new age of schooling until 18, by abolishing the GCSE at 16; and finally by removing A levels.
As exams become less dominant in school life, there is room to rethink the curriculum. At present, it is test- and exam-led, especially at secondary level. It would be far better if it were based on a thought-through set of general aims suitable for living together in a democracy. But the exam regime blocks off any such possibility. It is exam boards and governments that together fix the direction that schools should take. In a remodelled system, government could still have a role in this by laying down the more general aims that schools should follow, leaving the schools themselves to work out their own ways of realizing them. A National Curriculum Commission at a certain arm’s length from the enthusiasms of politicians in power could set these aims.
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This reform could revolutionize the school experience for many children (Reiss and White, 2013). An exam-led curriculum favours teaching within separate subjects, especially knowledge-rich ones. An aims-led alternative could leaven this with more work across disciplines, more discussion, practical projects, and aesthetic pursuits. The individualist ethos of the exam-orientated classroom would be tempered by more collaborative activities.
If the division of curricular powers between centre and periphery makes sense for some schools, it makes sense for all. The present arrangements are incoherent. They allow some schools – the old private sector and the new academies – virtually complete freedom to teach what they want. (In theory, that is: exam requirements dominate in practice.) The bulk of schools, meanwhile, are subject to a government-controlled National Curriculum that permits ministers to dictate in great detail what should be taught and sometimes how this should be taught. There are, as we have seen, good reasons for leaving more general aims within the political domain, but these do not permit politicians in power to trespass on more detailed territory that properly belongs to professionals. They have no moral right to insist on one method of teaching reading over another, or to impose their subjective take on what persons and events should be highlighted in the history curriculum.
In place of this incoherent system whereby some schools are freer than they should be while others are too restricted, all schools should be subject to a limited National Curriculum that lays down general aims and major sub-aims. They should also be at liberty to realize these aims in ways most fitting their own situation. ‘All’ schools here include private ones. There is no good reason to exclude them. A reason commonly given is that if parents pay for their children’s education, this should allow them to choose a school with the kind of curriculum aims they prefer. But there cannot be a blank slate here. Parents have no moral right, for instance, to impose a narrow ideology on their children and to seek out a school that will do this. As potentially autonomous citizens, able to make their own choices about how to live their lives, these children – like any young people – need protection against such indoctrination. As future citizens of a democracy, too, they need to be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that all other citizens have to acquire. It is a central task of the aims-centred National Curriculum I have in mind to spell out these civic aims in more detail. If privately educated students are to belong to a common citizenry, they should be following a curriculum regime that prepares them for this.
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In the last paragraph or so we have passed from the whittling away of the hierarchical system to what should be done about private schools in particular. I will now say more under this second issue.
Some would want to see these schools abolished. That would at a stroke remove the privileged position many of them have had in accessing good universities and dominating leadership roles. But if removing this is the aim – and for reasons given earlier, I accept it is a desirable one – we should not assume that abolition is the only way of attaining it. In any case, abolition is both hard to justify and difficult to implement.
It is hard to justify, as people should not be prevented from doing what they want with their own money unless they are causing harm to others. It may be that some private education is totally benign. A school may not star in exam successes but its liberal religious ethos or its encouragement of the arts may be just what some parents want for their children. I cannot see any sound reason for outlawing this kind of option.
Abolition is difficult to implement, not least because – as things have stood since 1953 – the European Convention on Human Rights seems to give parents the right to choose private education. There are also practical problems, of course, for instance, about overcoming the opposition there is bound to be to such a move, as well as legal and other difficulties concerning what should happen to the schools’ wealth, estates, buildings, and facilities.
There are other ways of reducing the power of private schools short of doing away with them. Measures already mentioned in this chapter go some way to doing so. If examinations lose their dominance, and parents no longer have the quick guide that league tables have provided to schools with the best results, fewer better-off families are likely to go private. The renascence of private schooling has been largely down to the promise of good exam grades. Remove this and the schools will once again be on the back foot.
Similarly with the curriculum. If private schools are obliged to follow the new-look National Curriculum described above, there will be less to choose between them and state schools.
A widely canvassed way of reining in the private system has been to make the charitable status currently enjoyed by these schools more dependent on the help they give to pupils in the state system, especially the more disadvantaged among them. During the Coalition’s rule, we have seen well-publicized examples of such help. Wellington College, for instance, has set up both the Wellington Academy and the Wellington College Teaching Schools Partnership. Eton College is now the educational sponsor of a free school, Holyport College, a part-boarding secondary school.
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I am sceptical about this as a way forward. It fits a contrary agenda rather better – the blurring of the boundaries between private and state education discussed earlier. The crucial issue is whether initiatives like these do anything to reduce the share of top leadership roles that alumni of places such as Wellington and Eton have traditionally had. I cannot see how this is likely. Even if such schools’ community programmes helped, say, a hundred underprivileged children to get into Oxbridge, this would scarcely affect the prospects of old Etonians and old Wellingtonians. Its more likely result would be to legitimize the continuing existence of such élite institutions by pointing to all the good work they are doing on the equality of opportunity front.
This is not to rule out measures of this sort with more teeth. I would not advocate, however, an idea put forward by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958: 53). He fantasized a future Eton undertaking in 1972 ‘to accept 80% of Queen’s Scholars, pushed home to 100% in 1991’. This would certainly be one route to abolition of a sort, but it would serve only the interests of the meritocratic dystopia that Young lampoons. Still, the idea of a sizeable proportion of public school students coming from the state sector is an attractive interim measure.
A reform that builds on this that I find more attractive is proposed by Harry Brighouse in his Fabian pamphlet of 2000, A Level Playing Field: The reform of private schools. He writes:
The government should set a 5-year target for the designated élite universities of 70 per cent state-educated undergraduates, and a 10-year target of 90 per cent, with the proviso that if at 30 per cent of a private school’s pupils are part of an equal opportunities access programme, that school counts as a state school for this purpose.
(Brighouse, 2000: 16)
I find the idea of a quota especially appealing. If private schools educate only 7 per cent of the population, yet bag most top positions, it would be helpful to reduce the numbers of their alumni on the fast track towards these to something approaching the same figure. This would remove most of the incentive that rich parents now have to send their children to them. It would also, more fundamentally, help to remove the obstacle to a more democratic Britain than private schools currently represent.
Brighouse’s allowing certain private schools to count as state ones is perhaps more problematic. It could leave the 70 per cent of public school students not on an access programme where they have traditionally been – in
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a dominant position at élite universities and in top jobs. Brighouse’s solution may be helpful if it sugars the reform pill. But I think it should be at most an interim move, for it still leaves the major objections to private education unanswered.
Brighouse’s proposal is only about élite universities. That is a good place to start. But there is every reason why the idea should be extended further. If the scheme were restricted to Russell Group institutions, you might well find ex-private school students even more over-represented at the next level down. A longer-term aim could well be to put a 10 per cent cap on the numbers of private school students at all universities.
One objection to a quota scheme is that it would offend against the principle that universities have an obligation to admit only the best qualified candidates. On this principle, if, say 40 per cent of the best-qualified candidates (for example, those with the best A level results) are from private schools, they should all be among those admitted. Ben Kotzee and Christopher Martin (2013) argue for the best-qualified candidate principle on the grounds that since the purpose of the university is scholarship, ‘one must always make admissions decisions on the basis of which applicant will make the best scholar in their discipline’ (p. 639). But are there good grounds for adopting this principle? Matthew Clayton (2012) is doubtful. Among the several arguments he employs is one that questions whether universities should take scholarly ability as a given. Could it be one of their functions to develop ability, he asks, as well as offering opportunities to exercise the ability one has (p. 421)? Kotzee and Martin appear to hold the latter position. They advocate, for instance, the incoming student’s being ‘ready (based on previous learning) for the learning opportunities available at the university’ (p. 637). But why rule out the development alternative? Even on their essentialist – and questionable – account of the university as having the single function of promoting scholarship, a good way of achieving this may sometimes be by taking on less well-qualified students and taking steps to enhance their scholarly abilities once admitted.
Clayton’s paper is about positive discrimination. It can apply, and perhaps Clayton intends it to apply, to situations where there are more than marginal differences between admission candidates. Brighouse’s quota suggestion, in his own formulation of it and in the extension I have proposed, might well allow the admission of state school students who get a slightly lower mark than a private school alumnus, say three As at A level rather than three A*s. Whether they are ‘ready (based on previous learning) for the learning opportunities available at the university’ or whether their tutors need to develop their powers rather more is perhaps a moot point. At
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all events – and this is the central issue – the quota suggestion seems to come out (at least so far) unscathed.
The discussion up to this point has been about admission to university. We need to say something, too, about entry to employment. We have seen how the percentage of private school ex-students in many top jobs is far higher than their percentage in the population as a whole. Will reducing the proportion of them entering élite universities remove this discrepancy entirely? It may not. The networks they have built up via their privileged education, unpaid internships that are not an option for most young people, as well as a preference that some employers may have for privately educated employees, may still give them an edge. All this bespeaks the need for some kind of public monitoring of hiring practices. Could this go so far as including quotas, as for universities? This might be easier to arrange in areas of the public sector such as the law, medicine, and the civil service. But I do not know of any reason in principle why industry, commerce, and finance should be excluded. Given the concern that all major UK political parties have exhibited in recent years about low social mobility, they ought to consider a quota system as one possible way of making improvements.
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Conclusion
Just as I was about to write this conclusion in late September 2014, news came through of a speech that the chairman of the HMC was about to deliver to its annual meeting. The Daily Telegraph reported that Richard Harman, the headmaster of Uppingham School:
… will accuse politicians of seeking to ‘stir up the politics of envy’ rather than find solutions, such as investing in educational partnerships between the two sectors … In his speech, Mr Harman will criticise the UK’s ‘sclerotic social mobility’, but say that ‘attacking the excellence of the education we provide will never help solve it’ … ‘We want to work together on practical partnership plans to turn the tide. When it comes to social mobility we are part of the solution, not the root of the problem.25
I wonder whether this last remark is true. Richard Harman had Alan Milburn’s report Elitist Britain very much in his sights, with its litany of private school domination of the best jobs. In this respect, the power structure in British society has changed little for a century and more. Sclerosis indeed!
It is often said these days that the increase in social mobility so marked between the 1960s and the 1980s has gone into reverse since then. There is evidence to back this up – for instance, the surge in graduate numbers since the early 1990s has disproportionately benefited more affluent families.26 But the problem is more deep-rooted than this suggests. In the two decades mentioned, an expanding economy created many more interesting and well-paid jobs, enabling large numbers of those from less privileged backgrounds to rise up the social scale. But this rise was not accompanied by a significant downward movement among those families already towards the top of the tree. They tended to stay where they were. If one understands ‘social mobility’ differently, as implying movement both ways, British society, as the veteran sociologist John Goldthorpe (2012) has pointed out, has remained virtually static, at least since the 1920s.
It is hard not to see private schools as part of the mechanism that has kept society largely immobile for a hundred years (White, 2014: 38–40). Richard Harman’s statement that they ‘are part of the solution, not the root of the problem’ looks hard to swallow. It makes some sense if the problem of social mobility has to do only with raising the prospects of those lower down the social scale. More private school bursaries for poorer children,
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Conclusion
and more assistance to the state sector, may well help some of the less well-off to climb the ladder to better things. This is not to be dismissed. But in itself it does not diminish the power of those at the top, does nothing to shift them from their traditional perch. Increasing ‘both ways’ social mobility needs other measures – like those proposed in the previous chapter.
A second news item that came my way just before the announcement about Richard Harman’s speech was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne’s, pledge at the 2014 Conservative Conference to abolish the 55 per cent so-called ‘death tax’ on pension pots, so as ‘to allow hundreds of thousands of elderly people to leave more money to their loved ones after they die’.27 If private schools have been one part of the mechanism whereby society has remained static, taxation policy allowing the better-off to pass on more of their wealth to their children has been another.
We should not be blinded by the enthusiasm shown in private school as well as Coalition circles for tackling the problem of low social mobility. Cameron and Osborne have both addressed this recently, each advocating greater equality of opportunity (White, 2014: 48–9). What they mean by this is strengthening the ladder that can take poorer children upwards. Their and Harman’s ideas are of a piece. They do not get to grips with social stasis.
What’s wrong with private education is not, at root, unfairness, or social aloofness and disconnectedness from ordinary life, or a misguided reliance on parental rights. There is validity in some aspects of these charges, but they gain most traction when harnessed to another objection: that they are a threat to democracy. In a formal sense, Britain has been a full democracy since universal franchise in 1928. Citizens have been able to replace legislators at regular elections. But we would all agree that regular elections and majority voting are not all there is to democratic rule. In a broad sense, the rulers of a country are not limited to its legislators. They include everyone in a major position of power, able to direct what people are to do, what they should think, or how they should live. They embrace those at the top of the civil service, the law, journalism, advertising, public relations, finance, medicine, commerce, industry, education, the military, and the main religious bodies. In some self-proclaimed democratic countries, positions like these are dominated by members of the same religious sect. In Britain most of them are dominated – and have been for well over a century – by those sharing an education open only to the rich.28 Instead of a theocracy, we have a quasi-plutocracy. A democracy in anything but name needs bulwarks against such sectional power.
This is the basic problem with private education. Unfairness and the other charges against it gain force when seen as aspects of it rather than as
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self-standing objections. However much the lines between private and state schooling are blurred – generating the impression that there is only one system and that these two labels are not important – this cannot disguise the fact that private schools still constitute a privileged group at the top of the new hierarchy under construction. It is they who ensure that, in 2015 as in 1915, leadership positions remain predominantly in the hands of the rich.
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Notes
1 Department for Education, SFR 15/2013. Online. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223587/SFR15_2013_Text_withPTR.pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).2 The Telegraph, ‘A level results 2012: Private schools “dominate top grades”’ (18 October 2012). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9617603/A-level-results-2012-private-schools-dominate-top-grades.html (accessed 1 July 2015).3 The Telegraph, ‘Private school pupils monopolising top university places’ (7 August 2013). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10229248/Private-school-pupils-monopolising-top-university-places.html (accessed 1 July 2015).4 Times Higher Education, ‘Oxford drops below Cambridge on state school entrants’ (27 March 2014). Online. www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/oxford-drops-below-cambridge-on-state-school-entrants/2012321.article (accessed 1 July 2015).5 BBC, ‘Five schools “send more to Oxbridge than 2,000 others”’ (8 July 2011). Online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14069516 (accessed 2 July 2015).6 HMC website: www.hmc.org.uk/ (accessed 1 July 2015). 7 The Sutton Trust, ‘The educational backgrounds of 500 leading figures’ (1 May 2007). Online. www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/educational-backgrounds-500-leading-figures/ (accessed 1 July 2015).8 The Telegraph, ‘Public schools retain grip on Britain’s elite’ (20 November 2012). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9689795/Public-schools-retain-grip-on-Britains-elite.html (accessed 1 July 2015).9 BBC, ‘Sir Peter Bazalgette: Top schools “too dominant” in acting’ (12 June 2014). Online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27821039 (accessed 1 July 2015). 10 Gov.uk website, ‘Elitist Britain’ (28 August 2014). Online. www.gov.uk/government/publications/elitist-britain (accessed 1 July 2015).11 Department for Education (2011), Class Size and Education in England: Evidence Report. Online. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183364/DFE-RR169.pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).12 Ibid., p. 50. This refers to Blatchford, Basset, and Brown (2008) ‘Do low attaining and younger students benefit most from small classes? Results from a systematic observation study of class size effects on pupil classroom engagement and teacher pupil interaction’. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, New York. Online. www.classsizeresearch.org.uk/aera%2008%20paper.pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).13 Harrow School website: www.harrowschool.org.uk/1541/outside-the-classroom/sport/ (accessed 1 July 2015).14 The claim that equality is not intrinsically valuable is about distributional equality, that is, about equality in the distribution of goods (for example, money, educational opportunities). It is not about equality of consideration as a moral or political principle, as enshrined, for instance, in the notion of ‘one person, one vote’. I leave it as an open question whether this kind of equality is intrinsically valuable.15 The Guardian, ‘Ten Mossbourne academy students win Cambridge University offers’ (23 January 2011). Online. www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jan/23/mossbourne-academy-cambridge-university-offers (accessed 1 July 2015).16 See my Exploring Well-being in Schools (Routledge, 2011), Chapters 7 and 8.17 The Sutton Trust, ‘The educational backgrounds of 500 leading figures’ (1 May 2007). Online. www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/educational-backgrounds-500-leading-figures/ (accessed 1 July 2015).
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18 www.harrowschool.org.uk/1764/overview/the-school’s-purpose/; www.rugbyschool.net/headmasterswelcome; www.marlboroughcollege.org/about-us/mission/; www.haileybury.com/; www.tonbridge-school.co.uk/home/; http://mgs.org/join-us/welcome-from-the-high-master/aims-and-objectives; www.millhill.org.uk/. 19 www.berkhamstedschool.org/Educational-Aims; www.highgateschool.org.uk/about/ethos-and-aims; www.stpaulsschool.org.uk/about-st-pauls/vision; www.sedberghschool.org/senior/News-Events/Headmasters-Blog; www.eastbourne-college.co.uk/Headmasters-Welcome; www.lancingcollege.co.uk/357/the-college/ethos-and-aims; www.bishops-stortford-college.herts.sch.uk/.20 Such as the purchase of Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk by the son of the carpet manufacturer Sir Francis Crossley in 1862.21 St Martha’s website: http://st-marthas.co.uk/the-school/headmasters-welcome/ (accessed 2 July 2015).22 The Value Added Score measures the progress made by students in a given year, compared with pupils of similar ability nationally.23 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_(English_school). 24 See Paul Krugman’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in The New York Review of Books (8 May 2014). Online. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ (accessed 2 July 2015).25 The Telegraph, ‘Top private school headmaster attacks “politics of envy”’ (29 September 2014). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11126481/Top-private-school-headmaster-attacks-politics-of-envy.html (accessed 2 July 2015).26 See the LSE report Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America (April 2005), supported by the Sutton Trust. Online. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf (accessed 2 July 2015).27 The Telegraph, ‘George Osborne scraps the “death tax”’ (28 September 2014). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/11127126/George-Osborne-scraps-the-death-tax.html (accessed 2 July 2015).28 Scholarship students apart.
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