Comments on: Government moves on private schools

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 10:39:14 +0000

Harry, Thanks for your advice. I’m going to just watch the situation develop first – as the articles implied that they were going to be lenient on the concept of public benefit. If it appears that they are going to be harsh on her school, then I will write to the Charities Commission as you suggest (plus my MP and the Education Secretary, as well as any Armed Forces pressure groups I can think of).

By: harry

harry — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 17:07:58 +0000

Peter, Thanks for your conjectures about my motives and non-braindeadness. I’ve yet to find a critic of private schooling motivated by envy; the envious egalitarian is an invention of dull-witted right-wing journalists. A little research (and I mean, a very little) might indicate to you that I have unorthodox and well-thought out and well-informed views about these and other educational issues. bq. By paying for a better education for their kids, parents ensure more resources for everyone in the state system. Nonsense. They exert downward pressure on tax revenues, and refrain from putting their own human capital into benefiting schools populated by less advanataged kids. In the UK anyway (a very different story in the US). The private system is for the most part abut buying competitive advantage for your own children in what is, within each generation, effectively a zero-sum competition. The irony is that the parents who use the system pay a huge premium for a very small competitive benefit. None of this suggests that attacking the private sector should be the main aim of reform; not at all; the focuss should be on reducing child poverty and reducing inequality of income and wealth, and on imporving state schools serving the least advantaged children. So I think small measures like this are about right. And, of course, the whole point of this measure is to exert moral pressure on the privates to actually do something for others, including children in the state sector, a moral pressure to which many of the leaders of private schools are, in fact, extremely susceptible, being basically people of good will.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 01:08:50 +0000

Brian, it’s rather difficult to give a long refutation of “Good for New Labour …” Indeed, were those four words really any more hard-hitting and well-reasoned than my own? Harry, I haven’t read the pamphlet, and I don’t plan on buying it from Amazon right now, but I suppose that you wrote one does demonstrate you have some other motivation than blind envy or braindead ideology. I can’t quite figure out what it is, though. By paying for a better education for their kids, parents ensure more resources for everyone in the state system. By raising costs so that parents at the margins cannot afford this – basically exactly the mums and dads who live in smaller houses, and endure a worse standard of living for years, because they desperately want something better than the state offers them – you make things worse for the individuals affected and for everyone else. Even if you were desperate for revenue and were prepared to see this happen as a way to get it, you must recognise that the cost of the taxpayer funding extra school places for one-time private pupils is going to reduce revenue.

By: dave heasman

dave heasman — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:49:48 +0000

I went to a state school that had a boarding component. A lot of us boarders were service children, children of missionaries (this was the 50s/early 60s) etc. Now the school still has some boarders, and is still a state school. Only 6th formers board now, and every year the head goes to China to find some. It ups the A level points score. 15 out of 20 boarders (there were 60 of us in my day) are now Chinese. The boarding fees have to be paid by the parents; tuition fees are paid by Essex ratepayers. I think it’s a case for the District Auditor, but that may be sour grapes, as, looking around my old mates at our last reunion I realised that none of us would have been admitted these days.

By: harry

harry — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 17:35:54 +0000

Matt—I’ve been thinking about this. In fact there are a few boarding schools in the state sector (Lord Williams, Thame, for example). But there are very few, and my guess is that the MOD and Diplomatic Service have the policy they do because they rightly think that it is important for kids to be near their parents, even if boarding, where possible, and that the two services between them simply don’t generate enough children to populate a sufficient number of boarding schools that are near to parents. So they use the private sector, as a cheaper way of getting boarding-education-which-allows-parents-to-be-near(ish)-to-children. (If they didn’t have this interest in maintaining proximity, obviously, the private sector wouold be much more expensive, just in terms of the education it provides).

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:40:28 +0000

Off the top of my head, I know that many people believe childhood education is a profession for which the market substantially underpays (I personally have no considered opinion on the issue). If that were true, I would think that schools would easily qualify as charities in most circumstances.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:28:17 +0000

… Andy’s case, for what it’s worth, does seem to offer some instance of private schooling providing a public benefit that’s not already available from the state sector.

By: Matt McGrattan

Matt McGrattan — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:24:00 +0000

Presumably the notion of ‘public benefit’ doesn’t just mean ‘anything that benefits the public’. Seems like a trivial point but there are, undoubtedly, a great many private companies which provide some form of public benefit (telecommunications companies, transport operators, etc.) but where we’d, nevertheless, not want to grant charitable status. The legitimacy of the public schools’ case for charitable status no doubt hinges, as you’ve pointed out Sebastian, on some detailed notion of ‘public benefit’.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:17:23 +0000

And a minor public benefit (not worthy of charitable status) would be if I learned to put the second ’s’ in substantial as a root.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:12:40 +0000

I know I’m probably missing something about the history of the term ‘public benefit’ in this context because in the common understanding of the phrase, wouldn’t subtantially educating a child be performing a public benefit?

By: harry

harry — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 14:28:36 +0000

Andy, I sympathise with your situation. I’ve been mulling over whether to write something up about the criteria the CC should use—I wrote something about this when I proposed the change about 4 years ago, but its out of date—and if I do it will definitely reflect what you’ve said. But, if you don’t mind me telling you what to do I think this is a case in which writing a letter to the Charities Commission (and ccing it to your MP and the Secretary for Education) explaining your situation and explaining why schools serving the military and diplomatic service in this way are contributing to an important public purpose might be quite a good idea; I really think this is a case in which people are going to be inclined to be responsive to good reasons (which you have). You could preface the letter with reasons why you either oppose or support the change (whichever is the case). Encourage others to do the same. I hadn’t thought at all about your kind of case, so am especially grateful to you for bringing it up. Peter—are you making fun of me for my ‘hurrah for NL’ comment? Fair enough—I did explain in great detail why I support this change in a pamphlet I wrote about 4 years ago, so although this post was, um, unelaborate, I have been elaborate about it before! (pamphlet still available at Amazon and the Fabian Society, by the way, just to promote sales).

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 07:02:02 +0000

And that’s the hard-hitting, well-reasoned response we’ve come to expect from the conservatives over the years. Concise, to the point, and really who can complain if it’s utterly unconvincing to anyone except the author? A real dialectical point-scorer there.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 04:56:28 +0000

Shame on you, Harry.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:53:51 +0000

I appreciate your point, but with less than 41,000 in the RAF (and the other Services dwindling as well), I doubt that this type of case counts as providing any widespread public benefit (although very beneficial for me). Fees going up would be mitigated in my case as you point out, but not for those who don’t have assistance – so my worry is that any schools close to the edge may close, and my daughter’s school is one of the smallest out there. Reading the Times article, and between the lines of the BBC one, it does appear that they’ll be as – well – charitable as possible when making the judgement call, so we should be OK. It’s just that I’m probably a bit sensitive at the moment (my latest quarter is falling to pieces and DHE don’t have the funds to upkeep it properly (the DHE funds from the sale of Families Quarters were originally ringfenced for maintenance, but the incoming Labour Government raided them anyway, or so I am told), the entire Iraq war affair makes us think that we were misled by our political masters, and now my neighbour at work is worrying about rumours of compulsory redundancies), so I am probably prejudiced to view such moves in the worst light. Anything that might affect my kids gets me nervous.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:34:34 +0000

If you read the story you’ll see that the schools will ahve to show that they merit charitable status. Presumably a high proportion of children in circumstances like that of your daughter would count? And, if the school loses CS the fees won’t go up much (I don’t have figures at my fingertips, but calculated some years ago that the financial, as opposed to symbolic, value of CS is pretty tiny), and the MOD will pay 90% of the increase. The point of the move is i) to encourage schools actually to do something charitable and in particular to foster more integration between the two systens and ii) to stop pretending that they are charitable when they are not.