Seldon on Private Schools

“Is this just an “oh fuck, we’re going to have to pay our taxes” moment?”

Yes it is. But as with the Head Beak of Eton last spring, the Govt should seize the offer and make sure (which they haven’t done with Eton) that the deal gets so much publicity that the public schools can’t back out.

A casual follower of this running issue in the news could be forgiven for overlooking the fact that – according to this source of official statistics – some 652 thousand pupils were attending “non-maintained” (official jargon for private, fee-paying) schools in the UK in 2004/5 out of a grand total of 9,963 thousand pupils at school – Table 3-3 (p.35):
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends36/Social_Trends_36.pdf

In other words, pupils attending fee-paying schools represented only 6-5 per cent of all pupils at school in the UK. With that order of magnitiude, it stretches credulity a bit to claim that private, fee-paying schools inflict the scale of social damage they supposedly do.

The London Borough of Sutton, which almost perennially tops the standard league table of Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England, shows that the presence of a local cluster of outstanding maintained selective schools in an LEA can have the effect of raising the average attainment of candidates in the GCSE exams for 16 year-olds across the borough:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7180228.stm

On the inconvenient but perennial evidence from Sutton, it can hardly be argued that the presence of outstanding selective maintained schools has caused an erosion of educational attainment across the LEA. And some parents are actually pleased that the maintained (multi-ethnic) boys school down the road can achieve better results in the A-Level exams for 18 year-olds (and university entrance) than Eton. The bad news is that the Borough of Sutton is a relatively low spender on education by prevailing standards and that far from being relatively affluent, the distribution of income among residents in Sutton is close to the average for all London boroughs.

The stuff about how Seldon & Co. cream off “cream off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university places” is flagrant self-promotion of course but it’s Seldon’s whingeing at the end of the piece that strikes me as especially nauseating. If he thinks he operates with tight margins, he should see how comprehensive schools get by.

If Seldon really wants to make a difference to social justice in this country he can send his pupils home, close up shop and start looking for an honest job. I’m not going to hold my breath.

I wonder if his claim that private schools work on tight margins is part of some kind of jockeying for government funds?

Yep: private schools in the UK are currently classed as charities–an absurd misclassification, since far from being of public benefit they bring a net disutility to society as a whole, by perpetuating the class divisions which poison British life–which enables them to worm their way out of paying £100 million a year in taxes. Seldon’s griping relates to recent talk of the possibility of these Ra Ra Rupert handouts being rescinded, but with the reactionary time servers posing as a Labour government we have currently running our country it’s unlikely to be seriously contemplated.

depriving those schools of their best academics, musicians, sportsmen and women and future stars.

Well, if UK state schools are anything like most NZ state schools, when it comes to academics the state schools generally don’t want their best academics, so I personally have no problem with private schools “depriving” them.

Bitter, me? Never!

Indeed, I believe every single independent school should either be founding an academy or taking part in a trust or federation. To fail to do so is to deprive pupils, teachers and schools at large of opportunities for giving and sharing.

Only if there is some evidence that independent schools can do anything useful with an academy or a trust or federation.

Students from deprived areas are not pawns to be given to and shared with independently of their own needs.

The evidence from Project Followthrough in the US is that educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds with a wide range of mental abilities is a whole different problem from educating bright children from culturally-similar backgrounds. It requires much better teaching to reach the latter group. And the US evidence from NCLB is indicating that the schools in rich areas do about as badly with their low-income students as the schools in low-income areas.

On the anecdotal level, one of my mum’s friends was sending her daughter to the local state primary school, which was not in a good area. The school called her one day and said “your daughter has a reading problem”. She went “aaarrgghhh”, pulled her daughter out of the school and sent her to a private school. Two years later the school called and said “your daughter has a reading problem”.

Seldon was also interviewed by Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 yesterday. Unfortunately he exasperated Vine by refusing to be critical of private schools on air, apart from suggesting that they should do SLIGHTLY more to cooperate with state schools (including being more serious about setting up academies, etc). But this could only be an inter-rim measure, he argued – in the long run, all schools should become independent, and hence the issue becomes a non-issue. So although the criticisms you cite, Harry, have certainly grabbed the headlines, the detail of his criticism didn’t seem partiularly wounding at all.

Boom boom.

Whatever the merits of the rest of the piece it makes no sense to claim that private schools ‘cream off the best pupils’ since they can only select from those of the richest pupils whose parents prefer they should be privately educated.

Fee-paying schools may offer a few token places to able kids, but there’s no way that private education embraces a significant proportion of the most able young people within our society. Similarly, I doubt that they offer, in general, a superior education, in terms of fitness for adult jobs (though clearly better in respect of cramming for the pre-degree type of exam).

The result is that senior positions, for example in the British Civil Service, are staffed by mediocre people who have received a mediocre education – not good for this country.

Harry – can that be right? I’m not an expert on this but I would have thought that charitable status is VAT-negative for private schools, as it would mean that they can’t claim back the VAT they pay on services and such.

I’m the product of a very expensive and academically at least a very good private secondary school, founded and run by a Quaker Meeting. I’d never send my kids to private school, or even to a private university. I also wouldn’t teach at one. They’re not concerned with teaching, or their students but with prestige. But of course the teachers and students are as well. The new model of the University is the technical college and the sports franchise, fueled by brand snobbery.

Daniel — it could be wrong — but when I worked out whatever I worked out both my accountant friend and bursar friend thought I was right. I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember the details, but it was immediately after I moved to the UK and my life was unusually chaotic. Am I right that charitable status gives them a break on the rates or community charge or whatever it is? Anyway, that’s what I worked out, and I was surprised that, all things considered, there was so little at stake on both sides.

john m — thanks for liking the book! I think there is a problem, but, sure, Seldon and perhaps I might exaggerate it. If you understand “best” not in terms of IQ, but in terms of the cost of educating them reasonably well, most of the 6% come from educated families, have already learned to read when they come to school, have more or less supportive backgrounds, etc. Of course, some are kids you wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole. And although the number of scholarship kids must be so small as not to have a coutnry-wdie impact, it probably does have an impact in some locales with particularly successful scholarship schools, like MGS, which also, not coincidentally, probably cream off small but significant numbers of good teachers from the state sector.

(Competely OT, but related to the above comment, why don’t more people with PhDs aim to teach in good private schools rather than in not so good universities?)

Parents who send their kids private are a mixed bucnh. Many use both state and private, at different stages or for different kids and needs. But parents whose kids are in state schools are more invested in the system. If your kids go private, will you put as much energy into making sure things go well in the state schools as if your kids attend the state schools? The tendecny is to focus on where your kids are, simply because you have limited time and energy, whatever your more abstract interests.

I agree that some of the resistence to tax-paying comes as a general matter, and some more comes from worries about leaky buckets (wasted effort on initiatives, etc). In fact a lot of the extra spending, even when highlighted as being part of an “intiative” goes to ordinary boring things (think about performance-related pay, which was really just a tarted up salary increase). And many initiatives are highlighted numerous times, giving the impression there are more than there really are. Your comment makes me wonder if the government would do better by publicisng what it does less!

I can’t quite see how the charitable tax breaks are much benefit. The supply of education is exempt for VAT, and so input VAT would not be recoverable in any case[1]. However, that’s pretty much the same position charities are in anyway on their charitable activities…

And I can come up with a reasonable argument that any net income the school may make would be non-taxable – if you can sail a course between the Scylla and Charybidis of Schedules D I and VI, there’s certainly enough to keep a phalanx of tax lawyers happy for years.

[1] As opposed to zero-rated supplies, where input VAT is, of course, recoverable. There’s a reason why I always pass VAT questions on to someone else straightaway in my professional life.

If your kids go private, will you put as much energy into making sure things go well in the state schools as if your kids attend the state schools?

Parents, in my experience, don’t focus their attention on state schools in general. Instead they focus their attention on their own kids’ state schools. So for example, my mother was elected to the board of our local primary school, and focused her efforts on improving that school.

Since state schools tend to draw on their local geographic area, and areas tend to be sorted by income, the quality of parent involvement in state schools tends to vary by income levels as well. Parents who are successful in monetary terms tend to have a lot of financial skills or are good at getting people to do what they want. On the flipside, poor areas have a lot more parents who lack those skills.

At a national level, in my experience education policy is dominated by:

– teachers

– universities/polytechs, who want well-prepared students and exam results that allow them to pick off the smartest kids

– education professionals (who may be university academics as well, but are driven much more by various educational theories)

– employers wanting skilled labour

– those individual politicians who went into politics because of some dream about the wonders of education.

ah yeah, the business rate would make quite a difference.

Perhaps not, but if the private education system systematically funnels people who are not adequately prepared into crucial jobs, this has a serious knock-on effect for this country. Which is what I believe.

Do you have any evidence to support this? The privately educated have to go to the same universities as everyone else, so it’s not like there’s some direct route to the civil service or whatever after a pupil finishes their secondary education.

I think they’re most worried about their endowments, rather than their profits. They’re not businesses and don’t have ‘profits’ as such. If Seldon’s right, and they do run on a tight margin, then the model at a place like Wellington is more-or-less that you pay your fees in return for that amount spent on your kids education and access to the school’s pool of capital. You literally pay an entrance fee for access to inherited privilege. That’s probably what they’re being so protective over. Capital Gains Tax and various schemes to do with investments and gifting could – over the long term – seriously erode one of their main advantages.

john m, your comments about private schools being focussed on more than exams were raised by Seldon in his interview on HardTalk. Sackur pointed out to him that the kind of “enriching” atmosphere you describe only works for rich kids from a restricted background which values education. It is irrelevant when transferred to a system where very diverse backgrounds have to be considered, and a very diverse range of outcomes prepared for. Especially when state schools don’t, as leederick has observed, grant you admission to a club which confers non-education-related benefits. Seldon had no response to this – the image of trying to teach his way to a bunch of working-class boys in a depressed inner-city area was too powerful for his bleating to cut through.

He tried to defend it, of course, by observing that his school gets excellent (and improving) exam results, too, but the social milieu of his 5 percenters is so clearly different to that of the hoi polloi that the argument just doesn’t wash. State schools have to work with a lower common denominator of teaching outcomes, because they have a broader range of students.

“Sackur pointed out to him that the kind of “enriching” atmosphere you describe only works for rich kids from a restricted background which values education. It is irrelevant when transferred to a system where very diverse backgrounds have to be considered, and a very diverse range of outcomes prepared for. ”

This is ludicrous and a position that could only be held by someone with no experience of working class people. It will shock and surprise Sackur that working class people value education and culture just like middle class people and know how to benefit from it. My grandfather read Dante when he wasn’t driving the van and my Uncle John gets much more heated about Maria Callas than about any printing job I’ve heard him discuss. I recommend to your attention the ‘Intellectual Life of the British Working Class’ by Jonathan Roase to your attention to cure you of any of these prejudices. I managed to read it despite coming from the low-browed, horny-handed, mouth-breathing working stock that Sackur apparantly thinks incapable of culture.

George Walden made the case a long time ago that the independent sector screws up education reform in the UK because a large proportion of those making the laws and influencing the policy simply opt out of the state system.

On the other hand, an independent sector allows parents an escape from the state system, thus reducing the state’s ability to go down lunatic tracks.

It strikes me that exam policy in NZ is affected by the ability of private schools to opt for non-state-sponsored exams such as the IB or the Cambridge Exams.

There is a case for politicians being obliged to put their children in state schools. But that hardly requires ending the private school system.

Readers may like to reflect on the timing of this renewed bout of political concern about the 6-5 percent of school pupils attending private, fee-paying schools and the continuing existence of 166 (or so) maintained, selective grammar schools in Britain.

There is a reason, believe me. Consider this recent news report concerning the schools league table based on the results of the GCSE exams for 16 year-olds last summer:

“More than half a million children are being taught in failing secondary schools that risk closure by the Government.

“New GCSE league tables published today indicate that 639 of Britain’s 3,000 state secondaries have failed to meet the Government’s minimum target for 30 per cent of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. Last year, the Prime Minister vowed to shut down or take over schools that did not reach that level within five years.

“Overall, the tables show that the rate of progress in improving GCSE results has almost ground to a halt.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/school_league_tables/article3162676.ece

That came a few weeks after this news:

“British teenagers have plummeted down an international education league table, sparking fresh fears that schoolchildren are failing to master the basics.

“They fell in a set of new rankings comparing reading, mathematics and science standards in 57 nations – accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s economy.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/nedu404.xml

With our prevailing blame culture, all this must be someone’s fault and it can’t be the government’s. The answer to education inequalities is quite straight forward. Close all the good schools.

Nonsense; it means that the parents best placed to restrain the state from going down lunatic tracks don’t, and instead opt out, with the result that the lunatic education minister has to loonycate fewer kids, which is easier and cheaper.

Because of course education ministers are completely unaffected by comparisons between what state schools and private schools are doing.

A rule requiring elected politicians to place their children in state schools strikes me as placing ample incentives on the education minister to do things his/her colleagues care for. MPs are extremely good at lobbying in their own interests.

This way all people, not just the rich, get the option to choose the type of school they want, but at the same time it guarantees that most people with children in private schools still support adequate funding for state schools.

Public school teachers and other education staff are an ample lobby for more government spending on education.

What is far more important than spending on schools is the quality of educational outcomes.
There is a *lot* of evidence that there is no automatic relationship between spending money and good educational outcomes. What matters is the details. Is the curriculum well-structured so that a new skill is only taught once students have mastered all the necessary pre-requisites for learning the new skill? Does the curriculum include practice of already-learnt skills, or does it teach something then ignore it for 3 months, by which time most kids have forgotten about it? Are teachers trained to present new information in a way that is unambiguous for all the children in their class, regardless of cultural background? Are teachers trained to continually seek feedback on mastery and to adjust the lesson in response to that feedback? Do the national standards call for too many things to be taught per year? Are there national standards at all? Does the school administration support teachers in maintaining discipline? Does the school administration support teachers in running the classroom or do they interrupt classes all the time?

All these things are relatively independent of the level of spending. And we don’t seem to have a decent lobby group for them. The well-educated and/or wealthy either can teach their kids themselves or hire tutors if their kids have problems – I know as I’ve been hired often enough as a tutor.

“That’s why I believe that having different schooling systems instead of just a single state system is good.”

The Wikipedia entry for Gymnasium schools in Germany and the Netherlands compares them with the (? 166) grammar schools in England:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)

Why it is wrong for England to have more schools of the kind that are regarded as mainstream in Germany and the Netherlands. Among the City Academies famously promoted by the Blair government, some are specialising in modern languages, others in media studies or science and technology and so on. There appears to be no objections to some academies specialising in sports studies:

“There are currently 345 Sports Colleges in England operating as part of the Specialist Schools Programme. In addition, a further 12 schools have been designated in combined specialisms which include sport and 14 schools have Sport as a second specialism.”
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/specialistschools/what_are/sports/

What then is wrong about some academies specialising in academic subjects with a general expectation that their pupils will mostly be going on to universities after leaving at 18 and selecting their intake according to aptitude?

“That came a few weeks after this news:

“British teenagers have plummeted down an international education league table, sparking fresh fears that schoolchildren are failing to master the basics.

“They fell in a set of new rankings comparing reading, mathematics and science standards in 57 nations – accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s economy.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/nedu404.xml“

This particular little misleading piece of league table nonsense was nicely skewered by the BBC’s More or Less:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more_or_less/7136351.stm

@ bob b. i am not entirely sure what you mean with your reference to gymnasia. I actually attended one in the Netherlands. Perhaps it is useful to describe some features of the Dutch system, just as comparison.

Everyone in the country attends ‘basisschool’, primary education until 12. At the end of this everyone makes a standardized test, and its result plus your teacher’s advice determines what level of ‘middelbare school’, secondary education, you go to.

Middelbare school has roughly three levels. VWO is ‘preparation for scientific education’, it takes 6 years and prepares for university. This is similar to the German Gymnasium, in the Netherlands gymnasium means VWO with Greek and Latin.
HAVO takes 5 years and prepares for HBO, ‘higher vocational traning’, perhaps comparable with the former polytechnics etc. in the UK.
The majority of secondary school students go to VMBO for 4 years, which has its own sublevels, preparing either for work after it, or for MBO, ‘middle vocational training.
At the end of secondary school everyone does a standardized test again, and passing it automatically qualifies you for the fitting tertiary eductation.

So in principle you are put on a single track at age 12, which is quite young I think. There are however a nuber of ways to change track on the road, usually at the expense of redoing some years if you move to a higher level.

I think roughly half of the schools are state schools, the rest are mainly religious schools funded at exactly the same terms as state schools. (This is a leftover from the strong religious sepration in the country until recently). At primary school level there are also ‘alternative’ schools, with special educational philosophies, but at the secondary level the government prescribed curriculum is too strict to leave much of a difference between the schools. Truly private schools that charge their own fees are extremly rare, and aimed at rich people whose children are failing in the normal system, so attending them is not good for your CV.

Personally, I would like to keep the funding system that treats state and non-state the same, but with a prescribed curriculum that is a lot smaller, leaving schools with more freedom to do differentiate.

The separate track system in secondary school is quite different from England, isn’t it? From an egalitarian point of view, it has good and bad points. If someone scores well on the 12-year old tests, they are automatically put on track to tertiary education no matter their social bakground. On the other hand, people with higher education themselves tend to push their children to higher levels, and the system tends to exaggerate this effect.

Bob b, as i understand, you are not in favor of expensive private schooling, but fear that a sentiment against these schools will also affect your local, good school because it too has an ‘elite’ feeling?

As I understand it, this school is not government-run, but is government funded, and ‘selective’ means it reserves the right to reject certain children, based on school performance?

If that’s the case I have to stress that Dutch schools have very strict rules on who they can reject. In particular, if your test scores give you VWO advise, a VWO school is not allowed to reject you. Religious schools are allowed to reject people on religious grounds, but only within strict rules. In practice this is rare.

Also, most secondary schools are ‘scholengemeenschappen’, ‘school communities’, meaning they combine all three tracks in one organization, and often in one building. This makes it easier for children to switch track, and it also diminishes the ‘elite’ aspect that the higher forms of education might have otherwise have.

The gymnasia you mentioned are a bit of a peculiarity, since they only offer VWO education and are indeed a bit elitist and also a bit ‘white’, meaning they have little immigrant children. However, they do not offer appreciably better education than the VWO sections of school communities, except for a self-selection effect because children who doubt they can finish VWO will prefer scholengemeenschappen, where they can switch to HAVO if necessary.

I have understood that in Britain you cannot send your children to schools outside your own district, or at least my colleagues there used to worry about this a lot. Is this also true for secondary schools? If so, I imagine the ‘elitist’ feeling of good schools in highly-educated neighbourhoods is much stronger than here in Holland.

Re: “your local, good school because it too has an ‘elite’ feeling?”

The outstanding, selective maintained schools in Sutton are funded by the local council – which, like all councils, receives a block grant from central government to cover c. 80 per cent of council spending – but the schools are “independent” in the sense that they have their own boards of governors and, subject to law, are otherwise free of detailed control by the local council.

The pupils of the schools are hardly elitist to outward appearances – boys from the one down the road, which my son attended a good few years ago, regularly travel on the same buses as I do when I go shopping for groceries and look broadly representative of the united nations.

I’m none too sure that the academic excellence of the schools is widely recognised by residents across the borough – the percentage of graduates (and others with level 4 qualifications) among borough residents is below the average for London although the local press usually carries a perennial news item reporting that Sutton was top again, or nearly so, in the league table of local education authorities for England.

Entry to the schools is by entrance exam – it happens that my son didn’t know that he was going to sit the exam until he was a couple of hundred metres from the school he was accepted for and he was appropriately unphased at the prospect. It also happens that my GP (NHS doctor) attended the same school before going on to university to read medicine but I doubt many of his patients know that. More recently, the school has opened its sixth form to girls from neighbouring schools who, presumably, can’t access the subjects that interest them at their own schools. However, the borough does have an outstanding, selective girls school – admittedly a longish bus ride away from where I sit – which achieves better results than Eton and there are several other girls schools which don’t do quite as well.

Parents who wish their siblings to be considered for admission, apply for them to sit the relevant entrance exams, otherwise they apply for them to go to one of the local comprehensive schools for which there are no entrance exams. The choice is theirs.

The evidence from the borough’s experience is that the presence of these outstanding schools in the borough helps to raise and not diminish average education standards across the borough. As a faithful adherent of evidence-based policy, I am therefore unable to support Mr Seldon’s clarion call to abolish the maintained grammar schools. A cluster of them has served this borough well and there is virtually no detectable local groundswell of opposition to them.

“Umm, what ‘evidence’ do you claim to have that the existence of selective schools in a given area raises the average level of attainment?”

Please read down the thread for links to appropriate citations – the London Borough of Sutton perennially comes at or near the top of the league table of local education authorities (LEAs) in England based on average achievement of candidates from local maintained schools in the GCSE exams for 16 year-olds.

Sutton has a cluster of outstanding maintained selective schools, the effect of which is to raise average performance of schools across the borough. It happens that Sutton is a low spender on education compared with most other LEAs and the distribution of income of residents is close to the average for all London boroughs so the borough can hardly be regarded as unusually affluent. For all that, two of Sutton’s outstanding maintained boys schools and one of its outstanding maintained girls schools achieved better results than Eton in the A-Level exams for 18 year-olds.