Michael Gove has had plenty of things to say about education in the first ten days of February.
He started the month with the call to go back to the future by restoring the old fashioned values in punishment, the writing of lines, the collecting of litter and the weeding of playing fields.
He seems to think that this is the world of the best schools, when such things are long gone.
However, at the end of last week he decided to say nice things about independent schools, that every school should be as they are, that every school should have Oxbridge success and debating, and the Combined Cadet Force, and a longer school day as a norm.
He claims that his desire is to knock down the Berlin Wall that exists between the state and the independent sector.
Such opinions do two things to teachers. Teachers in the state sector are annoyed, at best, and they have two forms of annoyance.
Those in the best state schools say that they do all this anyway and don’t need any lessons, thank you very much.
Those in schools that cannot do all these things say, quite rightly, that it’s all too easy for independent schools to do these things: after all, they get somewhere between two and seven times more money per pupil and they have able pupils and supportive parents and fields as far as the eye can see. After all, the average staff pupil ratio in the state sector is 21:1 and in the independent sector is 10:1.
However, those of us in the independent sector aren’t annoyed. We are confused.
We don’t know whether independent schools, or private schools or public schools, are, in the eyes of the Government – or the world – a good thing or a bad thing.
There is much that we think are bad things. John Major thinks it is ‘truly shocking’ that the upper echelons of power are occupied by the product of independent schools. It is a ‘disgrace’ that half the places at Oxbridge are taken up by pupils from independent schools.
Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, thinks that our partnership work is merely ‘crumbs from the table’. Our schools even produce too many Olympic medallists.
So, we are the great barrier to social mobility and, some would argue, we need to be abolished, or at least lose our charitable status. And yet, we could also be a good thing: it is widely agreed that many independent schools in this country are world class, for a decade Lord Adonis has wanted our DNA in the state sector and that now even that nice Mr Gove is holding us up as models of virtue.
So, what’s to be done in this world of annoyance and confusion?
Well, one thing to do is to get some clarity about the nature of independent schools. The independent sector is not just Eton and Harrow, tail-coats and boaters and fees at £30,000-plus a year: of the 250 schools in HMC, the group of leading independent secondary schools, well over two-thirds are day schools, usually the old grammar schools of their towns and cities.
So, these schools are not really remote in place or time or even cost: the average independent day school costs £11,000 per year.
And from this follows the second most important truth.
Independent schools do want to be part of the main, to be as accessible as possible to the world, to collaborate with the state sector as best they can, to bring their own sledgehammers to the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
And there are many different ways in which this can happen. Some schools have already crossed over the wall and given up their independence to become ‘free’ schools. Some have sponsored academies and lent their expertise to new schools in a variety of different ways. Some are engaged in massive outreach programmes to enhance the experiences of junior school pupils: King Edward’s School deals with over 100 different junior schools.
Some have committed substantial provision to means-tested places: in September over a third of our year seven pupils will have such a place. And there are more radical solutions for the Government, too: why cannot the state fund or contribute to the funding of places for pupils in the independent sector? It did so to good effect from 1944 to 1997.
I don’t think that independent schools are going to follow the Berlin Wall into extinction; it has been talked about for 70 years but never more than talked about and these days the Labour party won’t even talk about it.
Since this is so, the best way for schools and for social mobility and for this country’s future prosperity and welfare must be to lay aside the metaphors of walls and build some bridges.
* John Claughton is chief master at King Edward’s School in Birmingham
