Private schools have a 'moral duty' to their pupils - not the Government's academies

The history of education in the UK is a history of private success and public failure.

Research regularly tells us the best education systems in the world are those with little central interference.

This is not the model I see in the academies and free schools initiatives.

Over the years state education has become less about children and more about the fortunes of governments and individual ministers.

Schools have become caught up in an unseemly web of legislation that blows this way and that.

The independent school model works because it responds to a fundamental right and a fundamental responsibility.

Parents have the right to have their children educated as well as possible. They therefore have the responsibility to pay for it.

The partnership between hard-working parents, motivated students and committed schools has ensured no stakeholder rests on their laurels.

The freedom of schools as charities to charge fees in order to make a surplus means investment can be made in a school’s provision.

It is a virtuous cycle. Introducing the state into the equation removes motivation of all parties.

The over-involvement of government in many areas of our lives is a socialist hang-over that has infantilised the nation for generations.

All that has resulted is a lacklustre parade of cheap and low quality provision funded by an agency, the state, which has failed to create successful and lasting change in the way children are educated.

I believe the state, among many things unrelated to education, is there for the most vulnerable. It is there for those who cannot help themselves.

I am the first in line to pay my dues to a government that will lavish care on the unloved, the problematic and often unruly in our society.

That is the original philosophy of the Welfare State.

Dr Seldon says the perceived difficulties associated with fee-paying schools sponsoring academies “need not be burdensome” and the practical difficulties “are much exaggerated”.

As I see it, transforming a failing school or starting a new one is a Sisyphean task.

If an independent school wants to sponsor an academy properly, they need to invest time and energy into it.

If the practical difficulties are easily overcome, the task is not challenging enough and the reward not worth the effort.

We do not have money to spare to send teachers and deputies to form schools elsewhere. And we are behoven to our parents who are already paying twice for education.

As regards private schools “perpetuating social divides”, I want rather to perpetuate the right sort of divide – where the deserving are rewarded and the indolent do not prosper.

However we have lost sight of what a genuine meritocracy is.

Too many do well because of unearned advantage. Others expect help when they are unwilling to give of themselves.

By making education something all parents buy into and make sacrifices for, we have more chance of seeing motivated pupils and united families working towards common goals.

The engine room of the private sector is the hard working school that has to pull together a tough budget each year and strain every sinew to ensure that the educational offering is as high quality as it could be.

It is a tough ask, because they live in an unpredictable and unstable environment and must deliver or die.

As I walk the corridors of my school, I am acutely aware of the sacrifice families are making in financial terms to enjoy the first class education we offer. I am under pressure, as are my fantastic colleagues, to give value for money.

It has created, in the vast number of cases, a co-operation between parent and school for the success of those children in my care. It works. And it has worked here at Taunton School for 164 years.

I often get told independent schools do not live `in the real world’ and commercial organisations know all about survival in tough economic conditions.

Yet I know of few organisations that have lasted more than 100 years.

However, I know of dozens and dozens of fee-charging independent schools who have thrived and been successful over generations.

I believe education should be paid for – yes with a contribution through the tax system from the Government, called by many a voucher scheme.

Otherwise, parents should be allowed to top up what they want and go where they choose.

Schools, logically, would be free to teach and deliver as they please, and charge whatever top up they saw fit.

An inspectorate would guarantee basic standards. Such vouchers would be allowable also at independent schools.

A marketplace develops.

Competition between schools ensues. Schools improve or go under.

Parents see where their hard earned money is going.

Parents are more likely to work better together as a family for the good of their children if they are paying for their education.

‧ Dr John Newton is the Headmaster of Taunton School.

Have the middle classes lost their place?

Every day, we see another sign. A generation ago, the average middle-class family had one breadwinner. Now they have two. But they’re poorer. Why? Food, clothes, and appliances are cheaper. Yes, but mortgages are much, much bigger than they used to be. The middle class is hugely in debt. In a typical family, both parents must work to pay the interest on those debts. If interest rates – or petrol prices, or heating costs, or stealth taxes – go up much more, they’re finished. Bankruptcy looms. The middle class is under threat like never before.

Sometimes, the threat becomes reality, and things unravel in the most spectacular and gruesome of ways. A middle-class man, having built up a business, having bought a nice house for his family, reads his company balance sheet one day, comes back home, kills his wife and daughter, burns his house to the ground, and tops himself. “He was such a decent, hard-working man,” say the neighbours. Meanwhile, there’s a grim drift of statistics — the middle classes are boozing more (wine, naturally) and larger numbers of them are being charged with domestic abuse. Vivian Blackledge, of Domestic Abuse Service, has speculated that financial problems are the cause. I’ve also heard tales of the middle classes turning up in droves at the doctor’s, baying for Prozac. Being middle class, these days, can be pretty depressing.

Not so long ago, I heard the often-repeated line: “Everybody’s middle class these days”, and believed it, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. But it sounded cheerful and upbeat. It sounded as if everybody could expect a good standard of living, good manners from their peers, and a sense that they were contributing to the world. It sounded like progress. But it’s not true, is it? In fact, the opposite is true.

Now that the top one per cent own around a quarter of the wealth – or to put it another way, now that the top 25 per cent own three quarters of the wealth, with the middle class scrabbling around for the crumbs; now that the rich are getting richer, and everyone else is getting poorer; now that the underclass is smouldering away, ready to smash our windows and steal our stuff; now that our jobs are going and our mortgages are hanging by a thread – it seems to me that pretty much nobody is middle class.

That’s how it’s been for most of history, and that’s how it is even now, across most of the world. There’s the rich, and then there’s the rest. I’m using a phrase cited in a recent edition of The Atlantic magazine; that’s how they describe America in the 21st Century. It’s getting to be the same over here, too. Most people are wallowing in debt, living hand to mouth. A tiny group sits at the top, sipping champagne. They are the people who, directly or indirectly, make money from all the debt. They are the financiers – the investors, the bankers, the traders – and the small group of toffs who court them and flatter them. And, of course, bail them out. Well, just look at the cabinet. It’s not exactly middle class, is it?

But who were the middle classes, anyway? They haven’t been around forever. The middle class started in Europe three or four centuries ago, depending on who you ask. They weren’t risk-takers. They didn’t create wealth. No – they worked for the people who created wealth. You might say that the middle classes only exist as long as the rich need them.

In his book The Poker Face of Wall Street, the American writer Aaron Brown defines the middle class as “people who value security over the chance to get rich”. They save rather than spend. They’re keen on deferred gratification. Having taken up their place in society, they’re desperate not to be overtaken. They despise those on the rung below. You might say they are snobbish time-servers. Now it looks like they are on the way out, you might say “good riddance!”

If you think about it, the middle classes are hard to like. I say this as somebody who is solidly middle class. I went to an expensive independent school, founded in the Victorian era to mould the sons of Empire. If you heard me speak, you wouldn’t know which part of the country I came from, but I don’t think of myself as remotely posh. I wear jeans, which are quite cheap, with shirts that are quite expensive. I own a terraced house, but I have a large mortgage. I make the same amount of money as a very bad football player — maybe someone who plays for Tranmere Rovers or Oldham Athletic. I’m probably about as well off as my dentist.

But am I more middle class than my dentist? If I know one thing about the middle class in this country, it’s that there are lots of tiny nuances. Kate Fox, the anthropologist, says that if you’re middle class, you would put your dog in a caged-off section at the back of your car, whereas if you’re upper-middle class, you have the dog in the back seat. That sounds about right. I was always aware that social climbers always pretended to be cleaner and more polite than people who were actually posh; real posh people farted and said “what!” rather than “pardon”.

In her book Class, Jilly Cooper, a middle-class person (on the posh side, if you ask me), writes that when she met an upper-class chap, he was smoking in the street. She pointed out that, in her book, this was bad manners. “I do what I like,” said the chap. For Cooper, this was a revelation. The higher up the class system you were, the more vulgar you could, and possibly should, be. Except you had to do it in the right context. It’s all very confusing, and the borders are policed with a gimlet eye. In any case, you can see why toffs often get on with chavs – both classes can swear, drink and gamble with impunity. You see them at Epsom and Ascot, betting slips in hand, with half-cut, identical expressions on their faces.

I say all this to illustrate the insane complexity of the middle class. It’s a complex class because it served a complex institution — the British Empire. People with brains and bullishness trekked all over the world, inventing brilliant and nefarious ways to suck resources out of it. These people needed administrators — people to keep the books, arrange the logistics, run the factories, market the goods, and teach the next generation how to carry on the good work. The richer we got, the bigger the middle- class grew, toadying away expertly, aping its superiors (never quite accurately), and eventually trimming its hedges and waxing its cars.

At some point, around the time when our empire folded, politicians began to call for a classless society. Harold Wilson wanted a classless society. So did John Major. Tony Blair wanted us all to be middle class. But, as a society, we were living on borrowed money. You can’t support a vast swathe of middle-class people if you’re a society with escalating debts. Various governments tried. By making education comprehensive, they created the illusion of equality. By making exams easier, they created the illusion of a better-educated population. By chartering more universities, they enabled lots of people to be given degrees.

Meanwhile, something else was happening. As a nation, our debts were maturing. Just when we thought we were getting richer, we were getting poorer – far too poor to support an enormous middle class. A very small number of people, the risk-takers and financiers, were making huge amounts of money. The rest of us were being left behind. As Ferdinand Mount points out in his brilliant book about the British class system, Mind the Gap, “the average pay ratio of chief executive officer to employee has risen from 47 to 128 in the last 10 years. Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco is paid nearly 900 times as much as the average Tesco worker. Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP receives 631 times the wage of his average employee, Paul Adams of BAT 391 times.” On the other hand, the middle class is getting poorer – by the day. Some are losing their jobs, abusing their spouses, going off the rails.

And loss of income, of security, of a sense of identity and belonging, is destablising what long seemed to be this most respectable of classes. As Ferdinand Mount, writing about the chav-based novels of Martin Amis, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, puts it, “the brutality and hopelessness they describe are not restricted to the very poor, but rather as seeping upward like some mephitic gas”. Artists and fiction writers are always ahead of the game: Amis, Kelman and Welsh have known something for a while that we cannot yet face up to.

That’s us, that is. Just look at Shameless on television. That’s us. In some deep inner recess of our collective brain, that’s how we feel. And that’s why, in our droves, we love The Apprentice and Big Brother. We know we might just make it. But we are beginning to cotton on to how sharp-elbowed we’ll have to be. We used to watch The X Factor ironically. Now less so. We love the aspiration. We need the hope. Because the middle class, as we knew it, is not long for this world.

Lansley: let patients register with GPs near their work

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