07 May 2020
Eton’s Contribution
The £100 million experiment.
By Robert Kilconner
The announcement that Eton is in discussions with the Department of Education about spending £100 million on teaching disadvantaged sixth formers in East Anglia, the Midlands and the North may prove to be a significant milestone in the movement by private schools to partner with the state sector. Or it may not. But whether it does or it doesn’t, it is right that energy should be invested in searching for ways to exploit the skills of the private sector for a wider public.
There is, after all, a problem to be addressed. Some 10% of British children are educated privately and, if the fact that their parents pay the fees is anything to go by, most of them get a better education as a result. Not always, of course (there are excellent state schools and bad private ones), but on average. The challenge is to spread that educational advantage through the population at large and the question is how it can be done.
One of the difficulties is that the area is so overlaid by myth and wishful thinking that the central point gets lost. Some say that the difference is not in educational standards and that the greater success of the privately educated in obtaining university places and top jobs is down to the existence of networks and class prejudice. That fits nicely with certain political prejudices but takes scant account of the struggles by universities to up their proportion of state educated recruits or the ruthlessness of capitalist employers who (for some reason connected with profits) prefer to employ those best qualified for the job. Others say that the rise in standards in the state sector will eventually drive the private sector out of business. Maybe, but that could take a long time if one sets up no bridges between the two. Then there is the theory that the abolition of the private sector would unleash a remorseless parental pressure on state schools to lift their standards. In the nice middle class areas, perhaps, but that is hardly a route to improving education countrywide.
Hidden below the blather there are two essential questions. First, do we want to increase the average level of educational attainment? The answer to that must be “yes” for reasons far wider than the interests of the children concerned. We are a trading nation living on an overpopulated Island, dependent for our living standards on our wits, culture and expertise. We cannot afford to throw away any opportunity to develop them and foreign competition will not be forgiving if we do. Second, do we wish to spread the opportunity to learn as widely as possible? Again the answer must be “yes”, not just because there is a moral imperative on society to nourish talent wherever it may be found but also for the more pragmatic reason that it is wasteful not to do so. The question must be how to apply the expertise in the private educational sector to achieve these objectives.
Of course there are going to be difficulties. Private schools have the advantage that because all parents have paid fees they are likely to be supportive in the education of their children. Without the support of parents and children, the application of even the most refined teaching methods is likely to be wasted. That means some form of selection, perhaps delivered automatically because the project as contemplated deals with six form teaching, but creating division none the less. Then there will be children just outside the catchment who look over the boundary with envious eyes. And all this will be against a background of sneering as the usual class warriors bang on about privilege, elitism, members of the working class selling out, all subjects more dear to their hearts than opportunities for children or the strengthening of the pool of national talent. Yes, it will be difficult and there will be wrong turns along the way but in the end the goal is worth attaining and it is only by trying that anything will be achieved. Eton’s initiative should be applauded.
