WHAT’S WRONG WITH
Private
Education?
John White
What’s Wrong with Private
Education?
John White
First published in 2015 by the UCL Institute of Education, University College London,
20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
ioepress.co.uk
© John White 2015
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Cover image: Harrow schoolboys and local boys outside Lord’s cricket ground,
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Contents
1. Initial arguments
1
1
Private schools in general
Unfairness
2
Parents’ rights
3
Private schools in Britain
4
Back to unfairness
6
Social cohesiveness
11
A ruling class? 12
Back to social exclusiveness, unfairness,
and parents’ rights
16
Conclusion
17
2. Widening the focus
19
Victorian class-based society 19
The role of school examinations
22
Private schools after 1944
24
The rebirth of private education
26
Blurring the divide
27
The new hierarchy
29
Conclusion
31
3. Back to arguments
34
Assessing the new hierarchy
34
Reconsidering private education
36
Conclusion
38
iii
4. Ways forward
40
Conclusion
46
Notes
49
References
51
iv
Chapter 1
Initial arguments
A grammar school boy from Leeds, Alan Bennett first encountered the
privately educated when he sat a Cambridge scholarship examination in 1951.
That weekend was the first time I had come across public
schoolboys in the mass and I was appalled. They were loud,
self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting
down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy.
Public school they might be but they were louts. Seated at long
refectory tables beneath the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart
grandees, neat, timorous and genteel we grammar school boys
were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party
in possession.
(Bennett, 2014)
Less colourfully, he goes on to say:
Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those
who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to
purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.
And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that
education has been wasted.
Is Bennett right? Is private education wrong? And if so, is it wrong because
it is unfair?
Not all of the UK’s 2,400+ private schools are ‘public’ schools in
the British sense of the term. Public schools are an élite within the private
sector: they are the HMC schools, that is, the 250 or so whose headteachers
belong to the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference.
Whatever Alan Bennett or anyone else has to say for or against public
schools may not bear on the wider issue of whether private education is
wrong. I will come back later to public schools, but will start with this
bigger picture.
Private schools in general
In private – unlike state – education, parents fund their children’s schooling.
If private schools are wrong, is it because parents pay? But why should this
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be a reason against them? People with money to do so pay for meals out and
holidays on the Algarve. We do not say these things are reprehensible simply
because they are paid for.
Then, is what is wrong with private schools that some can pay and
others cannot? This can’t be right either. Not everyone can afford restaurants
or foreign holidays, yet those who do pay for these things are not behaving
improperly.
Perhaps the issue is really about the injustice of a system that enables
some to enjoy such goods while others are too poor to do so. This would
apply to private schooling as well as to holidays and meals. And it would
bring us back to Bennett’s view that what is wrong with private education
is that it is unfair.
Unfairness
One stance on this would be to accept the charge of unfairness, but to
deny this carries any implication that private schools should be penalized
in some way or not be allowed to exist. Some may argue that, yes, some
people get a raw deal in life and earn too little money to pay for more than
basic necessities, that this is an injustice that needs to be remedied, and that
we should remedy it by ensuring that they get more – either as a result of
economic growth or through income redistribution. In education, this could
point to a policy of ensuring that everyone has enough money to pay for
private schooling.
But should we agree that private education is unfair? Bennett says
that it is. As he presents things, he makes this seem like a self-evident truth.
But is it?
Suppose all state schools are doing a good job and are popular with
parents. Suppose, too, that the few private schools that happen to exist
are those that parents want for what others see as idiosyncratic reasons,
even though the education they provide is, by anyone’s reckoning, mediocre.
Neither do parents choose them for class size, since sizes are comparable
with those in state schools. Nor do they choose them for exam results,
for these are poor. In this case, they prefer them because they went there
themselves, say, or because they provide extra religious instruction in the
beliefs of their own unusual sect.
This scenario is perhaps not realistic. But it is useful because it helps
us to put a finger on what, if anything, is unfair about private schooling.
Unfairness would be a hard charge to level against our imaginary examples.
The children who attend these schools are not getting something that parents
within the state system would want their own children to have. We might
2
Initial arguments
still object, on other grounds, to the parents in the story going private. We
might say, for instance, that they don’t have the right to choose schools
according to their own beliefs. But we can make a charge of unfairness stick
only if privately educated children gain some kind of significant advantage
that state school students lack. I emphasize ‘significant’ because if the
advantage were trivial – for instance, if all of the private schools in our
imaginary society were more spacious than state schools by a few cubic
metres – the cry of ‘unfair!’ would be unlikely to be heard. We would have
to be talking about something more substantial, such as vastly different
class sizes, a richer curriculum, better chances of going to university, or
getting a top job.
All this shows, I think, that there is nothing intrinsically unfair about
private education in the abstract. If it is unfair at all, this must be because
of features attached to private schooling in particular circumstances. Alan
Bennett may be right in his objection – not because the institution is unjust
per se, but because he has in his sights a particular manifestation of it, the
form it takes in British society today. I will come back to this in due course.
Meanwhile, are there additional objections in principle to private
education other than alleged unfairness? Could it still be wrong in itself, but
for different reasons?
Parents’ rights
Perhaps one objection to private education might be that it brings with it
parental choice of school. Can we validly argue that parents have no right
to choose – morally, that is, whatever legal right they may have to do so?
Maybe. But we would need some backing for this. One such could
be the inadequacy of arguments put up in favour of parents’ rights. If a
supporter were rash enough to claim that children belong to their parents,
so the latter are entitled to decide how they should be educated, an objection
would soon be at hand. If something is your property, you may well have
the prima facie right to do what you will with it, but parents do not own
their children.
A better supporting case might be that parents are responsible for
their children’s welfare and so should do their best to see they go to a school
that promotes this. This looks reasonable as a premise. But does it support
private education? It is compatible with all schools being state-provided.
Parents could in principle choose the best school for their child among these,
so parental choice does not necessitate parental choice of private schools.
But neither does the premise support parents’ choice even among
schools in the state sector. It is compatible with all children being allocated
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to a local school. Parents would still be responsible for keeping tabs on how
well the school is doing for their child, and there are obvious ways in which
they can do this – via parent–teacher meetings, for instance, or by becoming
a governor, or collaborating with other parents.
A response to the last two paragraphs could be that this is not always
how things are. In Britain and elsewhere, for instance, children are not all
allocated to schools; and not all schools are state-run. Where private options
exist, as here, parents are fully justified in choosing one if they think this will
be best for their child.
Fair enough. But does the new move really help the case for private
education? In taking as its starting point the existence of private schools
that parents may wish to choose, is it not begging the fundamental question
of whether such schools should be allowed to exist?
On the other hand, it is hard to make a case in principle against
allowing parents to pay for their children’s schooling. The strongest reason
for allowing them seems to be this: people should be free to do what they
want with their own money as long as this causes no harm to others. This is
a specification of the principle of liberty, as formulated by John Stuart Mill,
that lies at the heart of liberal-democratic thinking. If parents want to spend
money on their children’s schooling in the belief that this will be good for
them, this is unobjectionable as long as it does not harm other people – the
children themselves or others (Cohen, 1981).
If this is right, there seems to be no reason in principle why private
schools should not exist – along with private tuition or home schooling.
Private schools in Britain
I suggested above that Alan Bennett may be right in his opposition to private
education if he is thinking of the form this takes in Britain, rather than in
an in-principle way.
What features of British private schooling in particular might
provoke his and others’ objections? First, a few facts. The 2,400+ private
schools in Britain educate some 7 per cent of the population. Of these,
1,600+ are primary and just under 800 secondary. Among the secondary
schools are 250 or so HMC schools, generally known as ‘public schools’.
Fees across all schools range from £3,000 p.a. to £21,000+ for a day pupil,
rising to £30,000+ for a boarder. The pupil–teacher ratio, at about ten
to one, is much lower than the 17+ to one found in maintained schools.1
This allows for more individual tuition. Private schools also tend to have
better provision for extra-curricular activities than state schools. They are
4
Initial arguments
free, too, to determine their own curricula, tending to favour a traditional
academic model but with opportunities for ranging beyond this.
In terms of examination results and university entry, private schools
do well. According to the 2012 A level results:
Almost a third of pupils from the independent sector gained at
least three As … compared with just over one-in-10 attending
Government-funded schools and colleges.2
Privately educated students also score on university entry:
In 2010/11, an estimated 86 per cent of pupils from English
independent schools progressed on to any university course
compared with 70 per cent of those from the state education
system – a 16 percentage point gap.
But the gulf was even wider when analysing entry rates to ‘the
most selective’ universities – the third of institutions with the
highest entry requirements. This includes Oxford, Cambridge,
Imperial College London, University College London and other
members of the Russell Group.
According to figures, 64 per cent of students from independent
schools went on to these universities in 2010/11, compared with
24 per cent from state schools – a 40 percentage point gap.
The gap widened from 39 percentage points a year earlier and 37
points in both 2006/7 and 2008/9.3
In 2012/3, 42.6 per cent of entrants to Oxford University were from private
schools.4
Among private secondary schools, those in the HMC, the public
schools, do even better. The Sutton Trust revealed that in 2013 five élite
schools, four of them private, sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge
universities than nearly 2,000 schools, which make up two-thirds of the
entire state sector.5 The HMC website states that ‘one in ten of all those
attending the UK’s top ten universities come from (its) 253 schools’.6
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given these figures, people educated in
private schools are disproportionately represented in top professional jobs.
In 2007, Sutton Trust research found that over half of 500 people holding
leading positions in law, politics, medicine, journalism, and business were
privately educated.7 Again, top HMC schools do even better. In 2012 The
Daily Telegraph reported research, also by the Sutton Trust, showing that
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ten élite fee-paying schools produced 12 per cent of the high-flyers featuring
in birthday lists of national and Sunday newspapers in 2011.8
In June 2014 the Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Peter Bazalgette,
complained that top private schools are too dominant in acting. ‘I personally
don’t see why all the male actors getting Baftas should come from Eton,’ he
told Sheffield Doc/Fest, adding, ‘Good for them, and great actors, but why
should they all come from Eton?’9
The most recent data on jobs comes from Elitist Britain, the August
2014 Report from Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty
Commission:
71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces
officers, 55 per cent of Permanent Secretaries, 53 per cent of
senior diplomats, 50 per cent of members of the House of Lords,
45 per cent of public body chairs, 44 per cent of the Sunday
Times Rich List, 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, 36 per
cent of the Cabinet, 35 per cent of the national rugby team, 33
per cent of MPs, 33 per cent of the England cricket team, 26 per
cent of BBC executives, and 22 per cent of the Shadow Cabinet
attended independent schools – compared to 7 per cent of the
public as a whole.10
For the moment, that is more than enough factual information about private
schooling in the UK relevant to our discussion of objections to it. Let me
come back now to those.
Back to unfairness
I began with Alan Bennett’s claim that private education is not fair. We saw,
when examining in-principle arguments, that for this charge to stick, those
who go to private schools must – as a necessary condition – gain some kind
of significant advantage over those who do not. The facts supplied above
give abundant evidence of this. The 7 per cent of private students have more
individual tuition, are in smaller teaching groups, have better facilities, have
richer curricular and extra-curricular opportunities, do better at A levels,
are more likely to get into universities, especially the more highly-rated
ones, and figure disproportionately well in lists of those with the best jobs.
There is little doubt about these advantages. It is true that defenders
of private education sometimes challenge the first two points, about more
individualized teaching and learning. They point to studies that purport to
show that reducing class sizes in maintained schools is less effective than is
6
Initial arguments
often thought. Take, for instance, the DfE’s 2011 report on class size that
states (p. 2):
The evidence base on the link between class size and attainment,
taken as a whole, finds that a smaller class size has a positive
impact on attainment and behaviour in the early years of school,
but this effect tends to be small and diminishes after a few years.11
Actually, the evidence is more complicated and more mixed than this overall
statement suggests. One factor is the size of the class difference. It would
not be surprising if a fall of a couple of points had less effect than a larger
disparity. Where there is a big class size difference, for instance, a reduction
from 30 to 15, as in Blatchford’s (2008) study of low-attaining secondary
school pupils, there was ‘an increase in the probability of on-task behaviour
by around 10 percentage points from 78% to 88%’.12 Where we are
comparing private with state provision, it is differences of this magnitude
(two to one) that are the relevant ones. And it is because of their vastly
smaller teaching groups that parents often prefer private schools. They
would be likely to think twice if these in fact did not deliver the goods.
As for the other goods that private schools provide, these are hard to
gainsay. What ordinary state school could match this passage from Harrow
School’s website?
Our playing fields are extensive and include two all-weather
pitches that can be used for rugby practice, soccer and hockey.
The Sports Centre has an eight metre indoor climbing wall, a
weights room, a 25m swimming pool and a sports hall. The
cricket facilities include ten grass squares, grass nets, six artificial
outdoor nets and two indoor nets. There are courts for tennis,
rackets, squash and Fives and the School has its own nine-hole
golf course. Our athletic facilities include an Olympic-standard
running track, facilities for long jump, high jump, discus and all
the main athletic events, plus a water jump for the steeplechase
and an area for the pole jump event.13
Are these and the other advantages enough to justify the charge of unfairness?
If something is unfair, that suggests it is morally wrong. Is this true of the
extra benefits that private schools bring with them?
Their defenders may argue that wanting to remove or at least
reduce these differences between the two sectors betrays an ideological
attachment to egalitarianism. This ideal is that everyone should have
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the same. But, they may say, there is no good reason to believe this.
Equality is not good in itself. Revolutionaries may have bracketed it
with liberty and fraternity as democratic values, but it is different in
important respects. Making people’s lives, goods, opportunities more
equal does not necessarily bring about a benefit to anyone, as realizing
these other values does. For suppose that, while state school provision
remained the same, the better provision in private schools were reduced
by 50 per cent. No one would benefit from this move. A reply might be
that the advantage would lie in the greater equality itself, since equality
is intrinsically valuable. But it is presupposed that if something is of
intrinsic ethical value it is beneficial to at least one person. This is true if
we are talking of the realization of autonomy, physical health, intimate
relationships, helping those in distress, enjoying music, or any other such
value. Engaging in an intimate relationship, for instance, is valuable in
itself, and this could not be so if a conceivable instance of it benefited no
one. The fact that in our example of equality as an intrinsic good nobody
became better off is a reason for concluding that equality is not valuable
in itself (Raz, 2008).14
While I agree with this anti-egalitarian argument, it leaves open the
possibility that equality is instrumentally, as distinct from intrinsically,
valuable. Reducing the advantages that private schools possess – such
as smaller classes and better facilities – may in some way be a means of
benefiting existing state school pupils. This would have to be shown, not
assumed, to be the case.
Building on a suggestion made earlier, suppose all children who
attend state schools get a pretty good deal. Although this is not as good as
at Harrow or Eton or even at a little-known St Mary’s convent, it still means
that they enjoy school, do well in their exams, are able to go on to higher
or further education if they want to, and manage to secure a fulfilling and
adequately paid job. Why not leave the more fortunate with all that they
have, given that no one else is getting a raw deal?
That might be fine in theory, an opponent may reply, but the real
world is not like that. Many in Britain today live in poverty, are poorly fed
and housed, do unpleasant menial jobs, have no time to themselves, are
stressed, fall into despair … Their children tend to go to the worst schools,
with poorer teaching, more discipline problems, worst exam results … It
simply is not fair that these children have such a poor start in life, while
Harrovians enjoy their nine-hole golf course en route to Trinity College
Cambridge and life as a High Court judge.
8
Initial arguments
A defender of private education has an answer:
The problem here is poverty. It is not to do with comparisons
between different groups. If it is poverty we need to reduce, let us
work out the best ways of doing that, rather than being diverted
by how much better other people are doing. We should think
of how we can raise our gross national product so as to erode
the poverty that capitalist advances have already done so much
to diminish since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Private
schools have helped in this process from those early times by
furnishing the nation with its industrial and other leaders who
have done so much to transform the lives of ordinary people.
If schools in poor areas are not generating the exam results that
get underprivileged youngsters into Oxford and Cambridge, it
is there that we should be concentrating our efforts. We need
Sir Michael Wilshaw, now in charge of OFSTED and once an
amazingly successful secondary headteacher in a poor area of
London – with ten students at his Mossbourne Academy in
Hackney offered places at Cambridge University in 2011 – to
inject his tough love remedies.15 We need strict controls on
behaviour, relentless concentration on examination success,
threats of parental fines for truancy or ignoring homework.
Left-wingers may still prefer to dwell on their comparisons. But
what does this show? It is irrational to brood on these, given
that the other approach is so much more task-focused. One can
only think that it must be some sort of envy that is driving them.
They see all the superb teaching, the Olympic running tracks,
the sparkling A level results … and dream that they or the
downtrodden for whom they speak also had these things.
This accusation of envy is often heard in these debates. I suspect it is not
based on empirical evidence as much as speculation. But the more central
argument – that if poverty is the problem we should direct our thoughts
to that – is more telling. If the opponent of private education could show
that the only way, or the most effective way, of tackling it is by removing
resources from the better-off, including their educational advantages, this
would seem a strong counter-argument. But how could he or she show that?
We know that there are other ways of lifting people out of poverty such
as economic growth. Whether, or how far, redistribution of wealth is also
necessary – to alleviate not only extreme want, but also other causes of
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distress such as lack of free time – is a further question. It takes us far beyond
arguments about private education in particular and into general politics.
There is another, more narrowly focused, kind of ‘egalitarian’
challenge that has to be met. This also involves an appeal to equality not
as an intrinsically valuable good, but as of instrumental benefit, in that
reducing certain advantages possessed by private students would benefit
some state school pupils.
This argument is built around the claim that education is in part a
positional good.
What matters is not how much education one gets, or how good
that education is, or even one’s results, but one’s position in the
distribution of those things. Children who, by going private, do
better than they would have done at a state school are gaining
competitive advantage over others. They are jumping the queue
for university places and well-paid or interesting jobs.
(Swift, 2003: 23)
The threat here is to equality of opportunity, in that state school students
have fewer opportunities than they would otherwise have had of getting into
university (especially one of the élite universities in which private students
are abundant) or a good job (especially, as we can also see from statistics
presented above, a ‘top’ one).
How are we to assess this argument? As Swift says, the fact that
most top jobs in different fields are held by private school alumni reduces
the chances of state school students getting one. But would this necessarily
be harmful to them? There must be many from state schools who are not
blind to the competitive nature of modern existence, and would like to have
a reasonably well-paid and interesting job, but who are not interested in
having one towards the top of the tree, and whose overall well-being would
not be diminished if they did not get one. How could such people be harmed
if their chances of becoming an admiral, a CEO, a bishop, or a cabinet
minister were reduced?
State school students who do aim at such heights may well be
disadvantaged, but even this is not obviously true. It might be true on a
definition of well-being based on how far one’s major informed desires are
satisfied; for if a state school alumnus wants above all to end up in this
top bracket and fails to do so, his or her well-being is diminished, and it
is plausible to say that he or she has been harmed by the advantage that
the privately educated have in this area. But whether the informed-desiresatisfaction notion of well-being is correct cannot be taken as read. It has
10
Initial arguments
been often challenged – and, to my mind, effectively so.16 Suppose, for
instance, a person has a burning ambition to reach the very top, does so, and
then finds he or she has nothing now to live for and falls into depression.
Even though this person has achieved his or her foremost goal in life, he or
she may be far from flourishing.
The upshot of this discussion is that it is not as clear as it may have
seemed that the dominance of private school ex-pupils in top jobs, and the
reduction of opportunities for others that this brings with it, is unfair to these
others, where this term implies that they have been harmed in some way.
This is a brave attempt at a defence of private schools, but it lacks
persuasiveness. While some state school students may not be worsted by
what Swift calls ‘queue jumping’, others still could be. This is at least in part
an empirical matter.
Social cohesiveness
A second complaint about British private education is that it is divisive.
Its students live in a world apart, scarcely interacting with ordinary
people, knowing very little about them, and often seeing them as inferior
to themselves. This is especially true of boarders, since they live in their
own gated community twenty-four seven. But it is also largely true of day
students, since for all of the time they are in school and often beyond this
they are interacting only with others like themselves. Bennett’s Cambridge
rowdies, bellowing down the table at each other, provide a vivid example
of how such enclosed worlds can persist. A state school class, on the other
hand, is frequently a microcosm of society itself. In some people’s eyes,
being a member of it can be, if schools manage this well, a civic preparation
in itself, a daily induction into life within the larger society.
How far these charges are true is an empirical question. But suppose
they were. Would that be enough to show that private schools were doing
something wrong – that they should be curbed in some way, perhaps even
abolished?
We should separate living in a world apart from looking down on
people. In terms of the first, an appeal to the principle of liberty might
suggest that there is nothing wrong with leading a life apart from that of
most people as long as one is causing no harm. Monks, nuns, and scholars
often do this, but we do not look askance at them for that reason. If exprivate school pupils prefer to fraternize among themselves, and their doing
so does not make other individuals’ lives any less flourishing – as these can
still get on with their own concerns without interference – what room is
there for moral censure?
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The second charge looks more reprehensible. It is indeed wrong to
lord it over other people, to see oneself as a superior being. But insofar as
the privately educated are guilty of this – and we do not know how many,
if any, of them might be – they would be no different in this from many
more ordinary people who look down on immigrants, benefit scroungers,
other racial groups, blue-collar workers, those in social housing. Wanting
to reinforce one’s place in the social pecking order is a common human
desire. If it is undesirable, as I believe it is, attacking private schools would
do little to undermine it. In any case, as I have said more than once, how far
the privately schooled do in fact engage in demeaning others is an empirical
issue and one that should not be prejudged.
So far, we have examined two complaints against private schooling:
that it is unfair, and that it leads to social divisiveness. Although both have
some weight, there is a third, and in my opinion more telling, objection.
A ruling class?
In 2007 Sutton Trust research found that over half of 500 people
holding leading positions in law, politics, medicine, journalism
and business were privately educated.17
The predominance of the privately educated was confirmed in the 2014
Report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, quoted above.
I don’t know how many of these 71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per
cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of Permanent Secretaries,
53 per cent of senior diplomats, and so on, are out of touch with the lives
of ordinary people. Perhaps, because of their schooling, a lot of them are.
But the argument that follows would still be cogent if all private schools
took steps, as some may well do, to bring home to their students how the
other half (or, more accurately, 93 per cent?) live, and encouraged them to
minister to their welfare.
The third reason to challenge private education is its role in
producing national leaders. This has traditionally been a central aim. From
the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, the private system
made no bones about this. Over much of this period, Plato’s Republic
was a favoured text used in defence of a public school education – before
Popper’s demolition of it in The Open Society and its Enemies in 1945
(McCulloch, 1991: 66–7). Its notion of a ‘Guardian’ class legitimated, or
so it was thought, the dominance of its ex-students in public life both in
Britain and in its Empire. The idea was influential directly and indirectly. It
was promoted through the classical education common to the upper classes.
12
Initial arguments
Benjamin Jowett’s celebrated translation of the Republic in 1888 – based
on earlier versions dating from 1871 (Faber, 1957: 433–4) – expanded
the numbers of those acquainted with the Platonic conception of an élite
ruling group. This conception was also influential indirectly, via the idea
of a state based on Platonized Christianity that influenced Coleridge from
1816 onwards and took shape in his notion of a ‘clerisy’, a guardian-like
élite more cultured than a traditional aristocracy that would help to diffuse
civilized attitudes and knowledge across the population (Keane, 1994: 78).
Coleridge’s ideal permeated much of mid-nineteenth-century thinking,
partly via its expression in the works of J.S. Mill, Thomas Arnold, and
Matthew Arnold (Gordon and White, 1979: 5–6; McCulloch, 1991: 16).
In the more democratic age that has followed we have heard much less on
these lines, about rule by a special élite. Yet the data already mentioned on
the top jobs is, as I shall show, disturbing.
A brief reacquaintance with the Platonic argument for Guardian
rule once so influential in public schools will help to show why private
school dominance is not tolerable. Plato’s perspective is attractive. His ideal
education system provided higher education only for the intellectually most
able. Ten years of mathematics and a further five of philosophy gave them
an insight into the structure of reality and the nature of the good life denied
to the rest of the free population. The understanding they gained of the
nature of the good society, as well as the devotion to its flourishing that
this engendered, equipped them as rulers of the state. Although reluctant to
give up the delights of philosophy for practical involvement in politics, they
dutifully spent their later lives in what they had been trained to do.
Generations of public schoolboys were brought up under the aegis of
this doctrine of the incorruptible and dedicated public servant. Its hold on
them gained strength from Plato’s argument that the Guardians were born
to rule. In his metallurgical image, they were the people of gold, innately
equipped with a high-powered intellect denied to those of silver, their
auxiliaries, or those of bronze, the common people. There was no question,
either in the Republic, or among the British upper classes, of rule by the
many. Their intelligence was simply too low.
Plato’s foundations are, however, shaky. I will not go further into his
psychological views about the distribution of intellectual ability, except to
say that they rest on the premise that there are innate ceilings of intelligence
that prevent ordinary people from possessing the understanding required
for political leadership. But the proposition that these upper limits exist is
an unjustified assumption, in my view both unverifiable and unfalsifiable
(White, 2002: 90).
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We can also leave out of any further account the Republic’s fifteenyear curriculum of abstract enquiry. What is more relevant for us is Plato’s
belief that a high-level education gives his benevolent rulers authoritative
knowledge of what is in the best interests of the ruled. The premise on
which this is based is that theoretical knowledge of the nature of goodness
is enough to rule well: the better you know the good, the better equipped
you are to do the good.
Once we isolate the premise in this way, it is not difficult to see its
weakness. Knowledge is not sufficient for virtue. Someone can have all the
understanding in the world of the nature of the good life yet fail to live up to
this in practice, whether through weakness of will or downright wickedness.
The same is true if we give such knowledge more body and greater
contemporary relevance than Platonic abstractions about the meaning of
goodness. Possessing insights into how to run a modern society signalled
by a first-class Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics does
not mean that one will be a good leader working for the good of all. An
unscrupulous person could put his or her knowledge and skills to purely
self-interested purposes.
Even if we could in some way guarantee that modern Guardians were
benevolent, there would still be a problem. If they are to serve the good
of all, they have to know what this consists in. They may have a general
grasp of what, from a philosophical point of view, goodness consists in,
but they need more than this. The people over whom they rule may run
into many millions. There is no reason to think that one person’s interests
coincide with those of others. We flourish in all sorts of different ways.
Intimate relationships, reading biographies, gardening, travelling, surfing,
teaching, and countless other pursuits are constituents of fulfilling lives. In
a modern society like ours, nearly all of us are brought up to make our own
autonomous choices about the kinds of activities that contribute to our
well-being. We each have our own priorities about our own personal mix of
these. How could modern Guardians, acting for the good of all, possess all
of this detailed knowledge?
Wolff (1996: 80) suggests that opinion polling could help. To this,
in our more digital age, we might add the use of the internet, including
social media, to discover individuals’ preferences. But whether satisfying
such preferences would necessarily be promoting their well-being is, as we
saw when this issue came up earlier, a further question. The fact that my
considered preferences include heavy smoking or watching endless soaps on
TV may say little or nothing about my well-being. If the Guardians could
find out what we each of us want, would they know what is good for us?
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Initial arguments
Issues open up at this point about how we are to conceive wellbeing if it is not a matter of preference satisfaction (White, 2011a: Chapters
7, 8). But even if we ignored them and adopted a preference-satisfaction
account of well-being, should Wolff’s suggestion incline us towards Platonic
rule? There is still a problem. However fine the mesh of knowledge about
preferences the rulers might acquire, it would still remain general – in the
sense that it could tell them only that person A has preferences a, b, c … x,
while B’s are d, e, f … y (etc.). This would not enable them to understand
what it is like from the inside to experience – to desire and feel ­– these
things, including the specific meanings they have for the agents and the
subtle interconnections between them in their lives. Insofar as the rulers
made decisions on behalf of the ruled, they would be failing to respect them
as individual agents (see Wolff, 1996: 112). They would be treating them not
as active persons, able to make their own decisions about things involving
themselves, but as passive beings, ready to accept what the rulers lay down
for them. This is at the heart of the argument, first elaborated by J.S. Mill
(1861: Chapter 3), for involving all individuals in government.
What bearing does all of this have on the disproportionate numbers
of privately educated people in top jobs? It is not surprising that, in a Britain
formally democratic since 1928, the Platonic defence of private schools as
cradles of national leadership self-sacrificingly devoted to the common good
has now become more muted than in earlier decades. I say more in the
next chapter about how this came about. On websites today you can still
find references to leadership among the aims of particular private schools.
Examples I have unsystematically discovered include Harrow, Rugby,
Marlborough, Haileybury, Tonbridge, Manchester Grammar School, Mill
Hill, City of London School for Boys, and Haberdasher Aske’s School for
Boys.18 No rationale is given on these websites, and if any were, I doubt
whether Plato would now figure in it. But many well-known private schools
do not include leadership among their stated aims at all; for instance,
Berkhamsted, Highgate, St Paul’s Boys’ School, Sedbergh, Eastbourne
College, Lancing, and Bishop’s Stortford.19
Whether ‘leadership’ appears on website lists of aims or not, like
Plato’s Guardians private school students have been brought up with
the expectation that many of them, at least, will end up in positions of
power. Unlike the Guardians, they are working within the framework of a
representative democracy, so there are constitutional and other legal checks
on the power they wield. Neither are they the sole people in these powerful
positions: state school products also hold a sizeable percentage of them.
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One might think these factors are enough to remove any possible threat
posed by their private education to democratic rule.
Yet some danger remains. The fact that private school alumni
nearly all come from a similar background, and one made possible by
family wealth, is relevant. It puts them in a commanding position even in
occupational areas shared with a large number of state school alumni, for
the backgrounds of the latter are so much more diverse. It suggests three
possible threats to democratic values. One is that networks of contacts built
up within and between domains of power may be used to further the interests
of those in their own social group. The second is that, even without such
collusion, shared assumptions deriving from a common background may
affect, in aspects that are hard to regulate, how well suited they are to use
their power in a way that encourages democratic agency and does not treat
those outside their circle as passive recipients of the services they provide
for them. The third is that, their power being based on family wealth, it is
likely to continue from one generation to the next, thus reinforcing over
time the first two dangers. Making top jobs more socially mixed is a way of
confronting these challenges to democracy.
This, the third of our criticisms of private schooling in Britain, is the
most telling, as it concerns the bedrock of our common life. If none of the
privately educated went into top positions (suppose all of them opted for a
hedonistic life style funded by private wealth), we might still be disquieted,
but we would not have worries about a concentration of power in a few
hands. Although we have been formally a full democracy since universal
suffrage arrived in 1928, we still have, nearly 90 years later, some way to
go in seeing democratic attitudes and procedures permeating areas of life
beyond voting in elections. The dominance of the privately educated in key
posts long pre-dated the 1928 reform, has long outlasted it, and continues
to be an obstacle to further democratization.
To add a word of caution: the criticism depends on data about the
future leaders private schools were educating two or more decades ago (see
Walford, 2006: 30) and assumes that they will continue to educate these
in the future. We will not have data on the latter, of course, for some time.
Back to social exclusiveness, unfairness, and parents’ rights
In the light of this central – anti-democratic – criticism, the previous
objections, to do with unfairness and exclusiveness, appear more substantial,
as do the doubts that critics of private education may have about its
supporters’ appeal to parental rights.
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Initial arguments
The arguments about social exclusiveness are that the privately
educated tend to live lives apart from those of ordinary people and that they
see themselves as socially superior to them. (We will assume here what should
be questioned elsewhere, that these claims are empirically grounded.) When
we looked at these arguments before, we concentrated on the harm, if any,
that this was likely to cause individuals outside of the favoured group. The
anti-democratic argument adopts a communal rather than an individualistic
standpoint: it is about the dangers to a political community rather than
any threats to the well-being of some individuals. In this light, it is easier
to make a case against social exclusiveness. If a large proportion of those
in top leadership roles are out of touch with how less privileged people live
and/or look down on them as inferior, this underlines the undemocratic
nature of our political arrangements.
Something similar can be said about the claim that private
education is unfair. Again, when we looked at this before, the angle was
individualistic – about whether people who hadn’t been educated at private
schools were being worsted by the fast-tracking these institutions provide
to good universities and top jobs. Bennett’s complaint about unfairness
gathers force if we have our sights on restricted access to leadership roles as
a threat to democracy. The more these roles are filled by a cross-section of
the citizenry – not only top roles, but, following the requirements of a more
participatory form of democracy, leadership responsibilities at every level of
institutional life – the better for our civic health.
Finally, parents’ rights. We saw no strong argument against appeals
to these in defence of private schools. But things may change if we look at
parents’ responsibilities not only individualistically, as promoting the wellbeing of their child, but also from a civic point of view. If the extrinsic reasons
why parents choose private schooling are about furthering their son’s or
daughter’s chances of getting a prestigious job, this may be condonable if
we see these parents merely as private individuals, intent on doing their best
for their child. From a democratic perspective, parents have a responsibility
to bring children up to be good democratic citizens. This excludes certain
ambitions they may have for them, for example, that they become members
of a plutocratic power-élite.
Conclusion
Alan Bennett has criticized private schools for their unfairness. Others
censure their isolation from ordinary life and their sense of superiority.
In the British context, while both of these objections have some purchase,
neither is conclusive. Each gains strength when taken in conjunction with
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the third argument about the domination of leadership roles as a threat to
democracy. That is why it is the most persuasive.
But it is so only on one assumption: that the top jobs in question
are disproportionately occupied by an élite that endures over time. If the
composition of this top tier was frequently to change so that people from
all parts of society were included in it without its ever being monopolized
by a single group, the danger to democracy would be lessened. But as long
as private schooling is, scholarships apart, only for a minority of affluent
people who can afford it, this alternative is ruled out. If many, sometimes
most, leadership roles are, and remain, in the hands of 7 per cent of the
population, this looks less like a democracy than an oligarchy, or plutocracy,
in all but name.
This, then, is a central difficulty about private schooling in Britain.
As we shall see, this ‘democratic’ objection is not self-contained, that is,
applicable only to private schools as a separate group. Exploring it in its
contemporary – early twenty-first-century – form will take us into wider
issues applicable to the whole educational system, state as well as private.
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Chapter 2
Widening the focus
Over the past hundred years we have come to see ourselves as living in
a democratic country – a society whose citizens rule themselves and who
are no longer under the domination of a rich minority. If the facts and
arguments presented in Chapter 1 are correct, we may have been deceiving
ourselves. We all know that democracy takes time to build: in Britain, it
did not spring fully into being as soon as the final adult got the vote in
the 1920s. We know that what starts as a grossly imperfect institution
needs years of gradual improvement before it can come anywhere close to
realizing its ideals. We also see that in many areas this improvement has
indeed been taking place – in the creation of a welfare state, the growth of
equal opportunities in education, the erosion of illiberal attitudes towards
homosexuals and other minorities, and the fairer treatment of women.
It has been easy – perhaps too easy – for us to think that the battle for
democracy is well on the way to being won. It is here that we may have been
prone to self-deception. For eight decades have already passed since the
arrival of universal suffrage. Yet the figures on private school domination of
élite university admissions and of leading positions in society suggest that
elements of a pre-democratic social order are still very much with us.
A brief closer look at the fortunes of private schooling before and
since the coming of formal political democracy may help us see how and why
this apparent paradox has arisen: a common belief that we are progressing
towards a more perfect democracy, set against evidence that society remains
dominated by an élite.
Victorian class-based society
Politicians in the 1860s were not coy about acknowledging the classbased nature of British society. This comes out clearly in the three great
commissions of that decade devoted to school reform. The Clarendon
Commission of 1861–4 covered the nine leading public schools – seven
boarding schools: Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury,
Westminster, and Winchester; and two day schools: St Paul’s and Merchant
Taylors’. While Clarendon catered for the upper classes, the remit of the
Taunton Commission of 1864–8 explicitly looked at ‘middle class schools’,
that is, all secondary schools below the nine Clarendon schools and above
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John White
the elementary schools for ‘boys and girls of the labouring class’ that had
been considered by the Newcastle Commission of 1858–61. Taunton
proposed a classification of these schools into three grades, of which ‘firstgrade schools’ for an upper-middle-class clientele, leading on to university
and the older professions, included costly boarding schools such as Malvern,
Clifton, Oundle, and Repton. The other two grades were for the lower
echelons of the middle class: day schools for students leaving at 16 on their
way to one of the newer professions such as the army, medicine, engineering,
and business; and day schools ending at 14 for children of small farmers,
tradesmen, and superior artisans (Walford, 2006: 84).
We see in this picture of British schools a broad division between
those for the working (or ‘labouring’) class and those for others. A leading
politician of the 1860s, Robert Lowe, reflected common opinion among the
élite in his remark in 1867 that:
The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties
cast upon them. They should also be educated that they may
appreciate and defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it;
and the higher classes ought to be educated in a very different
manner, in order that they may exhibit to the lower classes that
higher education to which, if it were shown to them, they would
bow down and defer.
(Quoted in McCulloch, 1991: 17)
This division between schools broadly coincides with another: between
elementary schools financially supported by the state (since 1833) but soon
to be state controlled (after 1870); and schools independent of the state,
financed from parents’ fees and privately run.
In the private category, there is again a broad dichotomy between
schools for people whose income would not often come from paid work;
and schools for future employees (of a non-labouring sort). The first covers
the Clarendon schools for the upper, largely landed, classes; and the second,
the Taunton schools for various sections of the middle classes.
The last two-thirds of the nineteenth century witnessed a political
struggle between the old upper-class establishment that had ruled the
country for over a hundred years and the middle classes, which had grown
in influence and economic power on the back of the Industrial Revolution.
There was no outright winner in this battle. What happened instead was a
gradual merger between the two power groups, but still within a broadly
hierarchical structure. At the top was the aristocracy, with its close links to
royal circles, then the gentry and the older professional classes, followed
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Widening the focus
by the newer classes as described above, and finally the lesser bourgeoisie.
In party political terms, the mid-nineteenth-century opposition – between
Tories who largely represented landed interests and Liberals concerned
with commerce and industry – had been replaced by the 1920s, when the
social coalescence was already well advanced, by a more unified political
voice, that of the Conservative party in its twentieth-century form. The big
political divide was henceforth between the more affluent classes taken
together and the larger, less well-off part of the population in blue-collar
jobs and represented by the Labour Party.
The gradual merger between the top end of the middle class and the
old establishment was the product of many factors, including intermarriage,
the purchase of country estates by entrepreneurs,20 and the fact that many
aristocrats were owners of coal- and other mineral-bearing land. Private
education also had a major role. The nine top schools in Clarendon’s remit
and those just beneath them such as Malvern and Clifton in the first tier of
Taunton’s middle-class schools came together in 1871 in the shape of the
Headmasters’ Conference (HMC), whose membership had increased from
50 to 150 by 1914. These ‘public schools’ became the nursery in which
the grafting of one stock onto the other had originated somewhat earlier
in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. Largely
under the influence of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby and the Platonic vision
of leadership described in Chapter 1, public schools tended to see their
mission as the nurturing of upright ‘Christian gentlemen’ (and later ‘ladies’)
habituated ‘to treat community service as the price of material privilege and
the hallmark of social prestige’ (McCulloch, 1991: 15, quoting Wilkinson,
1964). At a time when the British Empire was growing fast, it was these that
raised the top administrators, lawyers, merchants, and generals who ran
India and other territories, as well as providing their equivalents back home.
Below this élite tier of HMC schools came the rest of Taunton’s
middle-class schools, chiefly endowed grammar schools of varying degrees
of competence. This patchiness gave way after 1902 to something more
systematic with the introduction of the first state secondary schools, all
following a state-directed curriculum of largely academic subjects. These
schools remained fee-paying, although a ‘Free Place’ policy after 1906
increased the number of boys and girls on scholarships from the elementary
sector. There were also other fee-paying schools apart from HMC and some
girls’ secondary schools that remained wholly outside the new system of
state secondaries. These included a number of preparatory schools feeding
into the public school system.
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The role of school examinations
Helping to bind together all of these fee-paying schools from the midnineteenth century onwards was the new institution of the competitive
examination, opening doors to the universities and the professions (White,
2014: Chapters 5, 6). The middle classes were foremost in promoting
this – not surprisingly, because until the early nineteenth century soughtafter jobs were secured via a patronage system under the control of the
old establishment. It suited the new middle classes, especially the less
socially well connected of them, to replace this by a less partial instrument.
Impersonal examinations seemed to meet their requirements perfectly.
They were created both at career-entry level – for the Indian and Home
Civil Service, as well as for work in law, medicine, engineering, surveying,
and accountancy – and for older secondary students of around 14–15 and
17–18 years of age (Roach, 1971: 82). Success in the latter of these, the
Higher Certificate Examination, opened the way to a university education.
Examinations, not least those devised for schools by London, Oxford,
and Cambridge universities after 1858, promoted the widespread middleclass ambition that their children remain at least of the same social status
as themselves, and if possible to better this. As the Taunton Commission
reported in 1868:
The great majority of professional men, especially the clergy,
medical men and lawyers; the poorer gentry; all in fact who,
having received a cultivated education themselves, are very
anxious that their sons should not fall below them … (They
have) nothing to look to but education to keep their sons on a
high social level.
(Quoted in McCulloch, 2007: 16)
Even those perhaps less anxious about the threat of dropping in the
social scale, the upper and upper-middle classes whose children were in
the HMC’s ‘public schools’, quickly embraced school examinations as a
route to Oxbridge and a top profession. Following negotiations between
the HMC, Oxford, and Cambridge, 1873 saw the creation of the Oxford
and Cambridge Schools Examination Board. By 1903 it was examining
100 boys’ schools and nearly the same number of girls’ schools (Roach,
1971: 233–4).
The secondary school examination system constructed between the
1850s and the 1870s powerfully shaped the future of the fee-paying sector
– and, indeed, the elementary sector – through to 1945, and still leaves its
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Widening the focus
imprint on the whole school system we have today. Concentrating on the
1870–1944 period, we can say, first, that it proved to be a major factor in the
rapprochement between the upper and upper middle classes. Increasingly,
they sat the same kinds of exam at school, and grew used to the idea that
the best scholars from any of these élite backgrounds would go to the best
universities and be in line for the best jobs.
The exam system, secondly, required a move towards curriculum
uniformity. This period witnessed the consolidation in the secondary schools
of what we now call a ‘traditional’ curriculum largely built around a small
number of academic subjects – English, mathematics, the sciences, history,
geography, foreign languages – all of them rich in examinable knowledge.
Another indication of the coming together of the middle and upper classes
was the victory of this curriculum, with its strong historical links to middleclass culture (White, 2011b: Chapters 5, 6), over the establishment’s
traditionally classics-based curriculum in the leading public schools.
The third and final point is that this period, 1870–1944, saw a dramatic
reinforcement of the élite’s belief that school examinations as stepping-stones
to a fulfilling life were for them alone and not for the labouring classes. By
1900, able students who had come through the elementary system were
staying on in the advanced classes it provided and sitting various kinds of
examination. This was a threat to the élite’s monopoly of this institution
and its fruits. Numerically, the elementary sector was far larger than the
fee-paying. If the growth of these ‘higher-grade’ elementary classes were to
be the thin end of a very large wedge, the more affluent might well lose
out in the new competition, actualizing their anxiety that their sons – and
daughters – ‘should not fall below them’.
The response was swift. Balfour’s Conservative government of 1902–
6 saw to it that elementary students – all except the winners of scholarships
– were debarred from entering the examination stakes and obliged to follow
a non-academic curriculum without opportunities for advancement. At
the same time, they sharpened the division between what has been called
‘education for leadership’ and ‘education for followership’ (Eaglesham,
1967: Chapters 4, 5) by creating the fees-based state secondary schools
mentioned above, with a statutory curriculum of discrete, examinable
subjects (White, 2014: 25–6).
Private schools after 1944
Until 1944, the social dichotomy created by the commissions of the 1860s
remained broadly in place: a hierarchy of fee-paying schools for gradations
of the élite and offering an examination route to higher education and
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good careers, and free, as well as exam-free, elementary education for the
rest. This no longer quite corresponded to the post-1870 clear-cut division
between private schools and state schools, as the state secondary schools
that came on stream after 1902 still had fee-paying clients.
By 1944, Britain had become, at least in outward respects, a
democracy, the full franchise having been in force for 16 years. Its new selfconception stood in an uneasy relationship with the class-based dualism
just mentioned – as reflected in the growing criticism of the public school
system during the Second World War (McCulloch, 1991: Chapter 3). The
Conservative Minister of Education R.A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act
and its aftermath seemed to promise an at-least-partial resolution. The
elementary system was scrapped in favour of universal primary education
leading to universal secondary education, all of it non-fee-paying. The old
division between schools with an examination route to higher things and
those without was preserved in the shape of secondary grammar schools
as distinct from secondary moderns. In the new democracy, however,
allocation to the former was no longer by purse, but by superior intellectual
endowment. Since a child’s academic ability, as revealed by intelligence
testing, was thought, as in Plato’s Republic, to be genetically determined,
the new system seemed to provide a level playing-field for people of all
classes. The grammar schools – descended as they were from the lesser
grades of Taunton’s middle-class schools – were no longer, as they had been
before 1902, in every sense private; or private in the sense of fee-paying,
even though part of the state sector, as they had been before 1944. They
were now totally within the public as contrasted with the private domain.
After the Education Act of 1944, too, and influenced by the Butlerinitiated Fleming Report of that year on improving links between the public
schools and state schools, this public domain extended still further into
once-private territory through a new version of an already existing system
of ‘direct grant’ private secondary schools. To qualify as such, schools now
had to have at least 25 per cent of their pupils on free places, paid by central
government (Walford, 1990: 26).
These arrangements remained in place through the Labour
governments of 1945–51 and their Conservative successors of 1951–64.
It may be surprising that Labour did not capitalize on its massive majority
in 1945 to take more radical measures against private schooling. Public
schools had attracted hostility in the early war years as the Platonic ideas
of leadership that had inspired them for a century were associated with
Nazi ideology, not least since Adolf Hitler had modelled his own schools
for leaders on the English pattern (McCulloch, 1991: 27–30). Intellectually,
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Widening the focus
these ideas had been crushingly despatched by Karl Popper’s 1945 classic The
Open Society and its Enemies, which bracketed Plato with Hegel and Marx
as having erected the intellectual pillars of totalitarianism. As McCulloch
(1991: 66–7) has argued, ‘Popper’s criticisms helped to undermine the idea
of the “philosopher-king”, and indeed the view that a particular group
within society should be chosen for a distinctive kind of education to train
them for social and political leadership.’
To some people, the last days of the public schools seemed at hand.
That they were saved was partly due to the post-Fleming compromise, just
mentioned, and also to the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee’s fondness
for his own public school, Haileybury, and a reported statement after his
visit there in 1946 that ‘He saw no reason for thinking that the public
schools would disappear … He thought the great traditions would carry on,
and they might even be extended’ (Kynaston and Kynaston, 2014).
Now we come to the early 1960s. By then, opposition had been
growing on the left to Butler’s post-war settlement. Grammar schools had
been admitting predominantly middle-class children, thus challenging the
claim that the 11+ was culture-free (Walford, 1990: 28). Direct Grant
schools followed a similar pattern, with three-quarters of pupils coming
from white-collar homes (Donnison, 1970: 51, 77). It was becoming clear
that the sort of families who, before 1944, had paid fees for their children’s
secondary education, either at state grammar schools or in private schools,
were now often getting similar provision for free.
The replacement of nearly all grammar schools by comprehensives
(in the periods when Labour were in office between 1964 and 1979) and the
ending of the Direct Grant system in 1976 show Labour trying to contain
the continued advantages that the middle classes had been enjoying. This
did not apply to everyone in that broad category, only its lower strata –
the modern equivalent of families using Taunton’s second- and third-grade
schools. The upper middle classes, who had always placed their children in
expensive private schools and still did, were unaffected by the comprehensive
revolution.
The battleground between left and right was changing. By the 1970s
its focus had become the distribution of opportunities within the state
system, and this has remained the focus for the near half-century to date.
Although Labour had set up a Public Schools Commission in 1965 to seek the
integration of private schools into a comprehensive system, nothing came of
its first report’s recommendation that these schools should accept boarding
pupils from the state sector; and while the second report’s conclusion that
Direct Grant schools should be abolished was, as we have seen, translated
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into action, the net effect of the commission was that public schools were
allowed to continue to exist. This meant that they also continued to provide
the country’s leaders. In 1970–1, they had educated 62 per cent of top civil
servants, 83 per cent of foreign ambassadors, and the same proportion of
directors of clearing banks. In 1982, 42 per cent of MPs had been to public
schools, a fifth of them to Eton (McCulloch, 1991: 39).
We have seen from 2007 Sutton Trust and 2014 Social Mobility
and Child Poverty Commission evidence (above) that a disproportionately
high number, often a majority of top office holders, still come from private
schools. Nineteenth-century patterns of governance are still with us. When
in power, Labour was reluctant to take on the private sector, especially its
public school core, both in 1945 and after the damp squib of its Public
Schools Commission in the 1960s (Walford, 1990: 31). Its disinclination,
apart from occasional challenges to the schools’ charitable status and other
sorties, has lasted until our own time.
One recurrent reason for its inaction has been its greater
preoccupation with improving the state system. Its ideal in the 1950s and
1960s had been to build up a first-class comprehensive system that would,
among other things, attract families who would otherwise have paid for
private schooling. Labour would thus promote the mixing of social classes
within the same schools (Walford, 1990: 28–9). Many on the left must have
hoped that the private sector would gradually wither away.
The rebirth of private education
Very soon, the opposite began to happen. By the early 1970s the closing of
grammar schools left many middle-class families reluctant to stay in the state
system, seeing that comprehensive schools were the only ones available. The
private sector – and not just the public school core – started to woo them by
paying particular attention to their educational preferences and promising
them good value for money. High on their list were good examination results
and entry to good universities. Private schools, the number of which had
been steeply declining from 1964 until the mid-1970s, responded to the new
opportunity through an increased focus on academic achievement, and by
the later 1970s they were increasing once more in student numbers (Green
et al., 2010: 6–7; see also Figure 1, p. 27). The success of their policy can
also be seen in the increase in private school students accepted for Oxford
or Cambridge, rising from about a third of all admissions in the mid-1970s
to just above or just below a half from the late 1980s to 2006 (ibid., Figure
4, p. 28).
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Widening the focus
This new academic focus has continued to date. A glimpse at school
websites shows this. The nearest private school to my home is St Martha’s
Roman Catholic girls’ school in Barnet, North London, a school not known
locally some 30 or 40 years ago for an intellectual orientation. It is a small
day school for some 300 students aged 11–18. One of the first things stated
on its Headmaster’s Welcome page is:
Key to our success are the small classes in which traditional
high expectations are combined with modern teaching methods,
ensuring each student achieves her best possible academic
results.21
A click on the last four words leads to a page on ‘Academic Excellence’. This
states that, taking the Value Added Score22 into account, the GCSE and A
level results are in the top 40 of independent schools in the UK. In 2013, 90
per cent of St Martha’s girls got A*–C at GCSE, and 83 per cent got A*–C
at A level. Note that the website also emphasizes small classes. The school
has a pupil–teacher ratio of about ten to one (as compared with the state
school average of around 17 to one). Like other private schools, St Martha’s
stresses attentiveness to students’ individual needs and the range of extra
activities on offer (for many of which state schools would not always have
equally good facilities). The Headmaster’s Welcome goes on:
School days have a powerful influence on future success in life and
we believe a St Martha’s education provides the best start. Our
girls not only achieve excellent academic qualifications, but enjoy
a wide range of activities and receive outstanding pastoral care.
With school fees at £12,540 per annum, St Martha’s parents can reasonably
feel this is money well spent.
Blurring the divide
All in all, therefore, the private sector, far from withering away, is today
in good shape, as is the public school sub-sector within it. Two further
developments since 1979 have also helped its fortunes.
Point 1: The first is a major blurring of the line between state and
private education. We have already seen this at work at times in the past.
Were the state secondary grammar schools that came on stream after 1902
state or private? Local education authorities subsidized existing grammar
schools and set up new ones. The curriculum followed by the schools was
laid down nationally by the Board of Education. On the other hand, freeplace children aside, parents still paid fees. If the fact that a public authority
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John White
runs, sets up, finances, or provides a curriculum for a school is taken as a
criterion, these were state schools; if parental fee-paying is the yardstick,
they were private. The schools were neither like Eton, which was plainly
private on all counts, nor like a local elementary school, which was private
on none of them.
A later and different example of blurring was the creation of Direct
Grant schools after 1944. Since the state paid at least 25 per cent of these
schools’ fees, it participated in financing them. In 1969, in more than half
of the schools, the state was paying 50 per cent or more (Walford, 1990:
26). If this percentage had increased to, say, 85 per cent, would we have
been inclined to say that these once-private institutions were now virtually
state schools?
Since 1979, and especially after the Coalition came to power in 2010,
the blurring of the state–private boundary has intensified. The Assisted
Places Scheme (APS), introduced in 1980, shared features of the Direct
Grant idea, in that the state helped pay fees for able children to attend
private schools in cases where their parents were unable to afford these.
Part of the motivation for this, according to Walford (1990: 69–72) was to
promote the idea that private schools were better than state options, giving
abler children a better chance of success. The fact that the private sector
benefited in the examination stakes by creaming these students off from
the state sector helped to give this some substance. Walford also argues,
plausibly, that the APS was part of a larger picture, in which schooling was
treated as a consumer product, with parents encouraged to shop around
for the best option. This, too, contributed to the blurring under discussion,
since it suggested that state and private schools were all part of the same
consumer market.
A further contribution to the process came from the City Technology
Colleges (CTCs) founded after the 1988 Education Act. These were statemaintained, but officially designated ‘independent schools’, with finance
from private industry and commerce, their own conditions of service, and
governing bodies dominated by industry (Walford, 2009: 725).
The Assisted Places Scheme was axed by New Labour after it came to
power in 1997, but the blurring of the two sectors continued apace under
the Coalition from 2010. Paradoxically as it appeared to some, New Labour
policies contributed to this. Its City Academies (later simply ‘Academies’)
were part-modelled on the CTCs, in terms of being largely state financed
but with private sponsors and independent governance, and also being
officially called ‘independent schools’. But they covered a greater range of
subjects, and were intended for inner-city communities with traditionally
28
Widening the focus
low educational expectations. New Labour also encouraged, and provided
finance for, partnerships between the private and the state sector (Walford,
2009: 726).
Since 2010, we have witnessed a vast expansion of the Academies
programme, from around 200 when Labour left office to over 3,000 schools
by November 2013.23 They are state-funded, independent schools, run by
charitable trusts. Like traditional private schools, they do not have to follow
the National Curriculum, except – in their case only – the core subjects of
English, maths, and science. ‘Free schools’, a Coalition innovation, are a
kind of Academy set up by parents, education charities, and religious groups.
With over half of England’s secondary schools now being Academies
– neither fully private nor fully state institutions – the Coalition has done far
more than any previous government to erode the sharp line that once existed
between the two sectors. This is the first of two developments since 1979
– both of them pushed on apace since 2010 – that have helped the (fully)
private schools to maintain the flourishing position they have achieved over
the past 30 years. The erosion of the state–private borderline has meant that
the fully private schools have become less clear targets for criticism.
Adding to the conceptual confusion has been what has been termed
‘marketization’ (Marquand, 2013: 110). Where ‘privatization’ involves
state assets joining, or partially joining, the private sector, ‘marketization’
refers to state institutions buying in private services. Examples in the case
of schools would be in areas such as catering, cleaning, teacher education,
testing, and examining. All of this muddies still further the once far clearer
concept of the private.
As the privatization of state education through the Academies
programme has grown swiftly, there has been increasing confusion about
where private education begins and ends. Government-sponsored promotion
of the virtues of their new Free Schools and other Academies has been partly
designed to convince the public that introducing elements from the private
system into state schools has been a good thing. The fully private schools
have benefited from this confusion and this positive disposition towards
their values, consolidating their position as a seemingly indispensable
feature of the educational landscape.
The new hierarchy
Point 2: The second post-1979 development to have similarly helped these
schools has been the encouragement of parental choice. The crucial event
in establishing this was the introduction of school league tables in 1992.
These now give annual details of how each school in any locality – state
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John White
schools in the case of primaries, and both private and state secondaries –
performs on a range of measures. These include primary school Key Stage 2
tests in English and mathematics, and secondary school GCSE and A level
examinations. Parents can see at a glance from the maps and data provided
what the best-performing primary schools are in their area, and which
secondary schools offer their children the best chances of good results at A
level and hence of getting into a good university.
Again, the coming of league tables has obscured the division between
state and private sectors, this time by intermingling results from both in the
secondary data. It has also intensified the tendency, identified by Walford
as having begun with the Assisted Places Scheme in the 1980s, to view
education as a consumer product. It encourages parents to seek the best
buy, academically speaking, not only as between private and state schools
in the case of secondaries, but also among state schools themselves at both
primary and secondary level.
Seeking does not automatically bring with it success. But once a family
has targeted a preferred school, it can take steps, if it has the wherewithal,
to make acceptance by that school more likely. Affluent parents can buy or
rent houses in the school’s catchment area, forcing up property prices in the
area and thus threatening to make the school even more restrictive in its
social mix. This happens not least at the primary stage, suiting parents who
may or may not go private at secondary level and who are looking for firstclass free schooling for their children up to the age of 11.
Good results at primary school can help students to get into one of
the better secondaries (‘better’ here, as elsewhere in this part of the paper,
connoting higher-than-average exam results). Where religious schools in the
state sector – primary or secondary – are concerned, evidence of the family’s
belonging to the denomination in question can help a child’s admittance, as
can further signs of commitment such as participating in a church choir or
bell-ringing. Many of us can testify to parents’ exaggerating their devoutness
and even feigning a faith that they, as non-religious people, do not hold,
simply to maximize their child’s chances of admission to a religious school
with an excellent examination track record (and indeed many religious
schools do have this).
The effect of, and perhaps intention behind, these league tables has
been to establish a rough hierarchy among our schools, with those tending
to produce better test and exam results towards the top, and those with
worse towards the bottom. Importantly, the hierarchy is not only among
state schools (including academies), since the secondary tables also include
private schools of all kinds, including Eton and other élite establishments.
30
Widening the focus
Before league tables came on the scene, Geoffrey Walford, writing in
1990 at the end of Thatcher’s reign, foresaw the way things were likely to
go. He believed that ‘the long-term aim, then, is a blurring of the boundaries
between private and state provision’ (Walford, 1990: 113–14). He envisaged
a hierarchy of schools across the two sectors, with public schools at the
top, followed by lower-ranking private schools and highly regarded state
schools, and so on downwards. True, he thought this would be within a
varying fee-paying structure throughout, except for schools at the bottom
providing a minimum entitlement. But on the essentials he was prescient.
In one way the hierarchy now created has been more advantageous
to the better-off than the one Walford imagined. They are not only able to
use league tables to identify top-flight and other good state schools, but are
also able, if their children are admitted to them, to acquire academically
excellent schooling for free. If at the secondary stage they decide to go
private, they can be spared preparatory school fees before the age of 11 if
their child goes to a first-class local primary.
The hierarchy we now have may well have been better for the
private schools, too. Walford’s hierarchy is built around the almost total
transformation of the state system into a fee-paying one. In heightening the
visibility of the private education tradition in this way, it would make it
more of a target for opponents. As things actually are, however, the presence
of private education in the hierarchy is kept out of sight, unless one happens
to click on one of the local lists in the league tables. The more the public
comes to take league tables as part of the educational wallpaper, the more
firmly it will be established – in a low-key way – that private schools are a
regular part of the school scene and here to stay.
Conclusion
This chapter began with the hierarchical nature of society and schooling
in the 1860s. There was then no attempt to hide this feature of them.
Why would there have been? The country was run by a coalescing élite
of landowners and men dependent on industrial and commercial wealth.
A democratic Britain, electorally speaking, was over half a century in the
future. It was no secret to anyone that there were, broadly, three social
groups: the upper classes, the middle classes, and the labouring classes. The
educational commissions of that decade arranged a pattern of schooling
to fit this pattern, with further subdivisions within the second category to
mirror groupings within the rapidly expanding middle classes.
When I was a young man in the 1950s and 1960s, it was easy to think
that this older way of perceiving society was irrevocably passing into history.
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John White
There were, true, still all sorts of status markers left over from the earlier era,
from accents heard on the BBC to lists of attitudes, activities, and objects
held to be ‘U’ (for ‘upper class’) or ‘non-U’. But the trend, most of us felt,
was towards the flattening out of these social differences. Britain was now
a functioning democracy, with massively high income taxes at the top end,
a welfare state, a comprehensive school system that was replacing a divided
one. As we looked forward, even those of us trained as historians – sceptical
of the Victorians’ belief that history is an account of the irreversible progress
of mankind – thought that the momentum of the social improvements we
had witnessed since the end of the Second World War would carry us and
our co-citizens at least through the next few generations.
We should have known better. If Thomas Piketty is right, the greater
equalities of wealth and income that we were then experiencing in Britain
and comparable countries have proved to be a temporary interruption in
a longer-term trend.24 Since the 1980s, the gap between rich and poor has
grown again, bringing with it a hardening of old hierarchies.
We can see the educational form this has taken in Britain from the
account given in this chapter. The hierarchy of schools is not so sharply
drawn as in the 1860s. We cannot identify three relatively discrete social
classes for which they are designed, the topmost just short of royalty but
connected with it in multiple ways, and monarchy itself still imbued with
vestiges of celestial attachments. Social categories are now more complex,
shading into each other along the length of a registrar-general’s scale. Yet
where we once expected fluidity – constant movement up and down the
social ladder – we now have in prospect increasing rigidity.
At the pinnacle of the 1860s educational map were the public schools,
stretching down from upper-class Eton and Harrow to upper-middle-class
Oundle and Repton. They have retained their pre-eminence, despite threats
to them in the more egalitarian years, for 150 years. Today, they are safer
than they have been for a long time, surrounded by protective layers of
excellent to very good or good secondary schools belonging in no clearly
hierarchical way to either the state or the private sector. The private sector
of which they are a part no longer has the exclusivity with which it was once
associated. Henrietta Barnett School for girls in Hampstead Garden Suburb,
North London, an excellent state school, has all of the cachet of the nearby
Camden School for girls or City of London School for girls, both private.
As far as examination success goes, the not quite so well-known Queen
Elizabeth School for boys a few miles north in Barnet would knock spots
off virtually any private boys’ school for miles around. The new hierarchy
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Widening the focus
in English schools revolves around their prowess in the examination stakes,
not around parental ability to pay fees.
All of this strikes at the heart of the project on which I embarked
in Chapter 1. This was to ask what, if anything, is wrong with private
education – first of all as a general concept, and then in the British context.
I looked at the strengths and limitations of a range of objections to private
schools – that they are unfair, that they detract from social cohesiveness,
that their legitimacy cannot be based on an appeal to parents’ rights, that
they nurture a ruling class. All of this is now cast into confusion if private
schools no longer form an importantly demarcatable category, but have to
be considered as part of a wider canvas on which all state schools also figure.
33
Chapter 3
Back to arguments
It is beginning to look as if the old disputes over the acceptability of private
education in the British context have to be shelved. With the borderline
between private and public now shot away, there is no longer any easily
discernible target to attack or defend.
Assessing the new hierarchy
That is not to say that there is no longer room for argument in the area.
There is, but its focus has shifted – away from the pros and cons of private
education and on to the pros and cons of the new hierarchy described in
Chapter 2. It will be helpful to spend a little time examining these. What, if
anything, is wrong with the kind of hierarchical school system now being
created in England?
One form of objection is that it depends on the use of examination
results to grade schools, and that examinations have a deleterious effect
on the quality of the school curriculum, on the psychological well-being of
students undergoing them, and on the kinds of pedagogy used by teachers.
I have explored these harmful effects elsewhere and will bypass them here
(White, 2014: Chapter 1). One reason for this is that schools could still, in
principle, be arranged in a hierarchy even if examinations were abolished:
some other way of comparing their quality might always be found.
Another objection is that a hierarchical system is unfair. This brings
us back to arguments left unresolved when we looked at the same charge
against private schools (see above). I pick these up around the point where
egalitarianism – as the view that everyone should have roughly the same
benefits – was rejected, on the grounds that this is compatible with everyone
leading lives of the same level of misery. I then suggested that what many
who call themselves ‘egalitarians’ are really concerned about is not that
everyone should have the same but that the position of those who are badly
off should be improved.
If we apply these thoughts to hierarchical school systems, they do
not show them to be necessarily undesirable. For the education provided by
schools lowest in the hierarchy, as well as their ex-pupils’ later quality of
life, could still be very good, even though worse than in other schools.
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Back to arguments
But hierarchical systems may well not be like this. The quality of
education in the least favoured schools may be wanting, whether this
is down to difficulties in motivating pupils to learn, poor teaching, lack
of discipline, inadequate resources, or a combination of these and other
factors. The jobs that alumni take up – where they have employment at
all – may tend to be tiring, boring, ill-paid, insecure, at inconvenient times,
or a combination of such things. Coming from a poorly regarded school and
ending up in a poorly regarded job may also be psychologically debilitating
if it leaves people throughout their lives with a low opinion of themselves
as compared to others.
Insofar as a hierarchical school system is at least partly responsible
for generating such distress, this counts against it. If the system we have in
England today fits this pattern, it is unacceptable. I will not go into empirical
data relevant to either the more general point about the causal influence of
hierarchies, or to the situation in this country. My interest in this section is
more in the soundness of arguments at a more abstract level.
This brings us to another kind of objection to a hierarchical system
of schools. Suppose its upper echelons but not its lower end tend to produce
students who get excellent exam grades, go to the best universities, and have
careers in the most prestigious professions. And suppose, further, that their
children and later descendants tend to follow them along the same path.
Such a scenario would undermine what we have taken to be a central feature
of a democratic form of government ­– that its citizens, as autonomous
beings, rule themselves and are not under the domination of a section of the
population. For this is what would happen if the top posts in politics, law,
medicine, business, the media, and academia were held, by and large, by
members of the same families. The polity might still be democratic in name,
and its members might still think of themselves as living in a democracy, but
‘oligarchy’ would be a more fitting name.
How far the school hierarchy currently under construction in this
country fits this template is a further question. The threat to democracy
does not depend on its fitting it up to the hilt. It is a matter of degree. The
more restricted the group of leaders is to the alumni of the more highly
rated schools, and the more extensive their dominance across generations,
the greater the peril to democracy. The hierarchy of schools in this country,
dependent as it is on the arrival of league tables in 1992, is a recent
phenomenon and indeed one as yet incomplete. Thus, it is not clear that we
will have reliable evidence on how far a shift in an oligarchic direction is, or
is not, under way until several decades have elapsed.
35
John White
This is not the first time in this paper that we have discussed a political
argument about the threat to democracy posed by the concentration of
power in a section of the population. We examined it as a possible objection
to the existence of private schools – not in general, but in the British
context. We have now moved away from a discussion of private education
and are looking at a hierarchical system of schooling. Such a system need
have nothing to do with private education. We can imagine a society in
which all schools are state run and private options are outlawed. There is
no reason why these state-run schools cannot be arranged in a hierarchy,
with questions raised about how far this privileges a small group of families
and leads to some kind of oligarchical rule. Charges of this kind were
made in the days of the USSR about the dominance of top members of the
Communist Party and their use of élite state schools; and one hears similar
ideas today coming from Beijing.
Reconsidering private education
I suggested at the end of Chapter 2 that the blurring of the line between
private and state schools in recent years has derailed the debate about the
acceptability of private education. The debate has gone on for many decades,
exercising academics as well as politicians. In my own field of educational
studies, it has engaged both philosophers and sociologists. Nearly all of
these writings, speeches, national committees, and royal commissions of the
past 70 or 80 years have been based on the assumption that private schools
form a clearly demarcatable group. They are schools where all or nearly all
of the parents pay fees, which, together with endowments and investments,
are used to fund school costs from buildings to teachers’ salaries, and where
the governing body and the school together decide on the curriculum the
school is to follow.
The academies programme has helped to destroy the neat division
between public and private since academies share features of both systems.
So have league tables. They have encouraged us to see all schools – fully
private, semi-private, non-private – as belonging to a new ranking based on
exam results. Whether an institution is to be called ‘private’ or ‘state- run’
is far less important than its position in this new hierarchy. The old debate
about whether private schools should exist now seems otiose.
But is it? If the fully private schools tended to be towards the bottom
of the league tables, there would be no reason for concern. But they tend
to be towards the top. Public schools do especially well, but not far behind
are the more obscure private schools that have done so much in the past
30 years to attract parents wanting value for their money in the shape of
36
Back to arguments
good qualifications. Because of their success, the (fully) private sector is
in better shape than at any time in the past. Far from withering away, as
leftish opinion in the 1960s had hoped, these private schools have been
entrenching their position in a new national system.
Private schools do not occupy all of the top places in the league
tables. Some state schools also shine. But the success of the private sector
is commanding enough to prompt us to revisit the objections made to it
in Chapter 1. The most telling of these was the political one, concerning
the threat to democracy if a small section of the population dominates the
most powerful positions in society. We have returned to this in the present
chapter in connection with a hierarchical school system, not with private
education. But if in Britain, unlike many other countries, private schools
are prominent towards the top of the hierarchy, the more recent argument
applies to them, too.
This more recent argument was expressed hypothetically. If it can
be shown that a hierarchical system tends to concentrate power in a few
hands, from a democratic perspective this is a solid point against it. Since the
hierarchical system we now have has existed for only a couple of decades,
we may have to wait some time – I suggested – before we are in a position
to judge.
Should we reserve judgement, too, on whether the system of private
schools we have in Britain is an affront to democracy? Although, as just
observed, the private school system is inseparable from the hierarchical
system as it forms a large part of its upper reaches, its history is different. The
hierarchy, in the form we have it, is a new phenomenon, but private schools
have existed for centuries. We already have data showing their ascendancy
in supplying those who hold the most powerful positions. It is true that, as
Geoffrey Walford (2006: 30) reminds us, any data we have about positions
filled today reflects what private schools were doing several decades back.
If we are to see the effects of what they are doing now, we will have to bide
our time. On the other hand, given that through its new single-mindedness
in pursuing exam success the private sector is sitting prettier than ever, the
likelihood is that its alumni will continue to be well represented among the
top jobs. In the light of their track record, this is even more likely to be true
of the aristocrats of the private sector, the public schools.
The latter are especial beneficiaries of the new hierarchical system.
Around the time of the Second World War, as I said earlier, they suffered heavy
fire. They were in an exposed position, tarred with the cult of leadership on
which they had been reared, and the object of Nazi emulation. Now they
are far less visible. They are surrounded within the private sector itself by
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John White
rings of schools newly adept at winning exam prizes, if not always prizes
as illustrious as the ones public schools win themselves. This whole private
sector is intermeshed with top state schools, and surrounded by layer after
layer of decreasingly well-rated ones. The hierarchical system is the public
schools’ new protector. I am not saying that this reflects a deliberate policy.
I do not have evidence either way on this. (But whether calculation has been
involved might be an interesting question to pursue.)
At the end of the long discussion in this paper, we have come back to
the original challenges we examined to the existence of private education.
The strongest of these, applicable not generally but to the British case, was
the ‘constitutional’ one about the challenge to democracy. This is again at the
forefront. I have not returned to the other three contenders – Alan Bennett’s
charge of unfairness, the problem of social cohesiveness, and doubts about
a defence of private education based on parents’ rights. We did, however,
see how much more persuasive they are when viewed as adjuncts to the
‘constitutional’ argument.
Conclusion
In the past three decades, private schools, and not least the public schools
at their core, have attracted less criticism than in the previous three. The
rightward shift of British politics under Thatcher, Major, Blair, and now
Cameron is reason enough to have expected this. But as part of this shift,
a more particular reason has been the erasure of the clear line that used to
exist between private and public. Private schools have become incorporated
in a national system of school ratings – at the same time as schools within
the state system have been encouraged to adopt the independent status and
curricular freedoms associated with the private sector.
This has made private schools less of a target for attack. We have
now grown used to seeing all schools, the old private institutions and
the old state establishments, as forming a hierarchy of alleged excellence,
in which a school’s position on either side of the traditional divide has
receded in salience as compared with its position in a new pecking order of
grade results.
The new hierarchy raises fears, akin to those discussed by Michael
Young in his The Rise of the Meritocracy over half a century ago (Young,
1958), about the creation of a self-perpetuating élite holding down most of
the top positions in public and private life. If our demands on democracy
go farther than requiring regular national elections at which all adults can
vote, and include wider participation in the running of all large enterprises,
we need to take this threat seriously.
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Back to arguments
We also need to remove the camouflage that has made private schools
less visible. For along with a few élite state schools it is they who occupy the
upper rungs of the hierarchy, with public schools at its top. We cannot have
firm evidence at present that they will still dominate leadership positions
50 years hence, as they have hitherto – but, equally, there is nothing to say
that their fortunes will turn. The old charge against private education still
stands: the danger they pose to a democracy that is not only in name. Other
familiar objections to them fall into place when seen as aspects of this more
fundamental complaint.
39
Chapter 4
Ways forward
What should be the future of private education in Britain? As it is now part
of, and protected by, the hierarchical system, its fate cannot be considered
independently of the latter’s. I begin, therefore, with the hierarchy and then
move on to private schools.
The hierarchy has to be dismantled. It encourages a new kind of
selection, with sought-after schools – private, state, or in-between – at
the top and a neglected tail below. It disadvantages students at its lower
end, and threatens to create a self-perpetuating élite at its upper. Part of its
dismantling will require the removal of the foundation on which it rests
– league tables. These in turn are based on national test and examination
results. There are reasons independent of the existence of league tables to look
askance at school examinations. They do little to test deep understanding,
they blight the secondary curriculum, cause students great anxiety, and
pervert the job of teaching. These alone give us reason enough to replace the
examination system, not least at GCSE and A level, with something without
these blemishes (White, 2014: Chapter 3). But exams’ role in protecting the
route of the already privileged to a good university, interesting work, and
a comfortable life provides another motive. We should work out how we
can move towards a student record system as a replacement for high-stakes
examinations. This will no doubt have to be done gradually – first, perhaps,
by replacing exams set and marked by outside boards with exams marked
in-school with appropriate moderation; then, in our new age of schooling
until 18, by abolishing the GCSE at 16; and finally by removing A levels.
As exams become less dominant in school life, there is room to
rethink the curriculum. At present, it is test- and exam-led, especially at
secondary level. It would be far better if it were based on a thought-through
set of general aims suitable for living together in a democracy. But the exam
regime blocks off any such possibility. It is exam boards and governments
that together fix the direction that schools should take. In a remodelled
system, government could still have a role in this by laying down the more
general aims that schools should follow, leaving the schools themselves
to work out their own ways of realizing them. A National Curriculum
Commission at a certain arm’s length from the enthusiasms of politicians in
power could set these aims.
40
Ways forward
This reform could revolutionize the school experience for many
children (Reiss and White, 2013). An exam-led curriculum favours teaching
within separate subjects, especially knowledge-rich ones. An aims-led
alternative could leaven this with more work across disciplines, more
discussion, practical projects, and aesthetic pursuits. The individualist ethos
of the exam-orientated classroom would be tempered by more collaborative
activities.
If the division of curricular powers between centre and periphery
makes sense for some schools, it makes sense for all. The present
arrangements are incoherent. They allow some schools – the old private
sector and the new academies – virtually complete freedom to teach what
they want. (In theory, that is: exam requirements dominate in practice.)
The bulk of schools, meanwhile, are subject to a government-controlled
National Curriculum that permits ministers to dictate in great detail what
should be taught and sometimes how this should be taught. There are, as we
have seen, good reasons for leaving more general aims within the political
domain, but these do not permit politicians in power to trespass on more
detailed territory that properly belongs to professionals. They have no moral
right to insist on one method of teaching reading over another, or to impose
their subjective take on what persons and events should be highlighted in
the history curriculum.
In place of this incoherent system whereby some schools are freer
than they should be while others are too restricted, all schools should be
subject to a limited National Curriculum that lays down general aims and
major sub-aims. They should also be at liberty to realize these aims in ways
most fitting their own situation. ‘All’ schools here include private ones. There
is no good reason to exclude them. A reason commonly given is that if
parents pay for their children’s education, this should allow them to choose
a school with the kind of curriculum aims they prefer. But there cannot
be a blank slate here. Parents have no moral right, for instance, to impose
a narrow ideology on their children and to seek out a school that will do
this. As potentially autonomous citizens, able to make their own choices
about how to live their lives, these children – like any young people – need
protection against such indoctrination. As future citizens of a democracy,
too, they need to be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that
all other citizens have to acquire. It is a central task of the aims-centred
National Curriculum I have in mind to spell out these civic aims in more
detail. If privately educated students are to belong to a common citizenry,
they should be following a curriculum regime that prepares them for this.
41
John White
In the last paragraph or so we have passed from the whittling away
of the hierarchical system to what should be done about private schools in
particular. I will now say more under this second issue.
Some would want to see these schools abolished. That would at a
stroke remove the privileged position many of them have had in accessing
good universities and dominating leadership roles. But if removing this is
the aim – and for reasons given earlier, I accept it is a desirable one – we
should not assume that abolition is the only way of attaining it. In any case,
abolition is both hard to justify and difficult to implement.
It is hard to justify, as people should not be prevented from doing what
they want with their own money unless they are causing harm to others. It
may be that some private education is totally benign. A school may not star
in exam successes but its liberal religious ethos or its encouragement of the
arts may be just what some parents want for their children. I cannot see any
sound reason for outlawing this kind of option.
Abolition is difficult to implement, not least because – as things have
stood since 1953 – the European Convention on Human Rights seems to
give parents the right to choose private education. There are also practical
problems, of course, for instance, about overcoming the opposition there is
bound to be to such a move, as well as legal and other difficulties concerning
what should happen to the schools’ wealth, estates, buildings, and facilities.
There are other ways of reducing the power of private schools short
of doing away with them. Measures already mentioned in this chapter go
some way to doing so. If examinations lose their dominance, and parents
no longer have the quick guide that league tables have provided to schools
with the best results, fewer better-off families are likely to go private. The
renascence of private schooling has been largely down to the promise of
good exam grades. Remove this and the schools will once again be on the
back foot.
Similarly with the curriculum. If private schools are obliged to follow
the new-look National Curriculum described above, there will be less to
choose between them and state schools.
A widely canvassed way of reining in the private system has been
to make the charitable status currently enjoyed by these schools more
dependent on the help they give to pupils in the state system, especially the
more disadvantaged among them. During the Coalition’s rule, we have seen
well-publicized examples of such help. Wellington College, for instance, has
set up both the Wellington Academy and the Wellington College Teaching
Schools Partnership. Eton College is now the educational sponsor of a free
school, Holyport College, a part-boarding secondary school.
42
Ways forward
I am sceptical about this as a way forward. It fits a contrary agenda
rather better – the blurring of the boundaries between private and state
education discussed earlier. The crucial issue is whether initiatives like
these do anything to reduce the share of top leadership roles that alumni
of places such as Wellington and Eton have traditionally had. I cannot see
how this is likely. Even if such schools’ community programmes helped,
say, a hundred underprivileged children to get into Oxbridge, this would
scarcely affect the prospects of old Etonians and old Wellingtonians. Its
more likely result would be to legitimize the continuing existence of such
élite institutions by pointing to all the good work they are doing on the
equality of opportunity front.
This is not to rule out measures of this sort with more teeth. I would
not advocate, however, an idea put forward by Michael Young in The Rise
of the Meritocracy (1958: 53). He fantasized a future Eton undertaking in
1972 ‘to accept 80% of Queen’s Scholars, pushed home to 100% in 1991’.
This would certainly be one route to abolition of a sort, but it would serve
only the interests of the meritocratic dystopia that Young lampoons. Still,
the idea of a sizeable proportion of public school students coming from the
state sector is an attractive interim measure.
A reform that builds on this that I find more attractive is proposed
by Harry Brighouse in his Fabian pamphlet of 2000, A Level Playing Field:
The reform of private schools. He writes:
The government should set a 5-year target for the designated
élite universities of 70 per cent state-educated undergraduates,
and a 10-year target of 90 per cent, with the proviso that if
at 30 per cent of a private school’s pupils are part of an equal
opportunities access programme, that school counts as a state
school for this purpose.
(Brighouse, 2000: 16)
I find the idea of a quota especially appealing. If private schools educate
only 7 per cent of the population, yet bag most top positions, it would be
helpful to reduce the numbers of their alumni on the fast track towards
these to something approaching the same figure. This would remove most
of the incentive that rich parents now have to send their children to them.
It would also, more fundamentally, help to remove the obstacle to a more
democratic Britain than private schools currently represent.
Brighouse’s allowing certain private schools to count as state ones is
perhaps more problematic. It could leave the 70 per cent of public school
students not on an access programme where they have traditionally been – in
43
John White
a dominant position at élite universities and in top jobs. Brighouse’s solution
may be helpful if it sugars the reform pill. But I think it should be at most
an interim move, for it still leaves the major objections to private education
unanswered.
Brighouse’s proposal is only about élite universities. That is a good
place to start. But there is every reason why the idea should be extended
further. If the scheme were restricted to Russell Group institutions, you
might well find ex-private school students even more over-represented at
the next level down. A longer-term aim could well be to put a 10 per cent
cap on the numbers of private school students at all universities.
One objection to a quota scheme is that it would offend against the
principle that universities have an obligation to admit only the best qualified
candidates. On this principle, if, say 40 per cent of the best-qualified
candidates (for example, those with the best A level results) are from
private schools, they should all be among those admitted. Ben Kotzee and
Christopher Martin (2013) argue for the best-qualified candidate principle
on the grounds that since the purpose of the university is scholarship, ‘one
must always make admissions decisions on the basis of which applicant
will make the best scholar in their discipline’ (p. 639). But are there good
grounds for adopting this principle? Matthew Clayton (2012) is doubtful.
Among the several arguments he employs is one that questions whether
universities should take scholarly ability as a given. Could it be one of their
functions to develop ability, he asks, as well as offering opportunities to
exercise the ability one has (p. 421)? Kotzee and Martin appear to hold the
latter position. They advocate, for instance, the incoming student’s being
‘ready (based on previous learning) for the learning opportunities available
at the university’ (p. 637). But why rule out the development alternative?
Even on their essentialist – and questionable – account of the university
as having the single function of promoting scholarship, a good way of
achieving this may sometimes be by taking on less well-qualified students
and taking steps to enhance their scholarly abilities once admitted.
Clayton’s paper is about positive discrimination. It can apply, and
perhaps Clayton intends it to apply, to situations where there are more
than marginal differences between admission candidates. Brighouse’s
quota suggestion, in his own formulation of it and in the extension I have
proposed, might well allow the admission of state school students who get
a slightly lower mark than a private school alumnus, say three As at A level
rather than three A*s. Whether they are ‘ready (based on previous learning)
for the learning opportunities available at the university’ or whether their
tutors need to develop their powers rather more is perhaps a moot point. At
44
Ways forward
all events – and this is the central issue – the quota suggestion seems to come
out (at least so far) unscathed.
The discussion up to this point has been about admission to university.
We need to say something, too, about entry to employment. We have seen
how the percentage of private school ex-students in many top jobs is far
higher than their percentage in the population as a whole. Will reducing
the proportion of them entering élite universities remove this discrepancy
entirely? It may not. The networks they have built up via their privileged
education, unpaid internships that are not an option for most young
people, as well as a preference that some employers may have for privately
educated employees, may still give them an edge. All this bespeaks the need
for some kind of public monitoring of hiring practices. Could this go so far
as including quotas, as for universities? This might be easier to arrange in
areas of the public sector such as the law, medicine, and the civil service.
But I do not know of any reason in principle why industry, commerce, and
finance should be excluded. Given the concern that all major UK political
parties have exhibited in recent years about low social mobility, they ought
to consider a quota system as one possible way of making improvements.
45
Conclusion
Just as I was about to write this conclusion in late September 2014, news
came through of a speech that the chairman of the HMC was about to
deliver to its annual meeting. The Daily Telegraph reported that Richard
Harman, the headmaster of Uppingham School:
… will accuse politicians of seeking to ‘stir up the politics of
envy’ rather than find solutions, such as investing in educational
partnerships between the two sectors … In his speech, Mr
Harman will criticise the UK’s ‘sclerotic social mobility’, but say
that ‘attacking the excellence of the education we provide will
never help solve it’ … ‘We want to work together on practical
partnership plans to turn the tide. When it comes to social
mobility we are part of the solution, not the root of the problem.25
I wonder whether this last remark is true. Richard Harman had Alan
Milburn’s report Elitist Britain very much in his sights, with its litany of
private school domination of the best jobs. In this respect, the power structure
in British society has changed little for a century and more. Sclerosis indeed!
It is often said these days that the increase in social mobility so marked
between the 1960s and the 1980s has gone into reverse since then. There is
evidence to back this up – for instance, the surge in graduate numbers since
the early 1990s has disproportionately benefited more affluent families.26
But the problem is more deep-rooted than this suggests. In the two decades
mentioned, an expanding economy created many more interesting and wellpaid jobs, enabling large numbers of those from less privileged backgrounds
to rise up the social scale. But this rise was not accompanied by a significant
downward movement among those families already towards the top of
the tree. They tended to stay where they were. If one understands ‘social
mobility’ differently, as implying movement both ways, British society, as the
veteran sociologist John Goldthorpe (2012) has pointed out, has remained
virtually static, at least since the 1920s.
It is hard not to see private schools as part of the mechanism that has
kept society largely immobile for a hundred years (White, 2014: 38–40).
Richard Harman’s statement that they ‘are part of the solution, not the root
of the problem’ looks hard to swallow. It makes some sense if the problem
of social mobility has to do only with raising the prospects of those lower
down the social scale. More private school bursaries for poorer children,
46
Conclusion
and more assistance to the state sector, may well help some of the less welloff to climb the ladder to better things. This is not to be dismissed. But in
itself it does not diminish the power of those at the top, does nothing to shift
them from their traditional perch. Increasing ‘both ways’ social mobility
needs other measures – like those proposed in the previous chapter.
A second news item that came my way just before the announcement
about Richard Harman’s speech was the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
George Osborne’s, pledge at the 2014 Conservative Conference to abolish
the 55 per cent so-called ‘death tax’ on pension pots, so as ‘to allow hundreds
of thousands of elderly people to leave more money to their loved ones after
they die’.27 If private schools have been one part of the mechanism whereby
society has remained static, taxation policy allowing the better-off to pass
on more of their wealth to their children has been another.
We should not be blinded by the enthusiasm shown in private school
as well as Coalition circles for tackling the problem of low social mobility.
Cameron and Osborne have both addressed this recently, each advocating
greater equality of opportunity (White, 2014: 48–9). What they mean by
this is strengthening the ladder that can take poorer children upwards. Their
and Harman’s ideas are of a piece. They do not get to grips with social stasis.
What’s wrong with private education is not, at root, unfairness, or
social aloofness and disconnectedness from ordinary life, or a misguided
reliance on parental rights. There is validity in some aspects of these
charges, but they gain most traction when harnessed to another objection:
that they are a threat to democracy. In a formal sense, Britain has been a
full democracy since universal franchise in 1928. Citizens have been able to
replace legislators at regular elections. But we would all agree that regular
elections and majority voting are not all there is to democratic rule. In a
broad sense, the rulers of a country are not limited to its legislators. They
include everyone in a major position of power, able to direct what people
are to do, what they should think, or how they should live. They embrace
those at the top of the civil service, the law, journalism, advertising, public
relations, finance, medicine, commerce, industry, education, the military, and
the main religious bodies. In some self-proclaimed democratic countries,
positions like these are dominated by members of the same religious sect.
In Britain most of them are dominated – and have been for well over a
century – by those sharing an education open only to the rich.28 Instead of
a theocracy, we have a quasi-plutocracy. A democracy in anything but name
needs bulwarks against such sectional power.
This is the basic problem with private education. Unfairness and the
other charges against it gain force when seen as aspects of it rather than as
47
John White
self-standing objections. However much the lines between private and state
schooling are blurred – generating the impression that there is only one
system and that these two labels are not important – this cannot disguise
the fact that private schools still constitute a privileged group at the top of
the new hierarchy under construction. It is they who ensure that, in 2015 as
in 1915, leadership positions remain predominantly in the hands of the rich.
48
Notes
1 Department
for Education, SFR 15/2013. Online. www.gov.uk/government/
uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223587/SFR15_2013_Text_withPTR.
pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).
2 The Telegraph, ‘A level results 2012: Private schools “dominate top grades”’ (18
October 2012). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9617603/Alevel-results-2012-private-schools-dominate-top-grades.html (accessed 1 July 2015).
3 The Telegraph, ‘Private school pupils monopolising top university places’ (7 August
2013). Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10229248/Privateschool-pupils-monopolising-top-university-places.html (accessed 1 July 2015).
4 Times Higher Education, ‘Oxford drops below Cambridge on state school entrants’
(27 March 2014). Online. www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/oxford-dropsbelow-cambridge-on-state-school-entrants/2012321.article (accessed 1 July 2015).
5 BBC, ‘Five schools “send more to Oxbridge than 2,000 others”’ (8 July 2011).
Online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14069516 (accessed 2 July 2015).
6 HMC website: www.hmc.org.uk/ (accessed 1 July 2015).
7 The Sutton Trust, ‘The educational backgrounds of 500 leading figures’ (1 May
2007). Online. www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/educational-backgrounds-500leading-figures/ (accessed 1 July 2015).
8 The Telegraph, ‘Public schools retain grip on Britain’s elite’ (20 November 2012).
Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9689795/Public-schoolsretain-grip-on-Britains-elite.html (accessed 1 July 2015).
9 BBC, ‘Sir Peter Bazalgette: Top schools “too dominant” in acting’ (12 June 2014).
Online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27821039 (accessed 1 July 2015).
10 Gov.uk website, ‘Elitist Britain’ (28 August 2014). Online. www.gov.uk/
government/publications/elitist-britain (accessed 1 July 2015).
11 Department for Education (2011), Class Size and Education in England: Evidence
Report. Online. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/183364/DFE-RR169.pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).
12 Ibid., p. 50. This refers to Blatchford, Basset, and Brown (2008) ‘Do low attaining
and younger students benefit most from small classes? Results from a systematic
observation study of class size effects on pupil classroom engagement and teacher
pupil interaction’. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association
Annual Meeting, New York. Online. www.classsizeresearch.org.uk/aera%2008%20
paper.pdf (accessed 1 July 2015).
13 Harrow School website: www.harrowschool.org.uk/1541/outside-the-classroom/
sport/ (accessed 1 July 2015).
14 The claim that equality is not intrinsically valuable is about distributional
equality, that is, about equality in the distribution of goods (for example, money,
educational opportunities). It is not about equality of consideration as a moral or
political principle, as enshrined, for instance, in the notion of ‘one person, one vote’.
I leave it as an open question whether this kind of equality is intrinsically valuable.
15 The Guardian, ‘Ten Mossbourne academy students win Cambridge University
offers’ (23 January 2011). Online. www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jan/23/
mossbourne-academy-cambridge-university-offers (accessed 1 July 2015).
16 See my Exploring Well-being in Schools (Routledge, 2011), Chapters 7 and 8.
17 The Sutton Trust, ‘The educational backgrounds of 500 leading figures’ (1 May
2007). Online. www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/educational-backgrounds-500leading-figures/ (accessed 1 July 2015).
49
John White
18 www.harrowschool.org.uk/1764/overview/the-school’s-purpose/; www.
rugbyschool.net/headmasterswelcome; www.marlboroughcollege.org/about-us/
mission/; www.haileybury.com/; www.tonbridge-school.co.uk/home/; http://mgs.org/
join-us/welcome-from-the-high-master/aims-and-objectives; www.millhill.org.uk/.
19 www.berkhamstedschool.org/Educational-Aims; www.highgateschool.org.uk/
about/ethos-and-aims; www.stpaulsschool.org.uk/about-st-pauls/vision; www.
sedberghschool.org/senior/News-Events/Headmasters-Blog; www.eastbournecollege.co.uk/Headmasters-Welcome; www.lancingcollege.co.uk/357/the-college/
ethos-and-aims; www.bishops-stortford-college.herts.sch.uk/.
20 Such as the purchase of Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk by the son of the carpet
manufacturer Sir Francis Crossley in 1862.
21 St Martha’s website: http://st-marthas.co.uk/the-school/headmasters-welcome/
(accessed 2 July 2015).
22 The Value Added Score measures the progress made by students in a given year,
compared with pupils of similar ability nationally.
23 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_(English_school).
24 See Paul Krugman’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First
Century in The New York Review of Books (8 May 2014). Online. www.nybooks.
com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ (accessed 2
July 2015).
25 The Telegraph, ‘Top private school headmaster attacks “politics of envy”’
(29September2014).Online.www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11126481/
Top-private-school-headmaster-attacks-politics-of-envy.html (accessed 2 July 2015).
26 See the LSE report Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America
(April 2005), supported by the Sutton Trust. Online. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/
news/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf (accessed 2 July 2015).
27 The Telegraph, ‘George Osborne scraps the “death tax”’ (28 September 2014).
Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/11127126/GeorgeOsborne-scraps-the-death-tax.html (accessed 2 July 2015).
28 Scholarship students apart.
50
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