Some of you may have been a little puzzled by headlines yesterday, including in the Guardian, proclaiming ‘Soaring state schools threaten private sector.’ It is not often that a Guardian lead story risks sounding like a Tory press release or a Toby Young blog but, as I argue in a post on today’s Local Schools Network, this is certainly one report that begs rather more questions than it answers: Who or what was the source of this lead story? The chief source is the much quoted Ralph Lucas, owner of The Good Schools Guide ( available on subscription), the education bible of the upper-middle classes. While many newspapers and the BBC report that Lucas is an Eton educated hereditary peer, fewer mention that he is a Conservative and that according to the UK Parliament website he is listed as a member of the Tory group in the Lords – a rather crucial omission given the underlying politics of the story. Henry Stewart of the Local Schools Network has written previously about the political leanings of the 12th Baron. Which schools is Lucas talking about? Safe to say that Lucas is not referring to schools in the AET chain, many of which have been recently criticised by Ofsted, nor indeed to some of the excellent comprehensives in impoverished areas around the country. Media discussion of the new, improved state sector concentrates on those in wealthy, urban locations, such as my old school Holland Park or Toby Young’s West London Free School ( which has yet to produce a single set of GCSE results), schools which operate in highly favourable circumstances in relation to everything from admissions to resources to government support and, of course, media publicity. Are private schools really on the run? Soaring fees, in a time of austerity, have produced a lot of grumbling about the burden on parents who choose the private sector. But this is nothing new. Exactly the same stories were run in 2009 but without the pro-government gloss. Then as now, those private schools most affected are small and medium sized establishments outside London, forced or welcomed (take your pick) into the state sector under the free schools and academy programme. Soaring fees have clearly not affected the sector as a whole, particularly at the elite end. According to William Richardson, general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents leading independent schools, ‘pupil numbers are currently at record levels in private schools.’…
Tag Archives: private schools
Is Britain still too elitist?
Below, my contribution to a recent discussion in Prospect, reflecting on the publication of a recent report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
The big question: Social mobility
Is Britain still too elitist?
A new report states that people educated at Oxbridge have created a “closed shop at the top”
Each week, Prospect asks a range of experts, as well as our readers, to come up with answers to the questions defining the political agenda.
This week, a report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission into the social makeup of Britain’s leaders in business, media, politics and public service found that elitism was still deeply embedded in British society. Alan Milburn, the Labour former cabinet minister who chairs the commission, concluded that Britain remains a “deeply divided” country.
Read more here including my contribution to this discussion ( reproduced below..) Other contributors include Simon Jenkins, Toby Young and Anthony Seldon.
‘Liberal’ attitudes mask a war on the poor
The findings of Milburn’s report are pretty unequivocal. Britain is still ruled largely by those who come from educationally privileged, and therefore affluent, backgrounds. Today’s elite combines covertness about privilege with an extraordinary carelessness about the lives of others—this is typified by leaders like Cameron and Clegg, who have prosecuted a ruthless war against the poor, cunningly masked by a modern “liberal” attitude. Among the most pressing reforms needed now is a genuinely fairer education system and more diverse political representation. I particularly like the idea of university-blind job applications.
Melissa Benn is a writer and campaigner and founder member of the Local Schools Network…
Why the Goves need a little history lesson
Below, my column in Education Guardian today.
A few weeks ago this newspaper published a piece by Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist and wife of the education secretary, Micheal Gove, explaining why they had decided to send their daughter to a London state school.
It was a funny and lively article, and I agreed with just about every word. I was particularly drawn to Vine’s argument about the importance of educating students with very different interests and talents alongside one another, her belief that state schools produce more rounded, socially open citizens and her surprisingly robust criticism of the exclusivity and excessive competition of so much of the private sector.
Yet as time has gone on, Vine’s article has unsettled me. Why? Am I being irrational or ungenerous, unable to welcome even the spouse of an uncompromising Tory frontbencher over to “our” side of the educational divide?
Read the rest of the article here.…
Speak up at the back now Carla!
I love the look of this website and the interesting people they interview and talk about. I was interviewed by them over a series of weeks – via e-mail – which has now appeared. I wasn’t sure if it would work but it really does – in part, because with each question addressed separately, both question and answer has a freshness and energy to it that you don’t always get in traditional exchanges, where everybody gets tired and tails off towards the end!
I also love the picture they use which has what appears to be a teenage Carla Bruni loitering at the back. Obviously not….but then again….. or maybe it’s just me…..…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
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