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Why ban the best education for the young?

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 ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019

UKC is always good for a mix of views on a topic like this. (some more informed than others of course ) .

I have just read another 'ban private schools' article, which are gaining traction at the moment.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/19/private-schools-brita...

Whilst I acknowledge some of the arguments made for this ,it has struck me that it seems ridiculous to close down the best schools in the country  (and it is very hard to argue against the fact that most (not all of course) of the best schools in the country are private.)

It is a 'race to the bottom' - reducing inequality by lowering the standards of the best, rather than improving the standards of the worst. 

Do these people really think that it is better to have a lower standard  of education that everyone benefits from equally, than a higher standard one that some benefit from and some don't? That strikes me as simply an argument of envy. In which case I will point you to many other failed socialist ideas.

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 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

As soon as the government can ensure all schools provide a uniformly high level of education with sufficient resources to support all special educational needs in as integrated a way as possible I might entertain the idea.

Touring local primary schools in rural County Durham was an eye opener - and not always in a good way.

As always - fix the problem at source and the symptoms go away.   A lot of fee paying schools in the UK have no resemblance to Eton and Harrow, but have parents who have changed their whole lifestyle so that their child can get a reasonable education.  I know several parents of SEN children who have been failed so utterly by the state sector that they’ve either gone private at great cost or home ed at even greater cost.

In the mean time, the private sector is saving the taxpayer a fortune and is diverting cash that would otherwise be spent on foreign holidays, imported goods and the like into UK staff wages.

Trying to tear it down is myopic and futile and doesn’t recognise the real problems. 

Edit: Speaking of real problems, why the hell are Labour spending their time right now doing this rather than address some other pressing issue I can’t quite recall...

Charitable status - take it away, but then pay the schools the per-pupil funding they save the state...

Post edited at 10:40
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OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> As soon as the government can ensure all schools provide a uniformly high level of education with sufficient resources to support all special educational needs in as integrated a way as possible I might entertain the idea.

>

> Charitable status - take it away, but then pay the schools the per-pupil funding they save the state...

Yes, if all schools were of a high standard and private education was simply buying nepotism then I could understand. In the meantime the charitable status could be taken away, although I fear this would actually have the unintended consequence of widening education inequality further.

 Coel Hellier 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> ... and it is very hard to argue against the fact that most (not all of course) of the best schools in the country are private.

Actually, it's easier than one might suppose.   Yes, such schools dominate the league tables of best results.  But what leads to good results?  Well, primarily, it is *not* the quality of the school and the teaching, it is the ability and attitudes of the intake.  Such schools do well because they pick their intake.   Everything else is secondary to that.

When parents spend loads to get their kid privately educated, most of the advantage they get from that is not the quality of the teaching nor the school facilities, it is the effect of the peer group that they put their child into.

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 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> When parents spend loads to get their kid privately educated, most of the advantage they get from that is not the quality of the teaching nor the school facilities, it is the effect of the peer group that they put their child into.

At the risk of the derailing the thread, we saw very much the same thing when looking at the religious state schools in our area - more pupils from outside the catchment area where the parents were willing and able to undertake church activities to bump themselves up the admissions priority list.  I find this more insidious and frankly disgusting than fee paying as a way of peer group selection, as it subverts and perverts the state education system and some of the churches go on to claim they’re just better at educating when it’s largely down to peer selection.

I have even stronger views on grammar schools and the degree to which they warp opportunity based on a single moment in a child’s life that plenty of very talented people I have taught could never have passed.

Were I the Labour Party, the dual rot of grammar and religion within the state sector would be ahead of fee paying schools - and their inverse priorities do make me think they’re motivated by the politics over the ethics and the practical side.

The peer selection effect runs on other levels - there is little bus transport for primary schools here and it was clear that some parents were driving their children past 2-3 state schools to get to another one - so sufficient wealth of money and time to do longer school runs also opens up peer selection effects.

Post edited at 10:59
OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Actually, it's easier than one might suppose.   Yes, such schools dominate the league tables of best results.  But what leads to good results?  Well, primarily, it is *not* the quality of the school and the teaching, it is the ability and attitudes of the intake.  Such schools do well because they pick their intake.   Everything else is secondary to that.

I don't disagree with the gist of that, although perhaps I think it is less of a dominating factor. The support and attitude of the parents to the child's education is also another factor.

However, I would only consider exam results a part of what consists of a good education. 'Better' schools provide a greater breadth of subjects, more opportunity around sport, music, theatre; they may insist on their pupils doing charity work or joining the CCF (combined cadet force), all things which allow a child to develop as a rounded individual and equip them well for adulthood. 

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 ChrisBrooke 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> The peer selection effect runs on other levels - there is little bus transport for primary schools here and it was clear that some parents were driving their children past 2-3 state schools to get to another one - so sufficient wealth of money and time to do longer school runs also opens up peer selection effects.

Quite, and I suppose it almost goes without saying that we already have wealth-based selection across the education system anyway. I don't know what proportion of my house value is based on my kids going to some of the best state junior and secondary schools in Sheffield, but I imagine it's quite high. 

 Coel Hellier 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> ...  I find this more insidious and frankly disgusting than fee paying ...

Agreed, it is utterly ridiculous that taxpayer-funded state schools were granted an exemption from the 2010 Equality Act, and are allowed to discriminate over religion.

 timjones 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Are private schools really the best, they pick and choose their pupils and still manage to turn out some really poor specimens.

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 Pyreneenemec 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Labour would appear to have 'shooting themselves in the foot' down to a fine art ! 

Teaching staff at private/faith schools here in France have their salaries paid by the State. This has the effect of making fees much more affordable. My local Catholic Lycée charges about 3000 euros a year.

This school is, however,  very selective as regards ability. Children that are readily accepted  up to the age of 15 find themselves thrown back to the State  system as they are considered  too academically  weak for the 6th form..This doesn't appear to deter parents from sending their children 'chez le Curé'. Classes are generally smaller and discipline much tighter. The success rate for the Baccalauréat this year was 100% . The Lycée has an excellent reputation and intends keeping it. 

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OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to timjones:

Broadly I believe they are - there will always be exceptions.

 elsewhere 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

And the worst education for the UK?

Just ban them from parliament.

 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> When parents spend loads to get their kid privately educated, most of the advantage they get from that is not the quality of the teaching nor the school facilities, it is the effect of the peer group that they put their child into.

in england, around 6% of pupils are privately educated, but the private schools employ 14% of all teachers and have 17% of all funding. I reckon the teaching and facilities more than play a part. 

 TobyA 19 Sep 2019
In reply to timjones:

7% of UK children go to independent schools in the widest sense (not all are fee paying for example) and Oxbridge entrance is still about 50/50 state/independent. Coel will probably tell you that its all down to the superior genes of the private school kids but I suspect its a bit more complicated than that!

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In reply to stevieb: interesting post below the line to that Guardian article I have pasted below. I don't know if this is factually correct, but definitely shows its not a simple answer.

"Cransley

1h ago 

7677

On the contrary - there is no justification in getting rid of them.

The argument that "not everyone can afford them, therefore no-one should be allowed to pay for them" is complete lefty tosh. By that logic, not everyone can afford a house - therefore we should ban houses. Or not everyone can afford a holiday - therefore we should ban holidays.

The typical knee-jerk reaction from many lefties on private schools, is "ban them" (other than the likes of Diane Abbott, of course, who happily lives with the screaming hypocrisy of calling parents who privately educate their children as "indefensible, and intellectually incoherent", before she then sent her own son to an independent school!)

Firstly, the right to privately educate your child is enshrined in Article 2 of the first protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights.. Even if you did abolish such schools, that would simply lead to the relocating of those establishments to places such as Ireland, France and the Isle of Man (and the unnecessary removal of all of that economic activity from the UK.)

Some relevant facts to this debate are:

* Independent Schools Council (ISC) schools' contribution to UK GDP - £9.5 billion
* Jobs supported by ISC schools in UK - 227,200
* Tax revenues generated by ISC schools - £3.6 billion. (Critically this money is not coming out of the public purse, as it is with state-school teachers (since state-school teachers are paid out of money raised in taxes in the first place) - it is being paid to the treasury out of the available disposable income of the parents who send their children to private schools.
* Taxpayer saving from 500,000 ISC pupils not being in state education - £3 billion

Which means that "abolishing independent schools" which is the shrill cry of many of the more cerebrally-challenged on CiF, would cost £6.6Billion - i.e the cost of educating those students in the state system PLUS the loss of Income Tax and NI from those teachers currently in the independent sector.

* In 2018, £1Billion was paid by independent schools in bursaries and fees assistance to poorer families for the education of their children (5,657 pay no fees at all). That assistance was given to 171,488 (33%) of children in ISC schools. It should be noted that this amount is more than three times the tax that these charitable schools are not paying.
* 33% of children educated in ISC schools in 2016/17 were from minority ethnic backgrounds.
* 79,281 of pupils at ISC schools (15.0% of all pupils) are recorded
as having SEND (Special Educational Needs & Disabilities).

People who criticise independent schools do so in the blinkered belief that only children from wealthy families go to them. This is hogwash. Independent schools are a significant driver of social-mobility with the outstanding education they deliver to the fees-assisted students from poorer backgrounds.

I know this because I was one of them."

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 Coel Hellier 19 Sep 2019
In reply to TobyA:

> 7% of UK children go to independent schools in the widest sense (not all are fee paying for example) and Oxbridge entrance is still about 50/50 state/independent. Coel will probably tell you that its all down to the superior genes of the private school kids

No I would not.  Please don't misrepresent me. 

(And by the way, you should compare Oxbridge entrance to the fraction of private-school kids at sixth-form level, which is more like 20%, than the 7% figure for all ages.)

 Coel Hellier 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

It is certainly true that wintertree's proposal ("Charitable status - take it away, but then pay the schools the per-pupil funding they save the state...") would cost the taxpayer a lot and result in much more tax money going to the private schools. 

It would essentially be a "voucher" system, beloved of certain right-wing think tanks. 

 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

I was not arguing for the abolition of private schools, I was just pointing out the huge benefits in education, as well as outlook, family support and connections that they provide. Having 2-3 times the level of resource for your education is a massive advantage.

As you say, rich people can afford better houses, better cars, better servants etc. so it's daft to suggest that they shouldn't be allowed to buy a better education.

I think the argument that they are a driver for social mobility at a national level is ludicrous. Clearly, any poor child that manages to get into a private school will have greater opportunities than otherwise, but the clear majority of private school pupils are well off. I think the proportion of pupils being privately educated only becomes significant above the 95th percentile, and only above the 98th percentile does it become a majority. In a country where you are 100 times more likely to get a prominent role in public life if you went to one of the Clarendon schools, any claim that they are a source of improved social mobility is delusional.  

 Jamie Wakeham 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> ...it is very hard to argue against the fact that most (not all of course) of the best schools in the country are private...

Several others have beat me to it - but it is really very easy to argue against this.  I've worked on both sides of the divide for 20 years.  The quality of teaching is absolutely no better in private schools - indeed many a time I've rolled my eyes at practices in an independant school, thinking that there'd be no way in the world that you could get away with such rubbish in the state sector.

The problem is that we are obsessed with the % of pupils getting A*/A and A*-C (or, now, 9-8 and 9-6) as the benchmarks.  Oddly enough, if you only take the very brightest students, your percentages look really very good... your staff can be ill-prepared, lazy and plain incompetent (god knows I've seen all three) but you'll still get good results.  If the teaching is really bad, then your well-off parents can just top it up with private tuition so the effects of poor teaching get masked further.

You'll notice that state schools will sometimes trumpet their value-added scores - the difference between what their pupils 'should' have got based on their ability as assessed at entrance or at the end of KS3, and what they actually got at GCSE.  Independents tend not to talk about this - because it's usually close to zero, if not actually negative!

Post edited at 12:08
 Jamie Wakeham 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> (And by the way, you should compare Oxbridge entrance to the fraction of private-school kids at sixth-form level, which is more like 20%, than the 7% figure for all ages.)

On top of that, don't forget that included in the 20% of privately educated sixth formers are one hell of a lot of the very best of the state students who've been creamed off by scholarships.  When the two or three finest students from every state school's Y11 cohort suddenly move to the local independent for Y12 because they've been given a free pass, it's not at all surprising to see that Oxbridge entry looks biased towards the private sector.

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 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> I have even stronger views on grammar schools and the degree to which they warp opportunity based on a single moment in a child’s life that plenty of very talented people I have taught could never have passed.

Personally, I've got no problem with state grammar schools, as long as they don't receive additional funding.

The systems in apparently more egalitarian countries like Germany and the Netherlands where there are 3 or 4 different types of secondary school according to ability and preference seems like a good option. Yes, it can cause a cliff edge moment (though these are normally smoothed out), but it should reduce the number of disengaged teenagers.  

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> It is a 'race to the bottom' - reducing inequality by lowering the standards of the best, rather than improving the standards of the worst. 

> Do these people really think that it is better to have a lower standard  of education that everyone benefits from equally, than a higher standard one that some benefit from and some don't? That strikes me as simply an argument of envy.

That's because you haven't understood it.

When thinking about social policy, the question people ask isn't, as you suggest "what would make me feel less bitter about my lot?" - that would be an argument of envy - it is "what sort of society do I want to live in?". It's utter garbage to suggest that the people who object to the inequality of opportunity presented by private education are embittered because they wanted a private education and didn't get it, or that they want it for their kids. If you ask them what they want for themselves, they'll say "access to a good state school where everyone is achieving their potential". That's not envy, it's a desire for a society in which opportunity is distributed more fairly. And most people from the left and the right will profess that they believe in "equality of opportunity", while those who champion private education are displaying that in fact they'd rather that opportunities were preserved for those whose parents can afford it. 

I happen not to agree with the policy of banning private schools; but I also wouldn't want to see an expansion of the sector because of the way it increases inequality of opportunity. But, I won't engage in an argument about the best policy with those whose starting position is I am motivated by envy, because it's total bollocks, and it's an argument of bad faith. It's a thoughtless, cliched way to smear the opponent's motivation rather than critique the position itself. So it has no substance - it's emotional guff; and it's not true. 

To be clear about my own motivations: I went to a good state school where I got the results to study at one of the top universities - so I'm not envious of anyone who went to a private school. I think I gained a lot from growing up around a lot of different kids, across racial and class divisions. I don't have kids so that's not in the equation. I want to see a society where those in power in the government, civil service, in boardrooms and courtrooms etc have broad experience of society, so everyone's interests are well represented. As I hope is now patently obvious, the arguments against private education are motivated by improving society for everyone, and nothing to do with making things worse for those who are born into privileged positions, out of spite or envy.

If you can accept that, then I might be willing to discuss what I think is right and wrong about Labour's policy.

Post edited at 12:15
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 summo 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I'm was a comp kid, but this just sounds like a race to bottom. 

Rather than saying we are putting tax up so everyone can enjoy better education, they just remove the best education, so everyone can enjoy something below par together. Very socialist, but not good in the long run. 

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 neilh 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

The parents of the children I know who sent theirs to private school are now concerned that Uni's will select against them in favour of state schools. So I reckon there may be the start of a backlash against private schools.

Certainly in the Oxbridge case, there are now a higher proportion from State schools going than private schools.

You also have the bigger employers who are starting to ignore private education , as they have realised they are limiting their talent pool.Children from state schools are usually more driven than those from private schools.

So personally I think that advantage of private schools is now very questionable.

 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to TobyA:

> 7% of UK children go to independent schools in the widest sense (not all are fee paying for example) and Oxbridge entrance is still about 50/50 state/independent. >

No it isn't. It's about 60/40 and actually this year for Cambridge I believe it is 68/32 and, as Coel points out, the number of kids in private schools should be adjusted for private 6th forms. We need evidence based policy

 summo 19 Sep 2019
In reply to stevieb:

I know a few people who kids go private schools who definitely don't have servants, flash cars, holidays etc..  they have decent jobs but spend every penny on their kids education, because the local options are dire. They only power they have is not send them to the local school, they can't improve their local school, make the class sizes smaller, remove the disruptive kids and so on. 

So in essence this measure of Labour's wouldn't just punish the rich elite in an attempt to buy votes from the classes beneath them. I expect they'll announce a special super yacht tax next, anything to stop peopke asking them about their Brexit policy.

Post edited at 12:22
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 Jamie Wakeham 19 Sep 2019
In reply to neilh:

> The parents of the children I know who sent theirs to private school are now concerned that Uni's will select against them in favour of state schools.

In the last two years I've started to see parents pulling their children out of an independent at the end of Y11, in order to do their A levels in the local state comp, for exactly this reason.

 summo 19 Sep 2019
In reply to neilh:

> Children from state schools are usually more driven than those from private schools.

Really?

> So personally I think that advantage of private schools is now very questionable.

I'm not convinced you are correct here either. Are all state schools that outstanding? 

OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

I have understood it. 

It is still a race to the bottom. Create equality of opportunity by removing the best opportunities if they aren't available to all. It is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

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 Jamie Wakeham 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

> No it isn't. It's about 60/40 and actually this year for Cambridge I believe it is 68/32 and, as Coel points out, the number of kids in private schools should be adjusted for private 6th forms. We need evidence based policy

The critical figures would be what percentage of pupils got qualifying grades (typically AAA or A*AA) in each sector, and of them who got into Oxbridge.  I've never seen these published, but I have my suspicions that it will actually look reasonably balanced.  There's still going to be a degree of favouritism for private pupils because they get so much more encouragement and support to apply; Oxbridge can't give places to those who don't apply in the first place.

OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

I refer you to my post/point that education is about more than grades, or the quality of one teacher in the classroom. 

My partner has also taught at many different schools (inner city London, private London, UK system, Australian system and most recently move from an impoverished inner city comprehensive (not London,) to a market town local private. )I discuss this issue a lot with her so is something I am aware of beyond my own and others experiences as pupils. 

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> I have understood it. 

So do you think that in general, or in my case, or in the case of John McD, policies against private education are motivated by envy as you said in your OP, or do you think that they are motivated by improving the distribution of opportunity so that society works better for everyone regardless of background?

> It is still a race to the bottom.

You appear not to know what a race to the bottom is. A race to the bottom is where standards are reduced as a way of gaining competitive advantage, encouraging competitors to reduce their standards too, so the quality of what's on offer gets worse and worse. This isn't relevant in education.

I'm not sure there's a catchy phrase for a policy of stopping the hoarding of opportunity by an elite. The point of the policy in question is to redistribute excessive concentrations of resources so that more people can benefit, *raising* the standards overall. By putting all the rich, motivated kids in state schools, the idea is the other kids *all benefit*, while the rich, motivated ones aren't harmed - they'll still get their straight As and go to Oxbridge. Which when you look at good state schools with a big enough intake of rich/middle class motivated kids, happens all the time. 

The argument is that the loss of the level of luxury experienced by those in the private schools is not much of a loss for society at all (the kids aren't losing something particularly beneficial - or it might even create kids who think of the themselves as better, more entitled or more deserving of opportunity); and the gain for everyone else of having classes with the nice posh kids in, far outweighs any cost.

So, no, you didn't understand the argument, you just trotted out a cliched slur. Which I found quite boring, as I do every single time I hear it.

Post edited at 12:48
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 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to summo:

> I know a few people who kids go private schools who definitely don't have servants, flash cars, holidays etc..  they have decent jobs but spend every penny on their kids education, because the local options are dire.

> So in essence this measure of Labour's wouldn't just punish the rich elite

the very first line in the comment you responded to was - I was not arguing for the abolition of private schools - so it should be quite clear that I don’t support Labour’s policy. 

And The line about servants was flippant, but I’m pretty certain that private school pupils are much more likely to come from households with cleaners, gardeners or au pairs. 

I know people who send their kids to private schools to, and they’re not part of the landed gentry either, but I’m pretty sure that all of them have post tax household income well above the median £29000.

 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> You appear not to know what a race to the bottom is. A race to the bottom is where standards are reduced as a way of gaining competitive advantage, encouraging competitors to reduce their standards too, so the quality of what's on offer gets worse and worse. This isn't relevant in education.

>

  Your argument seems to be that reducing the standard of education of those going to independent schools by abolishing independent schools (or reducing access to  the richest of the rich) and thereby reducing their competitive advantage is not in fact "race to the bottom is where standards are reduced as a way of gaining competitive advantage".

  Is that right?

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OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

I didn't trot out a cliched slur. You may not agree, but I would argue that giving everyone 'equal opportunity' by removing the best opportunities for those that can access them is indeed the politics of envy.

Your statement 'society works better for everyone regardless of background' sounds very lovely, but in reality what it means is 'ensuring some don't get a leg up'. I would argue that rich motivated kids are 'harmed' (to use your word, it wouldn't be my choice) by going to most state schools compared to the education they would get at most private schools (yes, there will be exceptions in both cases.). And what about rich unmotivated kids who need the more intensive schooling to ensure they achieve results. Or those who are no good academically but find they are brilliant at say, building things, for example - that is more likely to be realised at a good private school.

I know we will disagree but I don't believe your argument has weight as it will reduce the quality of the best education in this country.

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 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> I'm not sure there's a catchy phrase for a policy of stopping the hoarding of opportunity by an elite.

Except that private schools are not hoarding opportunity – they are creating it where the state fails to, and are incidentally doing a lot for the UK economy in the process by creating jobs and keeping money in the UK.

Where opportunity is being hoarded is down the line in the discriminatory recruitment of downstream educators and employers.  

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Your argument seems to be that reducing the standard of education of those going to independent schools by abolishing independent schools (or reducing access to  the richest of the rich) and thereby reducing their competitive advantage is not in fact "race to the bottom is where standards are reduced as a way of gaining competitive advantage".

>   Is that right?

I don't think so, it sounds like a weird mangling of my argument to make it unintelligible.

A race to the bottom is where someone trying to attract business reduces their quality and price, encouraging competitors to do the same. This doesn't happen in education, and isn't relevant here.

Clearer?

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 krikoman 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> Charitable status - take it away, but then pay the schools the per-pupil funding they save the state...

This definitely, I think "banning" private schools sounds daft, but they shouldn't be charities and they shouldn't get tax breaks either.

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 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> Except that private schools are not hoarding opportunity – they are creating it where the state fails to

What do you mean? The places in the universities the top jobs are the opportunities in question; these exist with or without private education. The private schools don't create top university places! Someone is going to take up those places, and they could either have been educated privately or in a state school.

> and are incidentally doing a lot for the UK economy in the process by creating jobs and keeping money in the UK.

I can believe that private schools make a net contribution to the economy, but I struggle to believe that as a benefit it is significant in comparison to the disadvantages of hoarding opportunity and decreasing the educational standards in the state sector.

> Where opportunity is being hoarded is down the line in the discriminatory recruitment of downstream educators and employers.  

I'd suggest that they have to be rational. If the best standards are achieved in private schools, because the resources are hoarded within them, then I don't think the place to fix the inequality is at university entrance (i.e. lower grades accepted from state schools). I think it's better not to generate the inequality by hoarding resources.

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 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> I don't think so, it sounds like a weird mangling of my argument to make it unintelligible.

> A race to the bottom is where someone trying to attract business reduces their quality and price, encouraging competitors to do the same. This doesn't happen in education, and isn't relevant here.

> Clearer?

 You have changed your definition from "A race to the bottom is where standards are reduced as a way of gaining competitive advantage" to "where someone trying to attract business reduces their quality and price"

  These are not the same. But, anyway,  abolishing independent schools implies the reduction of price and quality in order to give state schools a competitive advantage.

Clearer?

Post edited at 13:35
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 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> What do you mean? The places in the universities the top jobs are the opportunities in question; these exist with or without private education. The private schools don't create top university places!

I mean that private schools create opportunity for education at the school level – they are not hoarding it.

I mean that the private schools are not responsible for the hoarding of opportunity at the University and employment level – I have yet to meet a school that runs university admissions.

> I can believe that private schools make a net contribution to the economy, but I struggle to believe that as a benefit it is significant in comparison to the disadvantages of hoarding opportunity and decreasing the educational standards in the state sector.

I disagree strongly with blaming private schools for educational standards in the state sector. There is the argument that removing the best peoples and parents from a school weakens it, but it’s not one I have much truck as the worst behaved and lowest aspiration pupils set the starting point.

> I'd suggest that they have to be rational. If the best standards are achieved in private schools, because the resources are hoarded within them,

But the resources are not hoarded within the private schools - they are not taking money away from state schools, they are giving it to them in the form of reduced burden on the taxpayer.  

> I think it's better not to generate the inequality by hoarding resources.

I have yet to see a compelling case that resources are being hoarded by private schools.  I see lots of parents sending children to state schools and complaining about taxation levels and the quality of the schooling – these are the people who are hoarding - they pay far less for the education of their children, and do not want for money whilst the state system crumbles on funding that is so low per-pupil I struggle to believe it works as well as it does.

Private schools are a minority of people. The majority are in state schools – if the parents who could afford to pay more did pay more, money will flow into the schools which is a significant part of the solution.  I would happily pay another 5% income tax per year if I knew it was flowing into the state school system (and not a bunch of high-level “Executives“ bought in to run federations).  Lots of other people don’t want to pay more tax, they want cheap flights nice holidays climbing trips and so on – that is the real hoarding. All these things and others are given up by many parents paying for private education.  

Post edited at 13:37
1
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> I didn't trot out a cliched slur. You may not agree, but I would argue that giving everyone 'equal opportunity' by removing the best opportunities for those that can access them is indeed the politics of envy.

But you haven't even attempted to address the argument that it's got nothing to do with envy! You're just repeating the slur without any more justification. I've explained why it's nonsense:

It's utter garbage to suggest that the people who object to the inequality of opportunity presented by private education are embittered because they wanted a private education and didn't get it, or that they want it for their kids. If you ask them what they want for themselves, they'll say "access to a good state school where everyone is achieving their potential". 

I'm not demanding that you agree - I'm asking whether you have a counter-argument.

> Your statement 'society works better for everyone regardless of background' sounds very lovely, but in reality what it means is 'ensuring some don't get a leg up'. I would argue that rich motivated kids are 'harmed' (to use your word, it wouldn't be my choice) by going to most state schools compared to the education they would get at most private schools (yes, there will be exceptions in both cases.). And what about rich unmotivated kids who need the more intensive schooling to ensure they achieve results. Or those who are no good academically but find they are brilliant at say, building things, for example - that is more likely to be realised at a good private school.

The argument I've set out is that the loss incurred by abolishing private schools is outwieghed by advantage to the state sector. Your argument is that there is only one relevant aim and that is to have the highest quality available to an elite. I don't agree that it's important that rich people should have access to luxury education. I don't think that's what makes a good society, I think it contributes to a country run by Boris Johnson, i.e. a f*cking catastrophe.

> I know we will disagree but I don't believe your argument has weight as it will reduce the quality of the best education in this country.

Your fundamental misunderstanding is that the policy is one of loss only, with no balancing benefits. The justification is that the loss is of something which isn't very valuable (look at what it's churned out in our current PM), and there is a gain for all the kids in the state schools as they get access to the resources and the influence of rich motivated kids.

3
OP ClimberEd 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

Your use of the word 'luxury' with regards to education negates everything else you have to say. 

13
 Phil1919 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I haven't read the thread through, but I would vote for that. They are trying to make education more equal at University level.....why not make it more equal from the start. More equality has been proven to make everybody happier. I'd vote for fully comprehensive schools where everyone has a stake in the same establishment. Just as I'd vote for a maximum wage to go alongside a minimum wage to equal things up.   

2
 SC 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Don't ban them, just take away their charitable status. They are businesses and should be taxed as such.

Faith schools on the other hand should be banned. I went to a Church of England school which put me at a disadvantage when I moved on to a secular school as I'd never even heard of evolution or the big bang theory and I'd been taught that the bible was fact. It did however, make me realise how ridiculous religion is and set me on the path to atheism.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

" but I struggle to believe that as a benefit it is significant in comparison to the disadvantages of hoarding opportunity and decreasing the educational standards in the state sector."

How do you see private schools decreasing the educational standards in the state sector? I would have thought that their net contribution to the economy and the fact the private school kids are not in the state system (but parents are paying taxes for that right) could suggest that it should be improving state school standards ?

1
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> I mean that the private schools are not responsible for the hoarding of opportunity at the University and employment level – I have yet to meet a school that runs university admissions.

If the skills that universities reward are only offered by private schools (let's say, for an exaggerated example, excellence at rowing; or more the ability to talk in a loud posh voice with excessive self-confidence) then those schools serve the function of hoarding the opportunities amongst those who can afford them. That's the argument against private education.

> I disagree strongly with blaming private schools for educational standards in the state sector. There is the argument that removing the best peoples and parents from a school weakens it, but it’s not one I have much truck as the worst behaved and lowest aspiration pupils set the starting point.

I don't even understand this argument. It's unbelievably obvious that a school with an intake of rich, motivated kids with parents who have high expectations and bring their kids up with loads of stimulation and resources are going to get better results that those who have an intake from deprived areas where the parents are largely unemployed. I just don't understand how anyone can doubt this obvious reality.

> But the resources are not hoarded within the private schools - they are not taking money away from state schools, they are giving it to them in the form of reduced burden on the taxpayer.  

Those resources include the presence of the clever motivated kids with high expectations, and the coaching of the kids so that they will fit right in at the top universities. It's these 'soft' resources are concentrated in the private schools and the kids in the state schools can't access them.

> I have yet to see a compelling case that resources are being hoarded by private schools.  I see lots of parents sending children to state schools and complaining about taxation levels

I don't recognise this. The only people I ever hear moaning about taxes being too high are rich and right-wing.

> Private schools are a minority of people. The majority are in state schools – if the parents who could afford to pay more did pay more, money will flow into the schools which is a significant part of the solution. 

Well we agree then that the solution is higher taxes to enable better state schools. I take it you'll vote Lib Dem, rather than for Tory tax cuts (although Boris is seems to be pulling a load of schools funding out of his arse, so if you're incredibly gullible, maybe that policy appeals to you?).

Post edited at 14:13
1
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

> How do you see private schools decreasing the educational standards in the state sector? I would have thought that their net contribution to the economy and the fact the private school kids are not in the state system (but parents are paying taxes for that right) could suggest that it should be improving state school standards ?

If you take the cleverest kids with the most affluent backgrounds out of a state school, that reduces the standard for everyone. The school I went to had loads of middle class kids who expected to go to the best universities, and did, plus loads of kids from much poorer backgrounds with much lower expectations. There's some kind of critical mass of clever, well motivated kids (and yes, that's going to be highly correlated with wealth) that's needed in a school to maintain a successful equilibrium. If you took out half of the middle class kids from my school, I'll bet you that the other half would be out the door straight behind them and it would become a sink school with crap results.

Only the extremely naive bordering on completely stupid believe that what matters most is how the school is run. What matters most is who goes there*.

*There's a good Freakonomics on "the school effect" showing it to be pretty small, which is intuitively obvious.

1
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> Your use of the word 'luxury' with regards to education negates everything else you have to say. 

I'm afraid that's not honest engagement with the arguments. You could ask me what I meant by 'luxury' in that context and I could tell you.

1
 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> If the skills that universities reward are only offered by private schools (let's say, for an exaggerated example, excellence at rowing; or more the ability to talk in loud posh voice with excessive self-confidence) then those schools serve the function of hoarding the opportunities amongst those who can afford them. That's the argument against private education.

I wildly disagree with your interpretation of university admissions.  Regardless, the schools are not doing this the universities are.  

> I don't even understand this argument. It's unbelievably obvious that a school with an intake of rich, motivated kids with parents who have high expectations and bring their kids up with loads of stimulation and resources are going to get better results that those who have an intake from deprived areas where the parents are largely unemployed. I just don't understand how anyone can doubt this obvious reality.

You are painting to opposite extremes and claiming it as obvious.  It is also deeply flawed. Such a small proportion go to private schools that banning it would not lead to an influx of highly motivated pupils with supportive parents into the state system.  If I sent all private school children into state schools tomorrow, it will put on average one or two children into each classroom. If all it took was one motivated child per class to change a whole school around then I think the problem would be solved trivially.  The “soft resources” you talk about won’t dilute accordingly, they’ll be just as unviable at the state level as they are now, and those parents will get private coaching instead.

So - fix university level admissions and state sector confidence - a lot of uni admissions problems seem to trace to lack of belief from state schools that pupils will get in to a place - when they apply they get in with the same success rate regardless of origin.

You are also trotting out the rich line – an awful lot of private school parents scrimp and save and sacrifice like mad, they certainly are not and never will be rich. As I said in my first post most private schools are not Eton or Harrow.

The deprivation issues affecting schools come from the house price > state school feedback cycle and have sweet F-A to do with independent schools frankly.

> I don't recognise this. The only people I ever hear moaning about taxes being too high are rich and right-wing.

I didn’t say taxes are too high.  I said people don’t want them raised.

> Well we agree then that the solution is higher taxes to enable better state schools. I take it you'll vote Lib Dem, rather than for Tory tax cuts (although Boris is seems to be pulling a load of schools funding out of his arse, so if you're incredibly gullible, maybe that policy appeals to you?).

Well neither Red nor Blue get my vote over educational policy but that’s down the list of what’s increasingly panicking me.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

"What matters most is who goes there*."

I agree this is a huge factor. But I suspect there are plenty of clever kids from normal backgrounds with lovely parents who cannot afford private school, and I (probably naively) reckon this makes up the majority of most state school cohorts, so I am not totally convinced the private sector is starving the state sector of the "smart kids" to maintain an equilibrium. I see where you are coming from though.

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

> abolishing independent schools implies the reduction of price and quality in order to give state schools a competitive advantage.

> Clearer?

Still nonsense, I'm afraid. Reducing the price and standard of the private schools doesn't encourage the state sector to reduce its standard and price so that it can compete better. For the love of christ, it is not a race to the bottom.

2
baron 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

If you want to raise the standards in state schools then you could start by banning all those children who refuse to behave and despite being a small minority are a major drain on a school’s resources as well as having a detrimental effect on the majority of other pupils who are eager to learn.

1
 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> Still nonsense, I'm afraid. Reducing the price and standard of the private schools doesn't encourage the state sector to reduce its standard and price so that it can compete better.

>

  Still nonsense I'm afraid. Your second sentence is simply a matter of opinion. My opinion is that removing the strongest competitors from the field is likely to reduce the overall standard.

  More obviously, reducing the the quality of the university intake by removing the best qualified candidates is likely to reduce the quality of university outcomes.

   You shouldn't be undertaking major policy changes on the back of personal opinions as opposed to hard evidence. I've heard that we need evidence based policy.

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> I wildly disagree with your interpretation of university admissions.  Regardless, the schools are not doing this the universities are.  

> You are painting to opposite extremes and claiming it as obvious.  It is also deeply flawed. Such a small proportion go to private schools that banning it would not lead to an influx of highly motivated pupils with supportive parents into the state system...The “soft resources” you talk about won’t dilute accordingly, they’ll be just as unviable at the state level as they are now, and those parents will get private coaching instead.

I agree really. I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but on the other hand I think their existence is detrimental to our society, so starting from scratch I would definitely not allow their creation. Creating an elite of children who end up being the judges and ministers who make decisions affecting the lives of people the likes of whom they have never had any contact with is deeply unhealthy.

> So - fix university level admissions and state sector confidence - a lot of uni admissions problems seem to trace to lack of belief from state schools that pupils will get in to a place - when they apply they get in with the same success rate regardless of origin.

> You are also trotting out the rich line – an awful lot of private school parents scrimp and save and sacrifice like mad, they certainly are not and never will be rich. As I said in my first post most private schools are not Eton or Harrow.

Fair enough, and I absolutely accept that many parents are pushed into the corner of sending their kids to a private school, when what they'd really like is a great state school, and they haven't got it because of...

> The deprivation issues affecting schools come from the house price > state school feedback cycle and have sweet F-A to do with independent schools frankly.

True. It's an interesting issue because for many people (like Diane Abbott!) their ideals about how society *should* work collides headlong with their simple and unshakeable desire to do the best for their kids. So no one's really making any effort to build a system that generates a fair distribution of opportunity because it's not in their interests to. All you get is a load of guff about how "schools should be better", as in, more like the ones full of posh kids, but without the posh kids. Which is a pipe dream. 

In reply to ClimberEd:

Why ban the best education for the young? 

Because it makes 7% of young people think they are better than the other 93%.

7
 wintertree 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

Agree entirely with everything you said.  

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Still nonsense I'm afraid. Your second sentence is simply a matter of opinion. My opinion is that removing the strongest competitors from the field is likely to reduce the overall standard.

You're saying it's a race to the bottom, and I'm saying what a race to the bottom is (*competitively* cutting standards to attract business), and how this is different.

The burden is on you to explain how the removal of private schools would encourage state schools to reduce their standards and price. Why would they do that? How would that help them "compete"? You can't meet that burden, because what you're saying is nonsense. 

>   More obviously, reducing the the quality of the university intake by removing the best qualified candidates is likely to reduce the quality of university outcomes.

I'm not proposing that we take all the privately educated kids out of the system, in some sort of cull! They'd go to state schools and still get bags of expensive additional coaching, and standards would be exactly the same!

>    You shouldn't be undertaking major policy changes on the back of personal opinions as opposed to hard evidence. I've heard that we need evidence based policy.

Unfortunately what passes as "hard evidence" in policy-making, particularly in education, is just a load of personal opinion dressed up with a few % signs and tables. I've commissioned it myself, making sure the money was spent only if it was to sure prove the point the minister I worked under wanted to make. So dream on.

The best you'll get is policy that seems intuitively reasonable. Stuff like, spend more money on the worst schools, find ways to get a good mix of kids into each so that you don't have sink schools, make teaching an attractive profession and ensure morale is high, blah blah blah.

1
 alan moore 19 Sep 2019
In reply to baron:

> If you want to raise the standards in state schools then you could start by banning all those children who refuse to behave 

Children don't refuse to behave. Behaviour is a complex response to a huge amount of internal and external factors.

2
 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> The burden is on you to explain how the removal of private schools would encourage state schools to reduce their standards and price. Why would they do that? How would that help them "compete"? You can't meet that burden, because what you're saying is nonsense. 

>

   The burden is on you to demonstrate why competition is thought to drive up standards in many areas but not by you in education. Why should they compete as hard if the best competition is removed? You can't meet that burden, because what you're saying is nonsense. 

> I'm not proposing that we take all the privately educated kids out of the system, in some sort of cull! They'd go to state schools and still get bags of expensive additional coaching, and standards would be exactly the same!

>

   What is your hard evidence for this? And if so, what is the point of abolishing private schools (or restricting entry to the very rich) if the system remains just as "unfair".

> Unfortunately what passes as "hard evidence" in policy-making, particularly in education, is just a load of personal opinion dressed up with a few % signs and tables. I've commissioned it myself, making sure the money was spent only if it was to sure prove the point the minister I worked under wanted to make. So dream on.

>

>

   So you now agree that policy cannot, in practice, be based on hard evidence? Hallelujah!!

3
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to baron:

> If you want to raise the standards in state schools then you could start by banning all those children who refuse to behave and despite being a small minority are a major drain on a school’s resources as well as having a detrimental effect on the majority of other pupils who are eager to learn.

What a brilliant idea. We'll just leave all the most dysfunctional kids roaming the streets - what could possibly go wrong? What possible costs in terms of crime, drug problems, homelessness, etc might be incurred in the long run as those kids grow up? I can't think of any.

Or are you saying that rather than have them roam the streets, you'd put them somewhere different giving them additional support with more specialised resources?

 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>    The burden is on you to demonstrate why competition is thought to drive up standards in many areas but not by you in education. Why should they compete as hard if the best competition is removed?

We seem to be having a real difficulty in understanding each other here, because you seem to think that education is a free market. And I think it's a public service, but with a minority of people opting out for private provision. So the private schools might compete against each other, because they want to attract business, but a state school isn't competing to attract business in the same market.

I honestly thinking that you are barking mad if you think that the quality of state schools is governed by "how hard they compete" with private schools. That makes not one iota of sense to me. It's weird.

>    What is your hard evidence for this? And if so, what is the point of abolishing private schools (or restricting entry to the very rich) if the system remains just as "unfair".

I'm not arguing for the abolition of private schools, I think that policy is deeply problematic. I am arguing that the existence of private schools is undesirable, which isn't quite the same (I wouldn't create them if they weren't already there).

I'm afraid I don't have any solutions to change education policy to transform society into a meritocracy in which it doesn't matter where you're brought up, your access to opportunities is the same. But I do see private schools as being instrumental increasing inequality of opportunity and as such they do not have my support.

>    So you now agree that policy cannot, in practice, be based on hard evidence? Hallelujah!!

I'm afraid that doesn't mean you can just make up any old crap without the need to justify it.

Post edited at 15:28
1
 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> We seem to be having a real difficulty in understanding each other here, because you seem to think that education is a free market.

>

  No I don't, but I think that institutions and people will set their standards relative to their peers. So if their best peers no longer exist they may set lower standards.

   > I honestly thinking that you are barking mad if you think that the quality of state schools is governed by "how hard they compete" with private schools. That makes not one iota of sense to me. It's weird.

>

  I think you are barking mad if you think that good organisations should ignore the standards set by the "best in class". Maybe state schools do and therein lies the problem?

> I'm not arguing for the abolition of private schools, I think that policy is deeply problematic. I am arguing that the existence of private schools is undesirable, which isn't quite the same (I wouldn't create them if they weren't already there).

>

  So what is the point of the discussion?  I agree: the idea of abolishing some of the best educational institutions in the world and thus harming some of the best universities in the world on the back of an ideological and a hunch is barking mad!

> I'm afraid I don't have any solutions to change education policy to transform society into a meritocracy in which it doesn't matter where you're brought up, your access to opportunities is the same. But I do see private schools as being instrumental increasing inequality of opportunity and as such they do not have my support.

>

     You've spent years arguing that schools don't make any difference anyway. Then you say that even if independent schools were abolished the same cohort would spend money in other ways to replicate (the apparently non-existent) benefits of an independent education.

  If the inequalities either don't exist or would continue anyway, then what is even undesirable about independent schools except some ideological obsession with uniformity.

> I'm afraid that doesn't mean you can just make up any old crap without the need to justify it.

>

  So stop doing it!! You lefties need to focus on evidence not ideology....

Post edited at 15:55
 Jon Stewart 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   No I don't, but I think that institutions and people will set their standards relative to their peers. So if their best peers no longer exist they may set lower standards.

Try and think realistically about the world as it actually exists in reality, rather than in daft assumptions about fake markets. Imagine you're running a state school in an inner city with a cohort of kids from all kind of different backgrounds. You've got a lot of complex pressures and you're trying to do the best job you possibly can, to give the kids the best education that you can deliver.

In that role, do you honestly think that what's motivating your decisions is competition with a private school? Of course it isn't! You're trying to deliver a public service within all the constraints placed on you. It's not a market FFS! It's got nothing to do with "gaining competitive advantage". And it's not about setting standards relative to peers. Work in the state sector is about trying to deliver the best you possibly can for the people you serve, given all the constraints. I'll go as far as saying that your attitude to public services makes me despair. The idea that schools that are failing are doing so because they're not "competing hard enough" with private schools who face none of the same issues is just patently absurd. I just don't think you've got a clue.

>   I think you are barking mad if you think that good organisations should ignore the standards set by the "best in class". Maybe state schools do and therein lies the problem?

I'm not making an argument about organisations in general. I'm saying that the standard of state schools is not a function of competition with independent schools. They're not in the same market place.

> You've spent years arguing that schools don't make any difference anyway. Then you say that even if independent schools were abolished the same cohort would spend money in other ways to replicate (the apparently non-existent) benefits of an independent education.

>   If the inequalities either don't exist or would continue anyway, then what is even undesirable about independent schools except some ideological obsession with uniformity.

I'm sure if you tried you could grasp this. I don't believe that education policy on its own makes much difference to outcomes. You can't raise standards by introducing some new incentive for schools to "do better with what they got" - that's just a waste of time. But I do believe that the environment in which education happens is of tremendous importance. So if you get all the rich kids with highly motivated parents and educate them together, they will do very very well, because of the environment they're in. Just as if you get all the kids from chaotic backgrounds where the parents have drug and alcohol problems and no expectations for their kids, those kids will suffer from that environment. It's not the policy or the school that's going to determine their outcomes, it's what's going on around them in a much broader sense.

Genuine question: can you see any problem in creating an elite of children who end up being the judges and ministers who make decisions affecting the lives of people the likes of whom they have never had any contact with?

Post edited at 16:17
1
Roadrunner6 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I agree to a point but public education is far from a failed socialist idea.

Private schools are selective so I don't think its fair to call them the best. I teach in one of the best prep schools in New England, tuition is $40,000 a year.

Our kids get a better education than the high schools down the road, but we are selective. We have small class sizes, we are far far better funded, we take the best of the best. Having taught at both extremes of the the US system, in 5 schools, I'd say the two worst schools were one public and one conservative catholic, and the two best were my current school and an earlier public school. 

However I don't think we should ban private education, I do think we should open up access though. I personally had an ethical decision when I accepted this position, whether I wanted to serve those who needed help or teach where I do. 

It was a really tough decision, but the prep school offered me a better salary and job security and less stress. Less bollox outside of the classroom. Ideally I'd teach in a public school but we needed the money and I've a young family and that's just life.

 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> Try and think realistically about the world as it actually exists in reality, rather than in daft assumptions about fake markets. Imagine you're running a state school in an inner city with a cohort of kids from all kind of different backgrounds. You've got a lot of complex pressures and you're trying to do the best job you possibly can, to give the kids the best education that you can deliver.

>

   You are obsessing about markets! I don't know why. I'm worried for you . Do you fear being seduced by market ideology? It's not even much about competition let alone markets despite your insistence on introducing and repeating the phrase. It's simply about setting a high bar. You haven't a clue! Do you think that a good headteacher shouldn't consider what models and what practices they could adopt to achieve the best possible standards?

>

> I'm not making an argument about organisations in general. I'm saying that the standard of state schools is not a function of competition with independent schools. They're not in the same market place.

>

   They you go again. Markets, markets, markets. Schools are doing the same thing. Educating kids and hoping to get the most able into tertiary education. Given that the kids who can no longer go to independent schools, except for the very wealthy, will go to state schools, how can you consider that they are not doing the same thing?

>

> Genuine question: can you see any problem in creating an elite of children who end up being the judges and ministers who make decisions affecting the lives of people the likes of whom they have never had any contact with?

>

  Absolutely, and it's a disgrace that the state education system fails to educate more children to do these things.

  Do you think we will get better lawyers,surgeons and ministers if we stop people getting the best education?

Post edited at 17:23
4
 wbo2 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd: let's get to the rub.  Do you think rich kids are genetically superior? 

Do you think poor kids should get equal education?

baron 19 Sep 2019
In reply to alan moore:

> Children don't refuse to behave. Behaviour is a complex response to a huge amount of internal and external factors.

I really couldn’t care less what the reason is for children who are well aware of the rules but choose to ignore them.

I’ve seen too many hard working children have their school life made a misery by recidivists.

We can have a discussion as to what should be done for or to such children but not allowing them in a mainstream classroom would be a good start.

1
baron 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> What a brilliant idea. We'll just leave all the most dysfunctional kids roaming the streets - what could possibly go wrong? What possible costs in terms of crime, drug problems, homelessness, etc might be incurred in the long run as those kids grow up? I can't think of any.

> Or are you saying that rather than have them roam the streets, you'd put them somewhere different giving them additional support with more specialised resources?

The latter.

 duchessofmalfi 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Once the toffs have to use the same schools as the rest of us then you can expect state school standards and funding to rise.

They aren't banning the best schools - they are obsoleting a system that perpetuates low social mobility and entitlement over merit.

Post edited at 17:37
8
 alan moore 19 Sep 2019
In reply to baron:

I'll assume your joking at this point.

 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>    Do you think that a good headteacher shouldn't consider what models and what practices they could adopt to achieve the best possible standards?

if the answer is; have twice as many teachers, three times the money, and select better than average students, then there might be a limit to what can be learned. 

>   Do you think we will get better lawyers,surgeons and ministers if we stop people getting the best education?

There’s a very good chance that you would have better ministers, and better law lords, because they would have a better understanding of the whole populace. 

You could make a decent argument that the cabinet ministers of the 60s, 70s and 80s who came out of the shared experience of WW2 and often the grammar schools were better at representing all the people than the Etonians or the class warriors.

 hang_about 19 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I haven't read this entire thread, so apologies if this has been said before. I think a lot of concerns about private education come from the networks that are established which allow advancement based on who you know rather than who you are. Just look at the number of cabinet members who went to Eton then did PPE at Oxford. I would not hold these up as the brightest and the best, but rather the best connected.

I know of a family member who went to private school and did very well (albeit lost of last minute cramming), failed at Uni (the one where I teach, but not in my area) then got a very well paid job in banking simply due to connections at school. It's this that makes a lot of people resent the private education sector.

I wouldn't ban private schools, but I would do something about the culture of entitlement that comes from those connections.

baron 19 Sep 2019
In reply to alan moore:

> I'll assume your joking at this point.

Not really.

Most parents  send their children to school in the hope that they will be safe, both physically and mentally, and that they will be given every opportunity to achieve their aspirations.

Unfortunately some parents send their children to school to dick about because ‘school never did any good for me’ so do whatever you want.

While I’m all for helping every child their comes a time when despite constant support a child should be removed to allow the vast majority of pupils to have the education that they deserve and are entitled to.

There are numerous strategies that can be employed to stop children falling out of the educational system but not at the expense of others.

 Postmanpat 19 Sep 2019
In reply to stevieb:

> There’s a very good chance that you would have better ministers, and better law lords, because they would have a better understanding of the whole populace.

>

  Well, I think that about 70% of MPs went to state school but it doesn't seem to help them much.....

  Maybe it's because they are like  Hilary Benn who went to state schools "reserved" for middle class luvvies 

> You could make a decent argument that the cabinet ministers of the 60s, 70s and 80s who came out of the shared experience of WW2 and often the grammar schools were better at representing all the people than the Etonians or the class warriors.

>

   The point about wartime experience is good, but the class make up of the elite hasn't changed much "in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%."

 summo 19 Sep 2019
In reply to stevieb:

You could have better educated people in every profession, not just politicians, judges etc.. If more money was put into education. But no one will vote for a tax rise, even if that means better education, nhs, social care and so on. The rich and in many cases the not so rich are prepared to spend vast sums on their kids education, average Joe would moan their butt off if they paid just 1% more tax on earnings over £12k. It's the parents unwillingness to correlate slightly higher taxes with better state services that is letting their kids down; not the parents sending kids to private school. 

 stevieb 19 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Well, I think that about 70% of MPs went to state school but it doesn't seem to help them much.....

Fair enough. Two thirds of the current cabinet were privately educated, but to be honest, the state school alumni are the most frightening. And at some point Theresa May’s cabinet was around one third. 

 Coel Hellier 19 Sep 2019
In reply to SC:

> Don't ban them, just take away their charitable status. They are businesses and should be taxed as such.

It would not make much difference.  Businesses pay tax on profits, and most private schools do not have an ethos of making profits for shareholders, they have an ethos of providing good education and charging enough to break even.

There are some benefits, such as reduction in business rates, but overall charitable status is a minor issue for them (and amounts to much less than the amount they save the taxpayer compared to if all those kids went to state schools).

Indeed, there are suggestion that some private schools don't opt for charitable status since the onus to provide "public benefit" costs them more than they gain.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/04/27/private-schools-abandon-ch...

Moley 19 Sep 2019
In reply to stevieb:

Wasn't it Margaret Thatcher at state school and Tony Blair had private education? 

I wouldn't read too much into it but both had a little dabble at wars.

 Bobling 19 Sep 2019
In reply to baron:

> If you want to raise the standards in state schools then you could start by banning all those children who refuse to behave and despite being a small minority are a major drain on a school’s resources as well as having a detrimental effect on the majority of other pupils who are eager to learn.

God, so true.  But what do you do with these kids?  You can't just scrap them, and they deserve a chance because in all probability it is not their fault.  So you send them to some sort of specialist school which costs exponentially more than the school they were in, which just drains the resources from the rest of the state sector.

I've been grappling with this for the last five years - seeing my kids' educations being dominated not by their needs but by Jaaxon's.  I wish I only had the money to send them to one of the beautiful independents I cycle past on my way to work.

 Ciro 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Still nonsense I'm afraid. Your second sentence is simply a matter of opinion. My opinion is that removing the strongest competitors from the field is likely to reduce the overall standard.

Education shouldn't be about competition between institutes. When you use competition to drive standards, by definition you must have winners and losers. When schools lose, the kids in their catchment area suffer.

Providing a good education to our children should be intrinsically sufficient motivation to drive standards, without the need for a competitive marketplace.

 Postmanpat 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Ciro:

> Education shouldn't be about competition between institutes. When you use competition to drive standards, by definition you must have winners and losers. When schools lose, the kids in their catchment area suffer.

> Providing a good education to our children should be intrinsically sufficient motivation to drive standards, without the need for a competitive marketplace.


  Jon, not me, introduced the idea of competition and markets. I am simply saying that, amongst other negatives , abolishing some of the best schools means abolishing some of the examples of best practice and best outcomes for other schools to aspire to. (and, in case of doubt, I acknowledge that some of that practice may be either unsuitable or unattainable for other institutions)

2
 Pete Pozman 20 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> As soon as the government can ensure all schools provide a uniformly high level of education with sufficient resources to support all special educational needs in as integrated a way as possible I might entertain the idea.

> Touring local primary schools in rural County Durham was an eye opener - and not always in a good way.

Not my experience. I see teachers working themselves into the ground and receiving brickbats in return. 

> Charitable status - take it away, but theen pay the schools the per-pupil funding they save the state...

Except the last bit. Public education is a general good which benefits all citizens. All have a duty to pay towards it. If the state provides an opportunity you can't claim a refund if you walk away from it. You can't claim a refund on your tax because you use a helicopter to get about and don't need roads. 

People who choose private education, health etc are free to do so... that's it. 

Post edited at 08:21
1
 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

> abolishing some of the best schools means abolishing some of the examples of best practice

I still fundamentally disagree with this.  It seems to be an axiom of the whole debate that private education is somehow 'better', and that to lose those institutions is somehow throwing that 'better' pedagogy away.  It's absolutely not true.  There is nothing that a decent state school head can learn from the independent down the road, other than 'oh - so this is what I could achieve if I had 50% more staff, all paid 25% more than the going rate, and only had to pick the nicest pupils'.

The actual teaching going on is nothing special.  In fact it's often pretty poor.  Time and time again you see private sector staff having a go at teaching in the state sector, and they usually crash and burn very quickly - partly because they've never learned behaviour management, it's true, partly because the workload is shocking to them, but also because their pedagogy just isn't up to it.  It doesn't have to be when you're teaching a tiny class of bright kids.

I could give a million anecdotes on this - just a couple:

* Whilst working a year long medical cover in an independent, I was going through a Y13 paper with my class.  It was quite a tough one and marks were low.  One of the pupils asked, jokingly, 'go on sir - what would you have got?' and I told him, truthfully, 100%.  They were astounded, and I told them that, really, if I couldn't get 100% on an A level paper (I then revised that to 99%, to allow myself one daft mistake), then what the hell was I doing sitting in front of them?  The the head of physics walked in, looked at the paper, and declared that he remmbered this one, it was a real stinker, and that he'd tried it himself and got 78%.  To their credit the pupils said nothing... that HoD later left to become head of science in a a state school, and after one year left and was welcomed back at the independent.

* In a different independent, pupils at Y9 and above were given free periods during which they were expected to go to one of a range of classrooms which were staffed by teachers as a sort of subject clinic - they could do homework there, or get help with concepts they were finding tricky.  I was put onto this rota and told that., because I was new, almost certainly no-one would come to me and it'd be a bonus free period.  By the end of the second week I had pupils arriving who I'd never taught, saying 'we've heard you can actually explain science?'

* In my current work as a private tutor I took on a Y11 boy from a very expensive independent.  He was geting straight As in everything except maths and science where he was getting C/D.  Neither he nor the school could fathom it.  It took me about 15 minutes to work out that he'd learned basic algebraic manipulation wrong - given a=b/c he couldn't tell you correctly that b=ac but would give you c=ab or c=a/b or some other random result.  Simply fixing that turned his whole maths & science education around in an instant.  But no-one at the school had spotted it.

Actually, as someone who spent most of his working life so far in the state sector, I find the automatic assumption that private education and educators are the best to be verging on offensive.  The astonishingly easy times I've had in independents left me feeling, more than anything else, angry at how hard I and other state teachers had to work and how diluted that effort always necessarily became.

The bottom line is that there is no 'best practice' to be gleaned from independents.  They get their results because they admit only the best, have tiny classes, and give their teachers huge amounts of free time to plan, mark and do other extra-curricular activity.  I don't know what my position on abolishing private education is - as someone who's worked both sides and now works as a private tutor I'm very conflicted - but the idea that there's some magic formula to be found in the private sector is truly infuriating to me.

1
 jkarran 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> Actually, it's easier than one might suppose.   Yes, such schools dominate the league tables of best results.  But what leads to good results?  Well, primarily, it is *not* the quality of the school and the teaching, it is the ability and attitudes of the intake.  Such schools do well because they pick their intake.   Everything else is secondary to that.

> When parents spend loads to get their kid privately educated, most of the advantage they get from that is not the quality of the teaching nor the school facilities, it is the effect of the peer group that they put their child into.

There seems to be a contradiction here. You say the schools get good results by selecting the brightest children but in the next paragraph you say people can pay through the nose to get little Johnny into that per group. Which one is it? It seems to me if you can pay to put your average child into a bright peer group and others can do the same then what you get is not actually a bright peer group, it's a monied one whose parent's demand results and can provide the resources and connections to achieve them.

jk

Post edited at 09:32
2
 BFG 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

It seems like a lot of this thread is people treating their ideology as fact, then dismissing every opinion that diverges from theirs as prima facie wrong, which isn't really going to lead anywhere. 

Now, I don't really give that much of a shit about private schooling. But it's probably worth looking at the evidence. The only thing I've read recently (cause it was covered on BBCs 'More or Less' - the piece is on grammar schools is interesting) states that the best currently available evidence for selective education says that it reduces social mobility overall and does not provide a better education.

The primary reason why kids who go to grammar schools do well is because they come from wealthier backgrounds. Paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2018.1443432 . The evidence from the Millenium cohort study also indicates that selective education provides no benefit for the pupils.

So, as a category, there is no evidence that selective schools improve the education for those that go there and there is evidence that it reduces the overall social mobility of the population in the cachement area.

Now, I can't find any studies done into private schools; so you have to make the argument that the above also applies to them. But, given that it is pretty well evidenced that taking the middle class out of general education has a net negative impact on society and provides no measurable benefit to the pupil, it suggests you'd need some pretty strong evidence that the benefit provided private schools is justifiable, both in terms of the individual pupil benefit and the wider economic benefit of improved education.

Now, I'm not arguing for 'banning' them. Cause again, frankly I don't care that much. But then, neither are people in Labour; their current policy is to 'remove the VAT exemption from private schools' the motion being debated would "remove independent schools’ charitable status, placing limits on their entry to universities and forcing them to let state schools use their assets". None of which stops them existing overnight - which is what a ban would do.

None of this means I support these policies. My intuitive response is that - for education at least - the best way to shrink the private sector is to improve the state offering. None of the above addresses the practical consequences of the above motions; which is what the law is about.

So, I'll just stop there. My point is that the Headline for this thread is lacking evidence in both the meaningful claims it makes; this isn't about a ban, and the claim that private schools represent the best of the education system needs substantiating.

 wintertree 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

Good post.

> The bottom line is that there is no 'best practice' to be gleaned from independents.

One area I might disagree - and it’s not about teaching practice - is with university admissions.

A significant imbalance of the state/private school admissions to certain universities is rooted in who applied to the institutions and not pupils’ raw achievement levels.  My institution spends a lot of time and money going in to state schools and saying to pupils “apply to us” and working with them on the process.  

Independent schools seem to start from the view half the kids should be apply to Oxbridge and the rest a rung “down”.  Partly this is down to a lack of resources for state school staff dedicated to mentoring university admissions but you also hear of quite a few school staff - wrongly - saying a pupil won’t stand a chance.  

My institution is statistically blind to the kind of school it’s intake went to but the intake does not reflect the state/independent school split of pupils achieving the required grades.

 Ramblin dave 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Jon, not me, introduced the idea of competition and markets.

The original post introduced the idea of competition and markets by talking about a "race to the bottom", something which only makes sense in the context of competition on price. Jon just did the "I do not think it means what you think it means" bit by pointing out that reduced standards driven by the need to succeed in the market by competing on price is obviously not what's happening in education.

OP ClimberEd 20 Sep 2019
In reply to BFG:

I'm enjoying reading all responses but have little further to add at this stage other than a couple of clarifications.

Many people seem to be focusing on academic results as the 'measure' of a school, I have pointed out that I think it is much more than that, it is to give a child a broad education for life across multiple areas and skill sets. This may well be a funding issue but that doesn't negate my overall point. 

Secondly, to BFG, the headline doesn't lack evidence as it isn't in response to Labour policy, it is in response to an article written in the Guardian which proposes banning private schools. 

 Jon Stewart 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Jon, not me, introduced the idea of competition and markets.

Categorically untrue. 

I explained that a "race to the bottom" is a feature of markets, and since state and private schools are *NOT* competing, the term "race to the bottom" was absolutely incorrect. 

You said:

 "But, anyway,  abolishing independent schools implies the reduction of price and quality in order to give state schools a competitive advantage."

and then

"The burden is on you to demonstrate why competition is thought to drive up standards in many areas but not by you in education. Why should they compete as hard if the best competition is removed? You can't meet that burden, because what you're saying is nonsense."

When I explained again that they were not in competition, suddenly something changed (you realised you were wrong but wouldn't admit it)

"You are obsessing about markets! I don't know why. I'm worried for you . "

I have consistently made the point that the market forces required to either cause a "race to the bottom" or conversely to drive up standards through competition are *NOT* present.

What you are trying to say is entirely unintelligible to me because it's inconsistent. And the fact that you think *I* introduced the concept of markets and competition (by explaining that "race to the bottom" was incorrect) demonstrates that you basically don't know what's going on.

Cheerio.

1
 Coel Hellier 20 Sep 2019
In reply to jkarran:

> There seems to be a contradiction here. You say the schools get good results by selecting the brightest children ...

Yes, that is the biggest single factor in affecting exam results and how well the school does.  But it is not the only factor.

> but in the next paragraph you say people can pay through the nose to get little Johnny into that per group.

Yes. The point is that you can't pay to make your kid brighter. You can only pay to influence some of the other factors. These other factors are secondary to innate ability, but can still affect outcomes.   And peer groups can influence a kid's attitude to learning and education, and that can be important.

> ...  Which one is it? It seems to me if you can pay to put your average child into a bright peer group and others can do the same then what you get is not actually a bright peer group,

The private schools generally pick kids from middling-ability to very bright.  The middling-ability kids can benefit from this environment. 

The reason that such a school then gets better results than surrounding state schools is that it is simply not dealing with the lower half of the cohort.

 Postmanpat 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> I still fundamentally disagree with this.  It seems to be an axiom of the whole debate that private education is somehow 'better', and that to lose those institutions is somehow throwing that 'better' pedagogy away.  It's absolutely not true. >

  In which case what is "unfair" about them and why bother to abolish them except for purely ideological reasons? If people want to waste their money, leave them to it.

2
 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

You're absolutely right - I overlooked that in my little rant!  This is one area in which state schools really could learn from independents.  Some state schools are actually quite good at it (my own school in the '90s was great at pushing me and other towards the idea of Oxbridge, although utterly pants at preparing us - thankfully the admissions tutors saw something useful in me).  I've certainly been in state schools where this isn't the case and pupils aren't encouraged to think about the top institutions and don't get any support for it - as well as 'you're not good enough' there's also the 'you won't fit in' argument.

 Coel Hellier 20 Sep 2019
In reply to BFG:

> The primary reason why kids who go to grammar schools do well is because they come from wealthier backgrounds.

No, the primary reason why kids who go to grammar schools do well is because they are higher-ability kids, because if they weren't good at passing exams they would not get into the grammar school.

1
 Jon Stewart 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Ramblin dave:

> Jon just did the "I do not think it means what you think it means" bit

I would also point out that if anyone wants to know what the term actually means, i.e. what everyone else in the world understands it to mean, they are very welcome to use a search engine of their choice.

 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> I have pointed out that I think it is much more than that, it is to give a child a broad education for life across multiple areas and skill sets. This may well be a funding issue

It's absolutely a funding issue.  Give state teachers an extra eight hours of free periods a week, a bucketload of cash (and the freedom not to be utterly focussed on the next OfSTED), and they'd absolutely love to provide all of these wonderful broad education opportunities.

traceyphillips 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I find this ridiculous.

These people that are trying to ban private schools are pathetic. I never went to private school, I went to a standard public school but I respected that I didn't come from a background that could afford it.

People will always want the best for their children and if that means they pay a lot of money to do so, then they will. You should never try to bring someone down to your level just because you don't have wait they have.

5
 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

...although wealthier parents can afford to live in better postcodes and send their children to better primary schools where they're surrounded by better-behaved peers.  And they can afford private tutors (like me) to help prepare pupils for the 11+, which (whatever the schools might say) can make quite a difference.  I spend quite a bit of my time doing 11+ work at this time of year - the GCSE and A level rush hasn't started up yet so it's a useful way to fill my schedule.  If I lived in an area where there were grammars it'd be a much larger part of my life (and I don't think I'd like it that much).

I don't disagree with your point, but it's not entirely separate from wealth.

 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   In which case what is "unfair" about them and why bother to abolish them except for purely ideological reasons? If people want to waste their money, leave them to it.

I'm only arguing that independents are no better from a pedagogic point of view.  Of course you're going to have a nicer time at one, in smaller and better behaved classes with better facilities and much greater out of classroom opportunities.  And, for a certain more easily influenced kind of child, being surrounded by that peer group may well mean you do better.

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

"And they can afford private tutors (like me) "

Why are you pocketing the largesse of all these wealthy pushy parents and not at the coal face helping the deprived?

2
baron 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> It's absolutely a funding issue.  Give state teachers an extra eight hours of free periods a week, a bucketload of cash (and the freedom not to be utterly focussed on the next OfSTED), and they'd absolutely love to provide all of these wonderful broad education opportunities.

Teachers used to cover for absent colleagues and it was possible to go a whole week without a single non contact period.

There were also no teaching assistants or learning mentors,

Many school buildings were completely unsuitable for modern education.

Pay was nothing to shout home about either.

This applied to many independent as well as state schools.

And yet amazing results were achieved.

Like the NHS you can never throw too much money at education but I’d argue that it’s aspiration that’s the biggest decider in educational achievement.

1
 Robert Durran 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Coel Hellier:

> No, the primary reason why kids who go to grammar schools do well is because they are higher-ability kids, because if they weren't good at passing exams they would not get into the grammar school.

I think I would replace "higher-ability" with "higher-achieving" and there are many factors including, of course, ability but also home background and wealth which affect achievement. Once at a grammar school, the level of academic expectation will really be what makes the most difference for most of the pupils. The culture and ethos of expectation is what really drives a successful school, acacdemically and otherwise.

Post edited at 10:39
 Postmanpat 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

  OK, you make a not entirely unfair point. But when I use the word "competition" (which you introduced) I am not, as I thought you had assumed, using it in the context of free market economic ideology. So we are talking at cross purposes.

   I am referring to competition to achieve the best outcomes. Part of the rationale of the abolitionists embraces the idea that there is competition for the places at the best universities, jobs  etc and that it is skewed in favour of independents (hence the endless criticism of Oxbridge entry etc). So it is there, whether you like it or not. My point is not about economic competition. It is about the competition assumed by the abolitionists and the effect that removing the independents will have on outcomes overall.

2
 Coel Hellier 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> I don't disagree with your point, but it's not entirely separate from wealth.

Agreed.  If the comment I was replying to had been: "The secondary or tertiary reason why kids who go to grammar schools do well is because they come from wealthier backgrounds", I would have been happy.

OP ClimberEd 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Further discussion with teacher partner (who has taught in Australia).

Why not have a stipend per pupil that every pupil gets whatever school they go to.

Private school fees will drop significantly (circa 40% of Australian pupils go to private school) and state school resources (infrastructure, class sizes etc) are far less stretched. That seems to solve the problem to me.

You will never solve the the problem of 'old boys network' as that is nothing to do with the school you went to, and everything to do with who you are. (did you know 16 prime ministers are all descendants of the same man). 

 neilh 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Perversely you may  have that with a pupil premium . Its just not a tradeable commodity or gift voucher.

I cannot personally think of a worse idea to address the needs of our young people and balancing that with teachers views and the need for some form of structure in the education system.

 wintertree 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> (did you know 16 prime ministers are all descendants of the same man). 

Every human is a descendant of one woman and one of seven men I believe.

You might need to qualify your statement with a time window...

 Jon Stewart 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>    I am referring to competition to achieve the best outcomes. Part of the rationale of the abolitionists embraces the idea that there is competition for the places at the best universities, jobs  etc and that it is skewed in favour of independents (hence the endless criticism of Oxbridge entry etc). So it is there, whether you like it or not. My point is not about economic competition. It is about the competition assumed by the abolitionists and the effect that removing the independents will have on outcomes overall.

Thanks. 

But what would the effect on outcomes overall be? There'd still be the same number of places in the top universities, and that's where people get the training to do the top jobs. So the places would go to the best students, who would have been educated somewhere else (in a state rater than a private school).

I see no reason at all to believe that a kid who got into Oxford via a state education is going to be a poorer surgeon or lawyer than one who got in from Eton. Surely it's the training at university level and beyond, combined with their talent (that is, the result of their genes interacting with everything in their environment, of which school is only a small part) that creates a great surgeon or whatever?

You seem to be assuming that if the kids who go to private schools went to state schools instead, then they wouldn't be able to achieve the required standard required to get into Oxford, and Oxford would have to lower their bar. Further, I think your argument is that private schooling actually adds some kind of additional talent to a child that stays with them throughout their life and makes them better at being a surgeon or a lawyer or whatever. This doesn't seem right to me. Once you've done years and years of HE and professional training, the effect your school had you on you is going to be completely lost. 

Think about the factors governing outcomes overall: genetic factors, early environmental effects on the brain, home environment (especially parental expectations and support), peer group, schooling...that's going to get you to university. Then after that there's a whole set more factors that kick in during adulthood.

If you took out private schooling from this causal network, you're only changing a tiny tiny factor in a small % of people. The effect on overall outcomes would be... zilch. What the private schooling might have caused is a difference in social attitudes because it's a form of segregation by wealth.

So private schools aren't doing anything of significant public use, because getting a sufficient number of kids up to Oxford entrance level is going to happen anyway. The additional value you think they're adding is "deadweight". But what they are doing is taking out kids who'd be beneficial to their peers in state schools, and segregating children by parents' income, which is socially unhelpful - particularly when those people go on to work in positions of public influence and the decisions they make effect people the likes of whom they have never had any contact with. It's a bad way to run things.

These are the reasons I don't think private education should exist in the first place - but I still can't really support abolition because I don't think that will solve any of the problems (you can't actually stop the segregation), and it will piss a lot of people off. Much better to make sure that the top universities aren't recruiting those who will "fit in" preferentially, and that talent in society at large is spotted and supported within the state system.

Post edited at 12:15
 Coel Hellier 20 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

> Every human is a descendant of one woman and one of seven men I believe.

True, and going back further those seven men would all have been descendants of one man. 

(This, indeed, is necessarily true for all sexually reproducing species.)

OP ClimberEd 20 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

Sir George Villiers is the ancestor of 16 prime ministers from the 3rd Duke Grafton to David Cameron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Villiers_(died_1606)#Common_ancestor_o...

 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

I do see your smiley   But yes, I also recognise the hypocrisy on my part.  All I can say is that I spent 15 years there, and it nearly killed me - in the 12 months after leaving the classroom I lost a stone and 20 points on my BP.  I have never felt as proud of what I do now as I do of what I did in state education, but I need to pay my mortgage somehow...

 Jamie Wakeham 20 Sep 2019
In reply to baron:

> Teachers used to cover for absent colleagues and it was possible to go a whole week without a single non contact period.

Yep, remember doing that.  My record (achieved by standing in a prep room and teaching y11 on one side and Y13 on the other) was teaching 28 periods in a 25 period week.

> This applied to many independent as well as state schools...And yet amazing results were achieved.

Not sure I agree with that.

> Like the NHS you can never throw too much money at education but I’d argue that it’s aspiration that’s the biggest decider in educational achievement.

Do you mean the aspiration of the staff or the pupils?

 nniff 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I have to declare a vested interest in that my wife is Headmistress of a prep school.  Note that she is not the 'Head'.  She takes kids through from 3 to 11.

The threat of business rates and VAT has produced a significant existential threat because if the numbers of kids are insufficient a school will close.  Independent schools do close on a regular basis.  She has a very strong view that education is not just about knowledge and her school is very successful in turning out very accomplished young people who, with very few exceptions, get to the next school of their choice, with a significant number of scholarships.

The school is non-selective - they take kids with significant difficulties as long as the school can accommodate their needs without detriment to the education of the others.  They have a substantial special needs department (actually 'learning enrichment' now because they also look after the very able (including one who is literally 'off-the-scale, teaching themselves Chinese as a hobby')).  Additional help is included in the fees.  The fees are the lowest in the county and the results are the best.  The Local Authority is hugely supportive for several reasons - they have an obligation to provide education for all of their citizens' children, whether they go to private or state school and the school relieves the LA of much of its Special Educational Needs burden (even when the LA is incapable of providing the funding that is due), and it actively participates in events and activities to support state schools.

The majority of the parents are not wealthy.  In most cases, both parents work full time to pay the fees.  Most forego a lot to afford the fees. The school provides care before and after school hours, including meals. Parents can have breakfast with their kids before they go off to work to help with 'family time'.  

The elasticity of demand is not infinite - if the fees go up, numbers will fall.  If numbers fall, jobs are lost.  If jobs are lost, the dynamic of the teaching environment is affected and the numbers fall some more.  The smaller the school, the more exposed it is to changes in numbers.  20% on fees and business rates is a huge jump.  Plus the cost of the teachers' pension scheme is set to increase hugely.

So what is she doing?  Over the past 4 years, she started looking for a new site.  A couple fell through, but then a site was pointed out to her, by the LA, of a private school that was closing (too few kids).  It is a big enough site to move to two-form entry, which provides the additional resilience that the school needs.  It needed to be refurbished and a temporary extension put in place for two years while a proper extension is built. 

All she's got to do now is double her intake and keep it there, and fill additional spaces at a rate sufficient to make the teaching ratios work (which are sacrosanct).

Meanwhile, there is state-funded competition just down the road - free to all who care to avail themselves of it.  If VAT and business rates are applied to schools it will have a significant adverse impact.  As a charity, no-one takes money out (other than in salaries, which are comparable to the state sector).  Any surplus is ploughed back into the school or funds bursaries.  It employs 60 or so people directly - good quality, sustainable jobs in an enterprise that relieves the burden on the state and produces an output of long term benefit to the same state. 

And you want to tax that, largely on the basis that not everyone can afford it and it is therefore unfair?  It is also worth noting that a significant number of people who could afford it choose not to, which is perhaps an inequality of greater complexity. 

OP ClimberEd 20 Sep 2019
In reply to nniff:

Is that general, or aimed at me? Because I ain't proposing anything. 

In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

Probably the greatest start you could give a child is to get them into decent state schools, encourage them to do well and support them, save the money you would have spent on fees and give them the £800k ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33535216 ) when they finish university.

I wish my folks had done that

Post edited at 13:20
 Rob Parsons 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   OK, you make a not entirely unfair point.

Ah ha! You are John Major, and I claim my £5.

That explains everything.

 nniff 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

> Is that general, or aimed at me? Because I ain't proposing anything. 

Not aimed at you - just in general - it's been a significant issue in our household for years, not least of all because when our kids were young my wife's entire salary and more went on school fees and fee increases were always difficult, let alone a 20%+ increase. 

Life would have been a  lot more comfortable without them, but as parents, the kids and their futures were the priority, not us.

 wintertree 20 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

> Probably the greatest start you could give a child is to get them into decent state schools, encourage them to do well and support them, save the money you would have spent on fees and give them the £800k ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-33535216 ) when they finish university.

Although in many instances the parents would have to have spent a lot of that cash to get a house in the catchment area of a decent state school.

Me - I’d rather we live somewhere nice, with quiet and clean air and lots of trees and stuff.  The money we’re not bleeding out of our backsides on a mortgage for somewhere with a decent state secondary is going into a pot for private fees should the need arise in a decade’s time l- although I very much hope it doesn’t for a wide range of reasons.  I have no intention of contributing to the game of moving houses for schools - it prices lots of early career types out of where they work and is arguably does far more to drive inequality in education than fee paying schools.  

 wintertree 20 Sep 2019
In reply to nniff:

Thank you for your post.  

I am very aware of the extent to which pupils with special needs often end up in a private school at great personal expense to the parents as the state in the form of the local state schools and LEA grossly fail the pupil’s needs.  I know several professionals who have given up all work to home educate as the only option open to them. There is literally a whole book on how to force your council to officially recognise and support SENs - being so gutted of funding they really resist the SEN assessment as the outcome of that is what can legally oblige them to act (spend money they don’t have).

I find it very disingenuous of posters from both opposed viewpoint on this thread to argue that it’s all about money, high achievement, elites and so on.  The state sector is so threadbare it just can’t do the right thing in many cases and it’s hard to over state the impact this can have on the children.  It’s awful to think of those who aren’t getting support and are not able to access independent schools with more resources.  

Given the family history I was asking a lot of questions about SEN support as we toured primary schools – it’s too soon to know if Junior will have the severe dyslexia of their ancestors, but I do not want to have to change schools down the line.  The short answer is that resources are threadbare and awareness amongst the staff was in some instances very limited compare to what I had naïvely expected – I teach young adults and part of one of my jobs and there is a very high awareness, staff training and resource.

A lot of this comes back to my earlier stated disbelief that the state system functions even half as well as it does with the budget that it now has. That it functions indicates the vast toll it is taking on the staff keeping it afloat.

Post edited at 14:43
 Cú Chullain 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

I’m a partial product of private schooling, attended a boarding school for just three years where I completed my GCSEs and A Levels. I loved it, small classes, inspiring teachers who actually gave a shit, lots of sports and outdoor pursuits etc. Left the place with a vague sense of direction and a bit of focus as to what I wanted do with my life. My parents pulled me out of the local school that had already massively let down my older sister and they did not want the same to happen to me and at considerable sacrifice they sent me to boarding school. My father was a plasterer from Limerick and ran a small successful buildingcompany, hardly 'old money' material

What people frequently forget is that there are private schools and there are private schools.

Even within the independent sector there is rampant snobbery at play. Just because you want to public school does not mean you are a member of 'the club'. The vast majority of private schools are unheard of institutions that offer a well behaved teaching environment with small classes with some nice to have bolt ons in terms of extra curricular activities that your average comp does not offer (Duke of Endinburgh etc). I can say with some confidence that my old school 'tie' opened zero doors for me or gave me fast track preferential access to plum job roles. It did gave me decent grades though and a bit of ambition

Most of the parents of pupils at these schools are middle class professional types who don't have money to burn and have made sacrifices to see their kids get a good academic start. For the most part the kids are 'normal' for want of another expression.

Then you get the likes of Charterhouse, Eton College, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester, now these are elite and pupils here are just as likely to lump the afore mentioned lesser independent school in with the comps as scum to be mocked. They cost well over £30 grand a year and thats before all the additional costs are thrown in. Yes the facilities and quality of teaching are excellent, but that is only part of what you are paying for, the real 'value' in these schools comes from the connections pupils form that serve them throughout life, the stupendous sense of entitlement that is instilled in the pupils from day one and generally membership of club that is not grounded in reality.

Anyway, if public schools were banned the idea that Lord Wazcock Womble III and Lady Octavia Sloane are going to let their kids attend the local comp with the oiks is laughable. What you will see is that money pumped into private home tuition, property prices around grammar schools increasing even more, the establishing of 'free schools' that will curiously mirror the ethos of the shutdown public schools or kids just sent to boarding schools overseas.

 wintertree 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Having contemplated the thread some more, perhaps more could be achieved for society by shutting down the PPE degree at Oxford University...

 nniff 20 Sep 2019
In reply to wintertree:

I think that you have summed it up well.  As a further declaration of interest, my daughter runs the special educational needs department in the school.  Unashamedly, she got her first job at the school as a 'gappie' because Mum was the boss, but thereafter she's made her way on merit.

They have a significant number of kids who cannot get the educational support they need in the local state schools.  They also have those who could not get the educational support they needed at other prep schools.  They also have a significant number who could not get the emotional support they need and those who were being bullied elsewhere.

The one thing that is not discussed, not mentioned, when parents come on a tour is 'results'.  Most parents are surprised by this, but the reason is simple - the results are a given and each child will achieve the best that they are capable of, whether they struggle or fly, and those results outstrip the competition.

Go around any classroom and there will be regular chairs and then a range of weird balance stools and cushions for those who would otherwise fidget etc.  There is now a school dog - kids who find it hard to read, read to him fluently because he is non-judgmental.  He sits underneath the chairs of kids who get stressed doing maths and they stroke him to unwind.  Those who get upset, get a cuddle.  One little girl who was upset  by her big new school and didn't want to come in, took him for a little walk and then happily led him into school.

Most prep schools do 'exam week' before Easter.  Wife thinks they've done more than enough of that sort of stuff and so that cohort went whale watching off the Isle of Man instead (no extra charge for parents - and it was a bargain anyway because all the other schools were doing practice exams).  The jobs that many of these kids will do have not yet been invented, and those will probably disappear or change out of all recognition several times in their working lives.  They will need to know how to think, to analyse, to work out a problem etc far more that they need to know things.

 spidermonkey09 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

This has been an interesting thread, although I am yet to read the whole thing. One point which I feel compelled to challenge is one repeated by several people that those who send their kids to private schools are not 'well-off,' 'wealthy,' 'rich,' 'affluent,' as they are scrimping and saving and sacrificing in order to do this.

I am not saying they aren't saving, but I'd like to point out that the local private school down the road from where I lived as a child charges day fees of £6600 per term. That amounts to over £18,000 a year, and a quick google suggests the average is around £17,000.

Even if this overestimates the average, this is a significant amount of money and anyone who can maintain a life while also spending this amount per child (3 kids would be nearly £50k per year!) simply has to be classified as affluent I'm afraid. The vast majority of people simply do not have this money and could not even entertain the thought.

The average salary in the UK is £29,000 and a massive amount of people earn considerably less than that, myself included! I am perfectly willing to listen to the arguments in favour of private schools, even if I instinctively object to them, but it does irritate me when people talk about these sums of money like they're trivial. They aren't and people should reflect on it. If I ever have £18k spare every year then things are going a lot better than they are now!

Post edited at 15:11
1
 nniff 20 Sep 2019
In reply to spidermonkey09:

I wouldn't disagree - it is a lot of money.  It took all my wife's salary and a fair chunk of mine to fund the kids' schooling.  Think that through - she worked for 18 years just to put the kids though school - that's where all of her money went, every penny.

If we had not made that choice, things would have been very different, but we wouldn't have had it any other way.  The majority of parents at my wife's school have made the same choices. 

There is a spectrum though, and the school that I went to was well beyond our means.

A £29,000 annual salary (post tax) covers prep schools fees for one child (£15k) - so a couple each earning the average could do it if they were minded, and a lot at my wife's school do just that.   If you have more than one, then things get more difficult obviously.

 mnyateley 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

"Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce; they should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to it citizens,......"

The words of Aaron Sorkin, via the character Sam Seaborn in West Wing many years back now but it should be nailed over the door of the office of the Secretary of State for Education

 spidermonkey09 20 Sep 2019
In reply to nniff:

> I wouldn't disagree - it is a lot of money.  It took all my wife's salary and a fair chunk of mine to fund the kids' schooling.  Think that through - she worked for 18 years just to put the kids though school - that's where all of her money went, every penny.

> A £29,000 annual salary (post tax) covers prep schools fees for one child (£15k) - so a couple each earning the average could do it if they were minded, and a lot at my wife's school do just that.   If you have more than one, then things get more difficult obviously.

Is the 29k average really post tax? Happy to be convinced but I am sceptical. 

I am not in any way criticising your choice; if anything I respect it! What I am saying is that I would have to classify you and your wife as 'affluent' compared to the majority of the population. I don't think that option is actually available to many people; to totally write off one persons salary and live off circa 80% of the others is not representative I don't think. I just think the discussion has to be bear that in mind. What we are talking about is not a system of schooling available to the less wealthy. I instinctively object to such a system. 

 stevevans5 20 Sep 2019
In reply to spidermonkey09:

I think his point was that a 29k salary would pay 15k per year fees once you take the tax off

 spidermonkey09 20 Sep 2019
In reply to stevevans5:

I might be having a Friday afternoon moment, but I don't follow this. Obviously 15k is less than 29k, but my point is that a massive chunk of the population can't spare 50-70% of their income, no matter what sacrifices they make. 

 stevevans5 20 Sep 2019
In reply to spidermonkey09:

The logic was that with two incomes of 29k it would be possible. Seeing as median income is well below this I agree with your conclusion that it is not achievable for a large proportion of people, which is unsurprising considering the proportion of people this applies to!

 The New NickB 20 Sep 2019
In reply to nniff:

£29k a year post tax is way above the average salary. The ONS put average at £26k before tax and other deductions.  Someone receiving £29k after tax is actually earning £40k or so.

 nniff 20 Sep 2019
In reply to spidermonkey09:

I've no idea if £29,000 is the right number - it came from higher up the thread.  I do know that higher rate tax affects people who you would not normally think of as being higher rate earners though.

I suppose, like many things, choice is one of the great privileges of the developed world.  However, it is not equitable and is unlikely ever to be.  We are happy to accept choice in most other walks of life - walking, taking the bus, bicycle, fast Ford, family saloon or Maserati, £600/year on Sky or Freeview. 

One of the key elements of our commitment to the kids education was to give them choice, as much as we could - overtly to set them up so that they could do what they wanted to do and in that regard I think we have been successful.  Not one bit of it has been easy.  All through that period, of course, we left two obligations on the State to educate sitting idle, to be used elsewhere.

 stevieb 20 Sep 2019
In reply to nniff:

I gave the £29k post tax figure, but that was median household income, so is already based on multiple incomes. Two full time working parent households will presumably be higher than average households.

This link gives some useful figures. I've only skim read it, but it suggests that a household on the 95th percentile would have to pay 20% of their net income for one private school place, but a household on the median would pay 50% for one child.

It also seems to suggest lower down that average proportion of income for all children who do attend is around 15% of household income, suggesting a lot of people well above the 95th percentile. (and also a lot of discounted places)

https://www.llakes.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Green%2C%20Anders%2C%20Henders...

I agree with you that it is a totally valid choice for a parent, and every bit as valid as the Maserati, the private tutor, piano lessons, climbing lessons or skiing holidays. I have no problem with this as a parent's choice, but some people on this thread have made some pretty wild claims for its accessibility or its efficiency or its benefits to making a more equal society.

 Toby_W 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

What interesting reading.  I’m sat watching my daughter swim at a private school 50m pool her club uses on Fridays.  There is a huge shield in the cabinet next to me for some school competition going back to 1908.  A mix of schools, maybe half comprehensive, half private.  From the 70s onwards they are all private, rather sad  ☹️ 

cheers

Toby

Moley 20 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

An acquaintance called by today and talking about communities, schooling etc. we were surprised when he said his 4 year old daughter (eldest child) was attending the local college in the nursery section - a private school.

They hope to educate her there as long as possible to give her a good start in life. 3 times a week they go running, 3 laps of the sports fields, which she absolutely loves and is good at. They are keen on public speaking so she has addressed the class (sort of, today's weather or something) and gaining self confidence. There are 8 pupils to a class as opposed to about 20 in public education. Loads of extra curricular activities available like ballet, violin and many more, none expensive.

Is our friend upper class, wealthy? No, he is a manual worker on flood defences for NRW, not sure about his wife's job, but he said "I don't smoke, rarely drink, no holidays, so feel we want to give our daughter the best start in life through education and are prepared to make sacrifices.

Is there anything wrong in a working man making this choice? Will his daughter be looked down on in later life as "You went to a posh school so had it easy? If state schools cannot equal these facilities and standards why should they be denied to others?

 Andy Clarke 21 Sep 2019
In reply to Jamie Wakeham:

> It seems to be an axiom of the whole debate that private education is somehow 'better', and that to lose those institutions is somehow throwing that 'better' pedagogy away.  It's absolutely not true.  There is nothing that a decent state school head can learn from the independent down the road, other than 'oh - so this is what I could achieve if I had 50% more staff, all paid 25% more than the going rate, and only had to pick the nicest pupils'... the idea that there's some magic formula to be found in the private sector is truly infuriating to me.

I absolutely agree. As the ex-head of an outstanding state comprehensive with a good record of getting kids into Oxbridge I never learnt a damn thing from the practices of private schools. I'd want to go through the exam results of any school - private or state - with a very fine value-added toothcomb before I assumed they had pedagogical ideas worth sharing. The inspirational, left-of-centre Director of Education for the county I worked in was very keen on state-private partnership and would regularly sigh at my antipathy. The best I could do for him was to allow our PE Dept to take our kids over to the local fee-payer once a year to thrash them at football.

 Olaf Prot 21 Sep 2019
In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:

> other than the likes of Diane Abbott, of course, who happily lives with the screaming hypocrisy of calling parents who privately educate their children as "indefensible, and intellectually incoherent", before she then sent her own son to an independent school!)

Not hypocritical at all as it's an unusually aware self-description by Abbott, although just "incoherent" would have done...

 sheelba 22 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

So this question caught my interest given the stated assumption in the OP, that most of the 'best schools in the country' are private. Using the only comparable metric (progress from GCSE to A-level, GCSE results are not comparable and this removes to a certain extent bias in selection procedures) and removing schools with less than 100 students entered for A-levels (which is a mix of state and independent schools) the top five schools are:

Abbey College - independent 

Hurtwood House - independent 

Brampton Manor Academy - state

Anold Hill Academy - state 

d'Overbrocks - independent 

Of the next five four are state schools and one independent. Four out of ten is certainly not 'most' nor is three out of five. 

And so it appears that the assumption does not hold private schools are not the best schools in the country if you judge better to be purely based on exam results regardless of inequities in funding. 

 Robert Durran 22 Sep 2019
In reply to sheelba:

> So this question caught my interest given the stated assumption in the OP, that most of the 'best schools in the country' are private. Using the only comparable metric (progress from GCSE to A-level, GCSE results are not comparable and this removes to a certain extent bias in selection procedures)

What do you mean by "progress from GCSE to A-Level" and why is it the only "comparable metric" (whatever that means).

 sheelba 22 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

See here for a much more detailed and rigorous analysis https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2017/08/can-we-compare-the-a-level-perfo...

It suggests that private schools do slightly better on average, however because the intakes are different you are not comparing like for like. Certainly not strong enough evidence to claim that ‘most of the best schools’ are private.

Post edited at 19:10
 Postmanpat 23 Sep 2019
In reply to Jon Stewart:

> Thanks. 

> But what would the effect on outcomes overall be? There'd still be the same number of places in the top universities, and that's where people get the training to do the top jobs. So the places would go to the best students, who would have been educated somewhere else (in a state rater than a private school).

>

  Yes, I think the pupils currently taught a independent schools focused on getting the best out of motivated middle class kids will benefit from being in that environment. I don't think that forcing them into an environment where they are outliers rather than the norm will be beneficial for them or the existing pupils.  In any case, what will happen is that wealthier parents will game the system to ensure that their kids get into the best state schools thus  sustaining  educational apartheid but this time at the expense of the taxpayer and the would be homebuyer. (I suspect the socialist answer to this would be some form of compulsory "bussing")

  Thus overall the benchmark of achievement would be lowered and the level of pupils going into university would be lowered.

  Of course, that is an opinion, based on anecdotal evidence, but then again so is yours.

OP ClimberEd 23 Sep 2019
In reply to sheelba:

Did you read the thread? I consider exam results only a part of what makes a 'best school'. 

 DancingOnRock 23 Sep 2019
In reply to ClimberEd:

Ironically they’re not abolishing Universities. The largest charitable private educational establishments around. 

 fred99 23 Sep 2019
In reply to DancingOnRock:

> Ironically they’re not abolishing Universities. The largest charitable private educational establishments around. 


What do you expect - didn't pretty well all of them go to one.

 Jon Stewart 23 Sep 2019
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   Yes, I think the pupils currently taught a independent schools focused on getting the best out of motivated middle class kids will benefit from being in that environment.

I think it's probably a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, with more resources and a higher overall level of achievement (due to, as Coel says, the bottom half of the cohort simply not being there), that will make it easier for those kids to get good grades. But on the other, it seems to me like a segregated, molly-coddled environment which narrows their experience of the world.

My perspective here is obviously strongly skewed by personal experience: I went to a lively, diverse state school and left with straight As at GCSE and A levels - I wouldn't have gained anything by having more resources and being surrounded by posher classmates, I'd have just ended up knowing less about the world I lived in and the people who live in it.

It seems to me that the real benefit of private schooling goes to those kids who aren't really that gifted, as they seem to need additional resources in order to get the same grades I did. I would have thought that a school would have to be really crap to actually lower the achievement of the top students - and I wouldn't want to send my kids to that kind of school, obviously. 

> I don't think that forcing them into an environment where they are outliers rather than the norm will be beneficial for them or the existing pupils. 

I don't think they'd benefit from going into a really rough school where they were outliers. But I don't think they would be in any half decent state school. Me and my peers at the top of my normal, northern state school, would, statistically speaking in terms of the grades we achieved, have shat all over the average private school kid. You seem to be underestimating how many clever kids there are out there in the state system!

And I do think that the more clever kids a school has, the better for all the pupils in the school. Especially if they're normal kids from normal families and aren't somehow segregated and presented as a different "breed" from the others.

> In any case, what will happen is that wealthier parents will game the system to ensure that their kids get into the best state schools thus  sustaining  educational apartheid but this time at the expense of the taxpayer and the would be homebuyer.

That's true, and why I think the abolition policy is wrong. But I would want to see some kind of gradual phasing out of private education by making it obsolete. 

> (I suspect the socialist answer to this would be some form of compulsory "bussing")

History's against that!

>   Thus overall the benchmark of achievement would be lowered and the level of pupils going into university would be lowered.

Well no. Possibly some kids scraping As with a lot of support would be getting Bs instead. That's not about the benchmark of achievement, that's about coaching some people to take up the sought-after opportunities but not others, dependent on the wealth of their parents. It's not desirable.

And if you want to talk about the top 0.001% not just the top percentile getting Oxbridge grades, then the state sector should perhaps provide something for the insanely gifted (those who learn Chinese in their lunchbreak) that it doesn't already - those kids don't justify the whole existence of the private school sector.

Post edited at 23:05

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