Private School Conversion Therapy

In the 1940s, Americans were encouraged to smoke Camels as an aid to digestion. The ‘increased alkalinity’ was particularly good for you, apparently. Smoking wasn’t just regarded as innocuous, it was seen as positively beneficial. Light up on any street today, and you become a social pariah, polluting the air and draining the NHS of resources, selfishly taking doctors away from the sick kid who needs a heart transplant and making them tend to your odious blackened lungs instead. My point is, social attitudes change over time. And what one generation regards as harmless, even a force for good, future generations may come to view as socially undesirable.

Last night I attended a debate put on by the Private School Policy Reform (PSPR) group, who are valiantly trying to establish some kind of meaningful direction for future reform of the independent education sector. Six speakers offered their proposals for how they would level the playing field. There was a brief discussion, followed by a vote that yielded these results:

Image courtesy of @cathmurray_. Personally, I voted for the second option, proposed by Hans Broekman.

The more unpopular proposals (in the room at least) seemed to leave the system largely unchanged. Enhanced collaboration between the two sectors, widening access to Universities. The winner, as I suspected it might be, was the one which made the most significant attempt to redress the systemic imbalance of resources between private and comprehensive schools. In Carl Smith’s strongly argued case, we were asked to imagine that each student had, say, £5k that could be spent on their education. Those who then wanted to take their student out of the comprehensive system would effectively forgo that £5k, which would then be added to the pot of money available to comprehensive schools. He envisaged this would raise approximately £3.5bn. Here’s why I don’t think this would work. Followed by what I think might.

“They already do that. Roughly £5k pa that is available to state school pupils but not ones at independent schools.” (Lord Ralph Lucas, backbench Conservative peer)

“Parents of children at private school not only free up state school places, but they pay for them as well.” (John, Twitter user)

These were the statements posted on Twitter in immediate response to Carl's winning proposition. Regardless of whether or not you agree with either of them, and they are each flawed in their own way, this is the kind of argument anyone would have to deal with when trying to push through reforms like this. We can't avoid the fact that a lot of people genuinely seem to believe that parents who ‘take their children out of the state sector’ think that they are doing state schools a favour. They argue that private schools deserve their charitable status because it means that state schools have fewer children to educate. And that we state school teachers should be grateful for this.

We are not, obviously. Why? Because it divides two children into two groups, one that is characterised by a wealth of connections and resources, esteem, the knowledge that they are statistically very likely to be successful. And one that isn’t. It may surprise some people (but not state school teachers) to hear that such a division does not make it easier to teach the latter group.

Carl Smith offered the most impassioned attack of the night on the inequities of a segregated school system.

Selective schools are vehicles for preserving status and shutting down social mobility. In doing so they create areas of entrenched disadvantage. They are a social ill, for which we all have to pay the price at some point. Like drinking, or smoking. And just like with these vices, we will all have to pay for the burden that low social mobility and inter-generational deprivation places on the health system, on the justice system, the costs of unemployment, the cost to economic growth, the waste of talent.

In this context, if we agree that ‘banning’ private schools is too restrictive on individual freedoms, then they should at least be presented as being socially and economically undesirable in the long-term. And thus, just like cigarettes, more and more people will gradually come to accept the need for them to be taxed and regulated. And once we start doing this, it becomes increasingly attractive for school leaders to follow Hans Broekman’s inspirational example of converting their selective schools into non-selective academies.

Hans Broekman, Head of Liverpool College. When he converted his private school to a state-run academy, Andrew Adonis described it as "perhaps the biggest single breach in the Berlin Wall between the private and state sectors."

I loved Hans' idea of creating a dedicated unit for helping schools who wanted to convert, along with the carrot and stick approach to encouraging conversion. He added some extra twigs to the stick too which I hadn't considered, as well as the VAT and removal of tax exemptions: repaying the state money spent on training their teaching staff; disqualifying for the state-run teacher's pension scheme. Not to punish private schools, but to do what good fiscal policy is always designed to do - direct people towards behaviours that are socially advantageous.

Perhaps only a few at first, but if they are successful then it seems inevitable that more and more schools would choose to convert. I imagine it being on the whole supported by staff; as was often said last night, no-one really goes into teaching wanting to only educate children from wealthy families. A local, vocal minority of parents would object, of course, but they would be outnumbered by the (quiet) majority of parents whose children would now have access to these formerly selective schools. Parents of children who would have otherwise had to walk past the decorated gates of these schools, sensing that they somehow weren't worthy enough to go in, but without ever really understanding why. They may not have the strength of voice, or size of platform, but so many parents would benefit from a private-state conversion; perhaps we should be working to amplify these voices that have so far remained on the margins of this debate, in something resembling a deferential silence.

In short, by creating the conditions in which selective schools are choosing to convert to non-selective academies, we wouldn’t need to talk about ‘abolishing’ anything, or worry about thousands of private school kids flooding our comprehensives. We would simply see schools continuing to operate largely as they are, preserving to a large degree their academic success (as Liverpool college has done since the fees were dropped), but moving away from an admissions policy that is highly divisive and discriminatory, towards one that instead places the highest value on social justice and equality of opportunity.