have never bought the argument that the growth in private education over the past 20 or 30 years denotes a new parental dissatisfaction with the state sector. Given social developments, the scale of the switch to private education is more or less what might have been predicted.
First, the middle classes have swelled enormously while the manual working classes have declined. As people get middle-class jobs and incomes, they acquire middle-class aspirations and consumption patterns. The growth of private education was as inevitable as that of owner occupation, and the decline of working-men’s clubs.
The second factor is the growth of sexual equality. It was once common for well-heeled families to school boys privately but not girls. Such discrimination is now almost unthinkable.
The third factor is the emergence of a multi-ethnic society. I am sorry to say that many white parents will do almost anything to avoid their children mixing with blacks. This is not to deny that some private schools take large numbers of ethnic-minority children (particularly from homes of Asian background) but they will rarely be more than a smallish minority. The same has happened in the US. The belief that all Americans use the local high school remains correct only in exclusively white areas. In the old South, in California and in the northern cities, private schools boomed once blacks escaped segregation. There, as here, people blame falling standards in state schools. It is all hypocritical piffle.
But now there is a new phenomenon. Again, people will wrongly blame state school standards; again, it should have been predicted. In London particularly, it is becoming common for middle-class parents in the state sector to have their children privately tutored outside school hours. In some London primary schools, more than half the pupils have at least 18 months of private coaching before they sit their SATs at 11.
The evidence was detailed in the New Statesman last week. I have to admit that when the author, Jenni Russell, first approached me, I was sceptical.
After all, a few ambitious parents have always gone in for private tuition. But I had not realised the scale of it, nor had I realised the appalling implications that Russell spelled out.
If so many children are being tutored so intensively, the Government’s entire strategy for raising standards - testing children at 11, monitoring the results and publishing league tables - becomes even more of a nonsense than I thought it was. In many cases, the results will have far more to do with private tutors than with the school’s teachers.
And if middle-class parents buy one-to-one private tuition for their children, what hope is there for equality of opportunity? Nothing we do by way of pouring resources into deprived schools or persuading affluent parents into comprehensives is going to make more than a marginal difference. We can offer working-class children pre-schooling and their parents tips on how to stimulate their offspring; but there is not a hope in hell that more than a few will ever be able to afford private tutoring.
To repeat: we should have predicted it. If we test children almost every time they draw breath; if we insist on setting them almost as soon as they enter secondary school; if we preserve a smattering of selective schools; if we make career prospects so dependent on exam results - then parents will want to guarantee their children the top marks.
We had best stop worrying about any political plans to privatise state education. The parents are doing it now.
Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman
