Private school for £52 a week

When plans for a Scottish version of free schools hit the buffers this summer, you might have expected their backers to disappear.

Instead, Tes Scotland can reveal, they have come up with another radical plan to address a “dearth of innovation” in the Scottish education system: budget private schools.

In an interview, the man heading up the scheme has claimed that a “no-frills” approach can deliver education better for a fraction of the cost of what he describes as the Scottish education “blob”.

One of the biggest critics of the previous plans, however, has dismissed the fresh proposals as “vague platitudes” from a “discredited” organisation.

Bill Nicol is director of the new Schools Educational Trust (SET), which will be officially launched in Edinburgh on 8 November, and also headed up the Hometown Foundation’s campaign for state-funded schools run outwith local authorities, an idea rejected by the government’s report on the Education Governance Review in June.

The launch event, billed as “Improving the Quality of School Education in Scotland”, will be chaired by former CBI director Lord Digby Jones. Another speaker is James Tooley, a Newcastle University professor of education policy described in an event programme as a “founder of low-cost independent schools in England”. He is behind plans for a school in Durham that is yet to open but whose website (igsdurham.com) promises “a private education for £52 a week”.

This is the inspiration for the Scottish plans which, Mr Nicol says, would enable new schools to charge just £2,700 a year, with costs kept down by a central support system more efficient than local authorities’, although he conceded the plans are “not that refined at this stage”.

The SET website (bit.ly/SETsite) includes a supportive article from Conservative education spokeswoman Liz Smith, who says “we should be doing all we can to support [this] progressive Scottish registered charity”.

‘Improving attainment’

The SET would be “solely focused on improving educational attainment” through “high-quality, no-frills education” with “added benefits and innovations for half the cost [of state-funded schools]”, Mr Nicol said.

He cites the Al Qalam School in Glasgow - part of the old proposals, now helping to shape the new model - as an example of innovation, with its S1-2 technology specialisms including artificial intelligence, web development and robotics.

He proposes to start the trust with a small all-through school in Edinburgh. It would be “egalitarian” school, he said, explaining that joining such schools would not be based on ability to pay, as “some sort of means-tested voucher system” would be used. He claimed that more than 100 businesses had expressed an interest in supporting the venture.

He decried the “blob”, a word he applied to the infrastructure of Scottish state education, which he claimed was costing far more than it should. Ultimately, a “natural consequence” of his model, if successful, would be a system with no schools run by local authorities.

“Why would you continue to fund the state system…if you can provide a product that is competitive in the market, that’s got better outcomes and costs less?” he asked, adding that the flexibility of SET would even lead to “more caring and responsive pupils”.

He said that many teachers he had spoken to “love this [SET] model” and invited members of the profession at all levels to next month’s event, but he added that teaching unions were likely to be hostile. “By and large, the unions are there to protect hopeless teachers,” he claimed.

The EIS teaching union declined to provide a response to this comment.

‘Culture of compliance’

Another speaker at next month’s event in the Radisson Blu hotel is educationalist Frank Lennon, a former secondary headteacher in the state sector.

He said that while he would not describe himself as an enthusiast for private education, he strongly believes there is a need for “more diversity” in the schools system, which, be believes, is currently held back by a culture of “compliance and conformity”.

Journalist, further education lecturer and former schoolteacher James McEnaney - one of the biggest critics of the plans that were thrown out in June - was no more enthused by the new proposals.

He said: “This looks like little more than a front for the discredited - and rejected - work of the Hometown Foundation, whose failed proposals for Scottish free schools have, thankfully, been rejected by the Scottish government.

“It is founded upon the same vague platitudes and hollow, ideological assumptions.”

Mr Nicol initially thought that the new model “might be threatening to private schools”, but said this had not been the case.

John Edward, director of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS), said that it was not supporting or opposing the plans, but added: “There is plenty of space in the educational firmament. I don’t see it necessarily taking any pupils off the existing [independent] schools.”

@Henry_Hepburn