A FRESH move to bridge the growing gulf between private and state education is launched today by the educational philanthropist Peter Lampl. In a report, published by his Sutton Trust, he calls for Government support to open up 12 independent day schools to pupils from all backgrounds.
He wants state funding for more “open access” schemes of the kind he has pioneered at Liverpool’s Belvedere school for girls.
The Belvedere scheme, which started in September 2000, guarantees means-tested help with fees for any girl who gets in and needs it. It is funded jointly by Mr Lampl’s Sutton Trust and the Girls’ Day School Trust. In the first two years, more than a third (35 per cent) of the girls admitted have had full fee remission and 40 per cent have had partial help.
The report, Educational Apartheid: A Practical Way Forward, argues that the polarisation between the two sectors now goes right from nursery to sixth form, with more and more independent schools starting their own junior schools and a rapid growth in private nurseries. It says 85 of the top 100 schools in A-level league tables are independent and nearly a quarter of students admitted to Oxbridge come from the top 100 independent day schools.
It also shows that private schools are getting the lion’s share of the country’s most highly qualified teachers and of teachers in shortage subjects such as mathematics and modern languages. Because of their better pupil-teacher ratios, private schools absorb 13 per cent of the country’s teachers for their 7 per cent of pupils.
The report may strike a chord with the Fettes-educated Prime Minister and with the head of his policy unit, Andrew Adonis, who keeps in touch with Mr Lampl. In A Class Act, the book Mr Adonis wrote with Stephen Pollard in 1997, he identified the divided education system as the single biggest engine of social segregation in Britain and urged links between the two sectors of the kind that exist in the health service.
But one of Labour’s first moves on coming into office was to abolish the Assisted Places Scheme, so it cannot yet support any scheme that could be seen as a replacement.
Ministers were noticeably cool towards the Independent Schools Council’s proposals, launched earlier this year, to bring in state support for pupils from low-income families at independent schools. Under the OASIS (Open Access to Schools in the Independent Sector) scheme, the Government would fund places at state-spending level, with the schools themselves paying the rest of the fees. Mr Lampl criticises the scheme because it would apply to only a minority of entrants to the schools taking part and would thus not constitute real “open access”.
Report available free from the Sutton Trust, Heritage House, 21 Inner Park Road, London SW19 6ED or from the website at www.suttontrust.com
