While the public row rumbles on about education, private schools, charitable status and the Green Paper, Schools that work for everyone, a new angle makes uncomfortable reading for policymakers. As parents in England and Wales receive news of the school places offered (or not) to their children for September, a Teach First analysis reveals that 43 per cent of pupils at England’s outstanding secondaries come from the wealthiest 20 per cent of the population.

At the same time, a Sutton Trust study finds poorer children much less likely to gain places at the top 500 comprehensives: over 85 per cent of schools in that top 500 took a smaller proportion of disadvantaged pupils than actually lived in their immediate areas. The Trust blames “social selection” through faith school status or house prices.

I’m about to have a pop neither at those schools nor at the “sharp-elbowed middle classes” (an unpleasant Cameron phrase) who readily colonise them.

This is a confused picture, and it’s unhelpful for the government robot - sorry, spokesperson - to repeat glibly: “We plan to create more good school places in more parts of the country by scrapping the ban on new grammar schools, as well as harnessing the expertise and resources of our universities, and our independent and faith schools.”

Government reiterates its mantra that a good school is a selective school. But is the reverse true? Does it follow that a selective school is of its nature good, but a non-selective school less likely to be good? The sloppy thinking behind the Green Paper continues.

Next government leans on universities, independent and faith schools to solve a problem - more than half a million school places to be found in the next few years - that is far beyond the resources of those three groups to tackle. It should be the government’s job.

I must declare an interest as an independent school head. However I’m committed to ensuring that my school does its bit in its area to share expertise and resources where it reasonably can and to play its part in the system as a whole.

I’m not attempting some feeble self-justification, merely observing that many independent schools like mine do what they can: we wrangle with government about the Green Paper because we don’t think diktat or benchmarks the right way to go encourage our collaboration. Nonetheless, my school and sector can make little impact on these enormous national needs, and government is both disingenuous and dishonest to attempt to portray us as the villains in this piece.

After Michael Gove sought afresh in The Times to spread hot air and confusion about charitable status and “tax breaks” (on the latter, his polemic was startlingly short on accuracy and detail), it’s worth revisiting the whole idea of education as a charitable purpose, something enshrined in English statute since 1601. Elizabeth I’s law-makers drew up a splendid and far-sighted list of charitable purposes:

“… the relief of aged, impotent, and poor people; the maintenance of sick and maimed soldiers and mariners; schools of learning; free schools and scholars in universities; the repair of bridges, ports, havens, causeways, churches, sea banks, and highways; the education and preferment of orphans; the relief, stock, or maintenance of houses of correction; marriages of poor maids; support, aid, and help of young tradesmen, handicraftsmen and persons decayed…”

Though the 1601 Act was repealed in 1888, Lord McNaughten preserved the concept of the advancement of education as a charitable purpose, something still defined on the government’s website as “to promote, sustain and increase individual and collective knowledge and understanding of specific areas of study, skills and expertise.”

What all schools do, private and state alike, remains a charitable activity, as does the work of universities. We can and do strive to work together effectively and to contribute to one education system.

Above all, we advance education. Yet, Nero-like, government fiddles (and issues platitudinous statements) while Rome burns, schools face funding collapse and great injustice is done in the allocation of insufficient school places. It’s our rulers, not we bit-players, who risk failing to advance education, thus betraying its charitable, its central and sacred purpose.

Dr Bernard Trafford is headteacher of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne and a former chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets at @bernardtrafford

To read more columns, view his back catalogue.

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