We need to take the issue of private school reform seriously

(Photo: Peter Dench/Getty Images Reportage)

Around seven per cent of the population receive private education yet they make up more than 40 per cent of students at Oxford and Cambridge University.

The same goes for 70 per cent of the top judiciary, 67 per cent of British Oscar winners, 60 per cent of top doctors and one third of the Cabinet.

If you went to one of the top nine private schools in the country, you are 94 times more likely to end up in Who’s Who, the compendium of ‘noteworthy and influential’ people.

Will this ever change? Recent years have seen demand for private school reform coming from some unlikely places. Before he returned to the Cabinet, Michael Gove called for an end to the charitable status and tax breaks that private schools receive and so has the Conservative Chair of the Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon.




These calls for change will be enhanced by an important new book, Engines of Privilege, written by Francis Green and eminent historian David Kynaston. The book is impressive in its sweep of history (it points out that many of these schools were originally established to help the poor), forensic examination of how skewed these schools’ intake is to the richest in our society and discussion of possible reforms.

It can feel that to even raise this issue is an attack on the decisions of parents who send their children to private school or worse, the children that go there. That should not, indeed must not, be what this debate is about.

Of course, parents will want to do the best by their kids as they see it. The question is not parents’ choices but society’s decisions about how private schools are funded, organised and who attends them.

Raise the price of private schooling, lower the advantage, or change the intake.

At the moment, private schools enable parents to buy a much more expensively funded education (three times better funded on average than state schools, according to Kynaston and Green), which in turn is likely to give them much better chances of getting on in life. What’s more we, the taxpayer, are subsidising this through the long-standing provision of charitable status.

The evidence from around the world is also that more stratified educational systems don’t just give a leg up to those at the top but also make educational outcomes worse for the rest.

In part this is because the state system is deprived of the social, educational and other capital from the wealthiest being educated together with everyone else. Private school reform isn’t about undermining excellence, contrary to defenders of the status quo, but how you achieve it across your educational system.

If we want to tackle huge inequality and our very low levels of social mobility, reform is needed. Engines of Privilege spells out three sets of options for change: raise the price of private schooling, lower the advantage, or change the intake.

First, on charitable status, these schools are a long, long way from their original mission to help the poorest. As the book points out, one per cent of those who attend private schools are fully funded, through bursary schemes, and therefore pay no tuition.



It seems very hard to justify a private school getting relief on its business rates while the state school down the road is not receiving it. The last Labour manifesto proposed putting VAT on private school fees with the money going to provide free school meals for every primary school child. This, and similar transfers of income, could make a big difference to the state sector.

Secondly, we need to look at the advantages that come from private schooling. The reality is that, other things equal, it is a much tougher ask to get top A-level grades from a state school with one-third of the resources of a private school.

This has led to the limited use of ‘contextual admissions’ in university entrance which takes account of where someone went to school and their social background. The education select committee recently called for them to be more widely used, and they are right.

Thirdly, there needs to be a deeper debate about the whole relationship of private schools to the wider school system, including who goes. Author Melissa Benn has argued that if private schools are to be forced to admit more pupils currently in the state sector, these should be young people who need educational support the most: children in care and those on free school meals. This is just one of the many ideas around.

We should also look internationally for lessons. Until the 1970s, Finland had a deeply stratified, unequal educational system, with a significant proportion of people attending private schools. They have become one of the leading educational countries in the world, in part because they have integrated the state and private sectors, with pupils admitted on the same basis at both without the charging of fees.


There are many reasons for inequality and disadvantage in our society. If we are to truly make ourselves a more equal, successful country, none of them can be ignored. It may be hard but that’s why we need to take the issue of private school reform seriously.

MORE: My teachers advised me against applying for Cambridge – a year on, I’ve just been accepted

MORE: Until school hair policies take race into account, they remain tools of white oppression

MORE: There’s a dating app exclusively for people who went to private school