The Scottish government is refusing to release correspondence showing the Prince of Wales lobbied ministers to loosen up strict rules on teacher training for a charity that stands to earn money from the changes.

Ministers have rejected three requests to publish letters and documents from Prince Charles’s office supporting proposals from Teach First, a charity he helped set up 15 years ago, to introduce fast-track teacher training in Scotland.

Clarence House should release Prince Charles’s Scottish spider memos | David McClure Read more

It comes at a time when the Scottish government is on the brink of announcing a £1m scheme to accelerate training in Scotland amid a shortage of suitable graduates, allowing new providers to enter the market.

Teach First said it has expressed its interest in bidding for the new contract to supply teachers in Scotland, and would earn a fee for every person it recruits if it wins. In England, where the charity has recruited more than 10,000 teachers for state schools and academies, it earns £2,600 for each trainee.

Prince Charles has served as Teach First’s patron since it was founded in 2002 with the aim of recruiting teachers for inner city schools that struggle to find teachers. It fast-tracks university graduates through a six-week training course, who then continue training in the classroom.



A handful of the prince’s “black spider” handwritten letters, written to UK ministers in 2004 and 2005, were released after the Guardian won a 10-year legal battle to have them disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. But the law in England and Wales on the disclosure of royal correspondence has since been tightened substantially, meaning they no longer have to be made public.

Scottish ministers have said the Scotland’s FoI rules on royal correspondence remain more open than the rest of the UK, and were not tightened after the black spider memo case. But civil rights activists say that claim is undermined by the Scottish government’s decision in this case.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A copy of a letter that Charles wrote to Tony Blair when he was PM, one of a series of private letters to government. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Maurice Frankel, the director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, said there was a clear conflict of interest if the prince was lobbying on behalf of a charity he patronised and which would gain financially from that lobbying.

“There is a powerful case for access to his advocacy correspondence, full stop,” Frankel said. “We’re talking about a specific policy which it turns out will financially benefit the organisation about which he is expressing those views. That says ‘conflict of interest’ in very large letters.”

An investigation by the Guardian shows the Scottish government was first lobbied by the prince in April 2012. That same day Teach First also sent the then Scottish education secretary, Mike Russell, a briefing advocating significant changes to Scotland’s teacher training system.

Russell attended a Teach First reception at Holyrood four weeks later, according to Scottish government records that are publicly available. He instructed his officials to keep in contact with the charity while they talked to the General Teaching Council Scotland about its proposals. One document notes Russell “would like to be kept closely informed of developments”, although progress was slowed by the independence referendum in 2014.

The issue of changes to teaching in Scotland is a highly charged one. Although the English and Welsh systems have been deregulated, the Scottish profession is highly protective of its state education system and the strict rules governing teacher training.

Scottish secondary school teachers must have a university degree in the specialist subject they teach and a one-year graduate diploma taught at a university. Teach First has proposed instead a five-week summer course before its Scottish trainees are placed in the classroom, similar to its English and Welsh model.



Iain Gray, Scottish Labour’s education spokesman, said: “The pattern of communication with Teach First directly and with the Prince of Wales on their behalf can only raise questions of policy being made as a result of pressure, and these concerns must be dispelled or otherwise by disclosure of the correspondence.”



The official records show Teach First kept lobbying the Scottish government. Civil servants have redacted further correspondence and briefing papers from 2012, 2013 and 2014 on the grounds they relate to the Prince of Wales. One of those is a letter from Russell to Teach First; another is a Scottish government briefing pack on the charity.

Even though Scottish ministers insist they weigh up the public interest very carefully when it comes to correspondence from the royal household, in this case they have applied a unique exemption under section 41(a) in the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, on all documents mentioning the Prince of Wales.

Two requests were made to the Scottish government to release the correspondence under the act, followed up by a media request from the Guardian to make them public. But the Scottish government said it had applied the royal exemption because the material related to “communications with HRH the Prince Charles, the Duke of Rothesay”.

Officials at Clarence House in London also refused to release the material voluntarily, and refused to comment. The prince’s officials are sticking to their policy not to release correspondence from him which they say is private, and refuse to deny that the letters came from his private office. Teach First referred inquiries about his role to Clarence House.



A Scottish government spokesman said: “The primary aim of the development of new routes into teaching is to broaden the range of people entering the teaching profession, not fast-tracking the qualification of new teachers.

“Any new route into teaching must be accredited by the General Teaching Council for Scotland and will require a partnership with a university.”