Independent Schools: Variety and Diversity

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, we should all be indebted to my noble friend Lord Lexden for giving us possibly the last opportunity in this Parliament to highlight the vital role of independent schools in the education sector and the contribution they make to civil society. Those of us who have had the good fortune to know him for many years, to have heard his erudite contributions in this House, and indeed to follow him on his remarkable website, know that the issue about which he feels most passionately is Ulster. But a very close second is independent education, a cause for which he has always been a formidable and authoritative champion.

I attended Brentwood School in Essex, where I received a first-class education that has been the foundation of all that I have done since. When I came to this House, one of the reasons I chose the title I did was because of my affection for my old school. I am now honoured to be a governor there, and I declare my interest accordingly. When I joined the school in 1971, it was a direct grant school. My parents could not have afforded to send me there otherwise. Direct grant schools were a very important part of our education system because in so many ways they neatly bridged the gap between the maintained sector and private education. I still believe that the abolition of direct grant status was a terrible act of educational vandalism.

But every cloud has a silver lining and for schools such as Brentwood, which were in effect forced into the private sector, independent status has proved to be of huge importance and value. The reason for that is this: genuine independence from the state and from the taxpayer has been the spur to innovation, and innovation has in turn been the engine of the diversity and variety that are the hallmark of the independent sector today. It is those three attributes that are the secret of success.

Your Lordships should think of it this way: independence means being judged every day on so many things—the standard of teaching, the provision of up-to-date facilities, the level of pastoral care, after-school activities, the quality of engagement with pupils and the effectiveness of communication with parents. Independent schools have to pass all those tests—and many more—every day or they fail. That so many of them are, like Brentwood, highly successful schools shows how effectively they meet these daily demands. As I said just now, crucial to that is the ability to innovate at the same time as preserving the tradition and heritage that are so valued by parents. Experimentation, original thought and the most up-to-date digital technology all sit alongside a respect for institutional history and custom, and a culture of excellence engrained over generations.

In this context, for a school like Brentwood, that means embracing systems such as the “diamond structure”, in which girls and boys are educated in single-gender groups from 11 to 16 and in a fully co-educational context post-16. It means championing a holistic approach to education, placing personal and social development, the importance of music, art, sport and community service alongside academic achievement. And it means the ability to offer ground-breaking curriculum alternatives such as the international baccalaureate diploma programme as well as international GCSEs, the rigour of which have underlined the general problem of grade inflation. Indeed, it seems to me that the innovation of the independent sector in championing these alternatives has been one of the spurs to the changes in the examination system that have been a key part of the Government’s education reforms.

As my noble friend Lord Lexden reminded us, schools across the independent sector come in many shapes and sizes, with often radically differing ethos and organisation; but they share in common a great deal. I have already talked about their educational fervour, appreciation of the value of independence and the immediacy of accountability. Another thing they share is a commitment to a diversity of pupils from different backgrounds. More than 28% of pupils at independent schools are from a minority ethnic background, which is 1.5% higher than in the state sector. When I visited my old prep school recently, I was struck by the extraordinary range of languages other than English spoken. I heard in the course of a morning Polish, Romanian, Italian and Spanish—something that brings a rich cultural diversity and global perspective to young minds and outlooks.

Perhaps most vitally, all independent schools have done a huge amount over the years to make entrance to them accessible to anyone who really wants to get there. Direct grant status helped my parents, whose living came only from a shoe shop in Upminster, to get me there. Today, that opportunity comes from a very generous system of bursaries for families who have trouble finding the fees and which has become a hallmark of the sector. These bursaries have been built up by generations of philanthropists and former pupils. For many existing pupils, means-tested bursaries throughout the sector are worth an average of £7,984 per year. More than 5,000 pupils at ISC schools pay no fees at all. I say to my noble friend Lord Storey that he is absolutely right to talk about social mobility. That is one aspect of social mobility in action.

More than a century ago, my grandfather attended Christ’s Hospital—a school with a long and distinguished history of reaching out to families of modest means. Today, it offers more bursaries than any other independent boarding school with just under 80% of its 680 pupils receiving support, and 123 getting full fee remission. Last year, it spent £16 million on means-tested purposes, a staggering sum, showing how seriously it, in common with other independent schools, takes its wider civil obligations and its charitable status.

As well as bursaries to enable greater access to children of all backgrounds, independent schools reach out to the wider community. Some, such as my own school, extend a helping hand to maintained schools wishing to start, for instance, their own combined cadet force. Others offer specialist Oxbridge tuition and assist local authorities to teach subjects in which specialist teachers are in short supply. In all these areas, independent schools are using the variety and diversity—and indeed the excellence—among them to expand diversity and variety within the maintained sector.

I hope what this excellent debate will achieve is to highlight three things: first, that the independent schools of today are a light-year away from the image many in this House may have had of private schools in the past. As the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said, they have reinvented themselves, as they have done many times. They are modern, multicultural, diverse, home to cutting-edge digital technology and learning, and, above all, open to the gifted and ambitious whatever their background. Secondly, they take with the utmost seriousness the responsibilities from their charitable status, both through bursaries and wider community involvement. Thirdly and finally, as a result of their priceless independence from government, they add to the diversity and variety of our education system and, above all, of our society as a whole.