Guide to Independent Schools

Transcription

Guide to Independent Schools
September 2012
In association with
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Gold standard
We’re often told about disparity in education: more than a third of British
members of parliament went to private school, and so did 70 per cent of
judges and more than a third of our Olympic medallists. It is right that
such facts prompt anger. Britain’s education ‘attainment gap’ is too great;
the state sector fails too many children. Something must be done.
Yet many politicians and commentators, in their determination to level
the playing field, seem eager not to make bad schools better, but to make
good schools worse. British education, it is said, suffers from ‘elitism’.
In this supplement, kindly sponsored by Brewin Dolphin, we take a
different view. We want to applaud Britain’s independent schools rather
than snipe at them, and to guide grandparents, parents and children who
might be considering private education.
We are not elitist, but we do think that Britain’s state schools could
profit from trying to emulate the best private schools.
In these pages, the headmaster John Moule argues that the success of
independent school alumni at the Olympics should be hailed as a triumph;
Harry Phibbs describes the emergence of better-value, ‘no frills’ private
schools, Ross Clark marvels at how public schools have transformed
in recent years; Robert Gray looks at boys’ clubs, a precursor to publicschool-sponsored state academies; and Matthew Parris urges private
schools to do more to help the state sector.
There’s lots more, too, all intended to inform and entertain. We hope
you enjoy reading it, and look out for our next guide in March 2013.
Editor
Freddy Gray
Drawings
John Jensen
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Sport and competition
John Moule
5
The new-look gap year Will Gore
25
Getting more for less
Harry Phibbs
8
Beyond the school play Tim Jelley
26
Boarding on a budget
James Delingpole 11
Career choices for girls
27
A triumph in publicity
Ross Clark
12
Foreign exchanges
Sophia Martelli
14
The public school effect Matthew Parris
16
Scholars in the slums
Robert Gray
School architecture
Harry Mount
Educational consultants Stephen Robinson 28
Female choristers
Will Heaven
30
18
Teaching literature
Sophia Waugh
32
20
Painting headmasters
Luke Martineau
34
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Contents_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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Camilla Swift
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GUIDE TO INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS | 8 SEPTEMBER 2012 | IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN
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Striving and thriving
Our public schools keep the spirit of competition alive, says John Moule
I
was never much good at sport. The pinnacle of my Olympian: in my case Phelan Hill, cox of the bronze
sporting career was being voted captain of the Sec- medal-winning VIII in rowing. A standard public school
ond XI football team at junior
sport, of course. More than half of
school. I could blame my educaTeam GB’s rowing medal winners
tion: it is pleasant to live under Independent schools go to
had the benefit of a private educathe illusion that, had I graced the great lengths to make their
tion, a fact that prompted chagrin
halls of an Eton or Harrow, rathamong media commentators.
facilities available to others
er than a comprehensive in TelAs ever, the debate is a little artiford, it might have been me at the
ficial and the guilt a little misplaced.
Olympics.
The town of Bedford bucked the national trend for priInstead, I am one of the guiltily proud public school vately educated medal-winners emphatically, with a
headmasters whose old boys’ network can boast an local-maintained school now able to add the names of
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More power to your elbow: athletes training on Eton’s rowing lake
Sam Oldham (gymnastics team bronze) and Etienne
Stott (canoe slalom gold) to its board of illustrious alumni. Here, at least, it’s 2-1 to the state sector.
But the fact that 50 per cent of our gold medal winners in the 2008 Beijing Olympics went to independent schools, when only seven per cent of children are
educated privately, is a cause for concern. That figure
was distinctly lower at London 2012, at 37 per cent. Still,
however, by one calculation, a child in the UK is nearly
eight times more likely to win a gold medal if they were
privately educated.
Lord Moynihan, Chairman of the British Olympic
Association, has described this situation as ‘wholly unacceptable’. His remark fed into our obsessive national
guilt about the success of our independent school system. Again.
Doubtless, some people will have felt uncomfortable about the fact that Eton Dorney, the venue for
some of Team GB’s greatest successes at the Olympics,
is owned by Eton College. They will also correctly point
out that independent schools have many more coaches than their state-funded counterparts and that their
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students are have more opportunities to excel on the
playing field as a result.
But hang on. Rather than griping about the stellar
facilities at our public schools, we should be celebrating Eton for maintaining such a world-class rowing lake,
which enabled Phelan and his teammates to make history and carry their country along with them, cheering
all the way. Independent schools go to great lengths to
make their facilities available to others, and do a great
service to pupils from all institutions in the process.
We should also be grateful to independent schools
for setting an example. Contrary to popular perception,
most sporting activity in the private sector depends not
on ex-Wimbledon tennis pros or Ashes-winning cricketers charging extortionate fees, but on the willingness of
ordinary teachers to give up their time after school and
at weekends to staff and coach teams.
There is also a third and more significant factor. What
is evident when listening to GB medal-winners is their
unashamed desire to win. This is based on an ethos of
success and competition; an ethos that flourishes in independent schools simply because it is allowed to do so.
Public schools are less constrained by ‘safeguards’, red
tape and regulation and can allow pupils to test their
limits and discover the joy in, to quote the Olympic
motto, going ‘faster, higher, stronger’. They can select
pupils according to talent and they can expose them to
the demands of competition. This is crucial not just for
ensuring sporting success but for delivering high-quality
education and a solid preparation for a fulfilling
later life.
The annual debate about public exams has been
revived of late, following the publication of last month’s
A-Level results, and there is a clear parallel to be drawn
here. Are we prepared to admit that the desire to promote the false gods of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ has dampened our ability to be the best, as we have eschewed
competition and lowered our expectations? Not just in
sport and exams; but in schools in general?
We can pour resources into an Olympic Games and
we can speak of a desire to ‘inspire a generation’. But if
there is still at the heart of our education system a cultural allergy to elitism and success — the spirit of dumbingdown that Michael Gove speaks of — then it will fail.
Perhaps our record Olympic successes will make us
reflect more broadly on the need to counter these trends
and embrace the spirit of competition in education to
the benefit of all, not just those who step on to a podium,
and not just in sport.
In the meantime, we can continue to bask in Olympian glory. I was at Hyde Park to witness the showjumping on the big screen. Now there’s an elitist sport, truly
expensive and posh. In fact, not many independent
schools have stables and livery. But the partisan crowd
still cheered our team to the rafters. We British love to
win and we love our winners. As far as I can see, we don’t
really care where they went to school.
So rather than succumbing to knee-jerk reactions of
guilt, we should really be saying: thank heaven for independent schools.
The author is Head Master of Bedford School.
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More for less
Harry Phibbs on low-budget private schools
I ndependent schools have an image of being for
the rich. Linked to this is an assumption that they
achieve good results thanks to lavish resources. Yet
around the country there are examples of independent schools charging modest fees with teachers
on low pay, and using somewhat dilapidated buildings.
They are routinely achieving dramatically better results
than more extravagantly funded state schools.
In Barnsley, there is an independent Christian
school, Hope House. Last year 100 per cent of its pupils
achieved at least five good GCSE passes. This is a town
where the council-run comprehensives have some of the
worst results in the country. Barnsley Council spends an
average of £5,912 per pupil a year. Hope House fees
vary by age but average around £4,000 a year.
For London, the costs are somewhat higher but the
general point is the same. In Tottenham, the Wisdom
School is applying to become a free school so it can
expand to two-form entry. It particularly caters for Turkish-speaking children who were falling behind at the
schools provided by Haringey Council. Children starting at the school are behind for their age but improve at
an incredible rate; last year 100 per cent got between A*
and C grades in English and maths. The Haringey average is 48 per cent. The fees at Wisdom are £6,000 a year.
For the state secondary schools in Haringey the cost to
the taxpayer per pupil is over £8,000.
Over in Edgware there is the non-denominational
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Holland House School, for pupils aged
four to 11. The headmistress, Irina Tyk,
is the Queen of Phonics, being the
author of The Butterfly Book, which is
used by many other schools for guidance. The children at her school flourish and the fees are a maximum of
£3,945 a year. This is compared with
state spending of more than £5,000 a
year for Barnet Council’s primary schools. Among the
independent schools in that borough for the same age
range are Gower House, which has no particular religious affiliation and charges £6,155. There are also Muslim and Jewish schools, which tend to charge a bit less.
Peter Meyer is the chief finance officer of the New
Model School Company. This has a not-for-profit model,
but relies on fees to cover its costs. ‘We have a mix of
income groups among our parents,’ he told me. ‘There
is a high proportion of self-employed people, which
reflects the risk-taking, pioneering nature of the school,
at least when it was first set up. In that sense, although
we are non-selective we are self-selective.’ The group
now has three fee-paying junior schools in London.
Maple Walk (annual fees £7,000) in Harlesden has been
joined by Stephenson School in Kensal Town (£6,210)
and Faraday School in Docklands (£7,200).
The company hopes to open more. Lots of fundraising from the parents helps — in Maple Walk they
purchased a climbing frame from eBay. There are 150
applications for the 20 places in each reception class.
Often the children go on to win scholarships at public
schools.
The New Model schools, whose conception comes
from the Conservative think-tank Civitas, are traditionalist. Pupils shake hands and say good morning to their
teachers at the start of the day. Children are taught to
read by means of synthetic phonics. History is taught
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as a chronological narrative. Geography lessons permit
the use of an atlas.
So a good number of private schools charge fees that
are comparable with, sometimes much lower than, the
equivalent state school spending. It would seem that for
some of them, converting to become free schools would
be a good way of increasing their budgets.
‘A significant minority of free school applications
come from low-cost independent schools wishing to
convert or set up new schools,’ says Rachel Wolf of
the New Schools Network. Batley Grammar School in
West Yorkshire has already become a free school. Hope
House in Barnsley is proposing to establish a Christian free school in the town. The difficulty is that many
schools worry that becoming a free school would compromise their independence, even though free schools
do not have to follow the National Curriculum. ‘We’ve
thought about it, and keep it under review, but it’s not
a route we have decided to pursue so far,’ says Meyer.
‘The particular curriculum we offer is the reason we
exist.’
Julia Morgan is a trustee of the Christian Schools
Trust, a group of more than 40 independent Christian
schools. She suspects that teaching creationism would
make it harder to gain free school status. ‘Our schools
teach creationism alongside evolution, and the pupils
perform better at science than state school pupils, so I
think if there is that discrimination
it is unreasonable,’ she says. She is
now a school inspector but previ- Nobody I spoke to suggested
ously taught at the King’s School
that running a school on a
Witney (where fees are a maximum of £5,400 a year, but there is shoestring budget is a doddle
a bulk discount on offer if you have
more than one child). ‘The teachers
at the Christian schools are willing to work for lower
salaries than they could get elsewhere,’ says Morgan.
‘Often premises are pretty modest. I inspected one
school which was a couple of houses knocked together. But the classrooms met the regulations.’ The local
MP for the King’s School is David Cameron. ‘He came
to see us and was pretty impressed. He said he hadn’t
been aware that such a school could exist,’ says Morgan. The GCSE results are well above the Oxfordshire
average.
Nobody I spoke to suggested running a school on a
shoestring budget is a doddle. In a recession it is tough
for many people to afford even modest fees. Yet I suspect that while some may find it advantageous to convert to free school status, there will also be traffic in the
other direction. There may well be new schools opening with low fees, which were originally conceived as
free schools but were spurned by Michael Gove. The
budget to buy new buildings means the number of free
schools starting each year is rationed: 102 free schools
have been approved for next year, which leaves another
150 that have applied but been knocked back. Often
they are good applications, desperately needed in communities where the existing schools are dire.
Rather than waiting for Gove, my advice to them is
to go ahead and open next year as independent lowcost schools.
Harry Phibbs - More For Less_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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barometer
One of the best-known alumni of an independent sixthform college is Martin Amis, who was sent to one after
disastrous spells at several other schools. Amis was
enrolled at Davies Laing and Dick College, now a
member of the Council for Independent Education
(CIFE).
The experience inspired an institution in Amis’s novel
The Rachel Papers whose introductory tour was to
persuade prospective students that it ‘was not a
workhouse or a blacking factory’.
It didn’t do Amis much harm: he went on to Exeter
College, Oxford, where he took a first.
Gold Standard
Each year, at the House of Lords, Baroness Perry of
Southwark presents a Gold Award to a student who has
achieved remarkable results at one of CIFE’s colleges.
Here are the last four winners:
2009 — Lauren Shipton, Mander Portman Woodward
College, London
2010 — Tian Sun, Cambridge College for Sixth Form
Studies
2011 — Xenia Dethlefs, Cambridge College for Sixth
Form Studies
2012 - Poppy Waskett, Lansdowne College
Source: Council for Independent Education - www.cife.org.uk
Star pupils
What percentage of A-level candidates get A*?
3.1%
Secondary modern Further education college
5.7%
Comprehensive
5.9%
Academy
8.7%
Maintained selective
12.1%
Independent
18.1%
Source: Joint Council for Qualifications
Subjects matter
Independent schools account for 13.4% of A-level
entries. Which subjects are relatively most and least
popular at independent schools?
most popular
Classical subjects 39.9% of entries are from pupils at independent schools
29%
Further maths
Economics
27.9%
French
26.2%
German
24.7%
least popular
Law 1% of entries are from pupils
at independent schools
1.3%
Sociology
Communication studies
1.3%
Media/film/TV studies
2.5%
Critical thinking
4%
Source: Independent Schools Council
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St Catherine’s
Day, full & weekly boarding
GSA School 880 girls 4-18 years
Founded 1885
Bramley
“Lots of options, lots
of opportunities
- real education
takes place here”
Good Schools Guide 2012
For further details please contact Judy Corben, Registrar
t: 01483 899609 | e: admissions@stcatherines.info
www.stcatherines.info
spectator01 July 2012.indd 1
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Make the grade at A level
At CIFE we’re not just about getting the right grades
or getting you into the best university. We’re about
bringing out the best in you as an individual. That’s why
our 2-year A level courses have so much choice and
flexibility built in. In fact it’s what our association
of highly accredited independent sixth form colleges
is all about. Yes, we’ll help you meet others’
standards – but fulfil your own promise too.
To discover how CIFE can enable
you to achieve your full potential,
call 020 8767 8666 or visit
www.cife.org.uk
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Cost benefit
Sending your child to boarding school might actually
save you money, says James Delingpole
C
an sending your kids to boarding school
really be cheaper than sending them to a
day school? At first the idea might seem
quite ludicrous. I know it did to me when
I was commissioned to write this piece.
Apparently, I gathered, it was a point the Boarding
School Association was itching to make. ‘Well of course
they would be,’ I snorted to myself. ‘That’s why they’re
called the Boarding School Association.’
Actually, though, when you start doing the maths,
you realise they might not be so far off the mark. Sure,
a state day school education is technically ‘free’. But in
reality — at least if you want your child to do any sport,
music, or indeed learn anything more sophisticated than
Mary Seacole, anti-racism and hand-washing studies —
you’re going to be forking out so much on extras you
might as well be sending them private anyway.
Let me give you the example of Girl’s recent experiences at a highly rated Church of England primary school. Though the pastoral care was splendid, the
teaching sometimes first-rate and most of the other parents and kids thoroughly delightful, it did nonetheless
call for an awful lot of extracurricular spending.
The early maths teaching, for example, just wasn’t
rigorous enough — as we discovered when trying to
play Monopoly with Girl and realising she couldn’t even
add up the numbers on the dice. Kumon is the solution:
all even halfway ambitious parents — especially Asian
ones — use it. But you’re looking at more than £600 a
year. And on top of that, for the non-maths work, you’ll
probably need a tutor, which will set you back another
£40 a week.
Then there’s music. Obviously if your child has no
Data: State Boarding Schools’ Association
Boarding by numbers
• State boarding school fees, which cover boarding not education,
range between £8,000 and £12,000 a year.
• Approximately 5,000 pupils attend State Boarding Schools’
Association schools.
• The average annual cost of attending an independent boarding
school is £26,340.
• The number of pupils at independent boarding schools is around
68,000, of whom approximately 15,000 are at prep schools
• 33% of pupils at independent schools receive help with their fees
(but this includes independent day schools).
interest or aptitude then it’s not an issue. But what a
lot of pushy middle-class parents like to do to game the
system is have their kids trained up early on into being
mini-prodigies. That way, they’ve a better a chance of
either winning a music scholarship to a private school
or sneaking into a decent grammar. Hence Girl’s piano,
recorder, flute, singing, theory and choir lessons, which
totted up to a good £1,000 a term.
Sport: that’s another thing state schools tend not to
do so well. If we hadn’t paid £38 a term for her badminton, £20 a month for her tennis, £50 a term for her ballet, £48 a term for hockey and whatever her share of our
family membership of the sports club/swimming pool is,
Girl would have got no exercise whatsoever.
Now obviously some of these extras you’d be paying
for even if your child was at a private school (adding
lots of extras to your bill is something private schools
are really good at). But the key difference is this: you
wouldn’t be having to ferry your child from class to class
every spare hour God sends.
This ‘time is money’ factor is probably the most
important consideration of all when conducting your
day v. boarding cost-benefit analysis. For the past five
years or so, my wife — a freelance journalist — has had
half her working day wiped out every weekday of every
term time thanks to the 3 p.m. school run and the ensuing child care/music-practice-supervision duties. Nor,
during that period, have our weekends been our own:
Saturday is music to-and-fro day; Sunday is hockey
day.
How much is all that lost time actually worth? Well,
you could argue that it’s not ‘lost’ at all because kids —
especially female ones — can often be quite interesting
and communicative when you’re ferrying them around.
On the other hand, if you’re a busy working couple,
the opportunity cost of that menial childcare grind is
potentially enormous: way more, indeed, than the cost,
of sending them to board.
Probably your best, most affordable compromise
here is a state boarding school. I spoke to Fiona, busy
working mother of two children at Wymondham College in Norfolk, who reckoned that to be freed from
termtime ‘juggling and childcare’ was easily worth the
termly boarding fees of under £3,000. ‘I’m often having to work late hours. If my kids were at a day school
they’d be latchkey kids, having to fend for themselves.’
Boarding is, in any case, a relatively cheap component in education these days. At Westminster, for example, the termly fees for a day pupil are £7,236 and for
boarders £10,450. So your total annual boarding costs
even for the crème de la crème are less than £10,000.
Now compare that with how much you’d otherwise pay
during that time for your child’s heating, washing, feeding, babysitting, transport, plus all the time you’d lose
from work, and suddenly that ten grand starts to look
really quite reasonable. And that’s before you’ve even
factored in the bonuses like being able to nip off on
quick jaunts abroad when you want, and being able to
use the bathroom and watch the programmes you want
to watch on TV, and not being told by sulky, resentful kids every breakfast how lame and annoying and
embarrassing you are. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
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Public relations
Ross Clark on rebranding independent schools
W
hen I was about eight my state primary
school class was taken on an end-of-term
outing to a boys’ prep school. I am still
not sure why we went. We didn’t interact with the other children in any way.
We just filed through the classrooms and watched the little Fauntleroys at their desks. It was treated as a kind of
human zoo: to see how the other ’alf live.
Did I come back envious? Not a bit of it. In fact
I couldn’t wait to get back to a bit of comfy, child-centred
education. With its gables and creaking doors, the prep
school seemed straight out of a horror film. The fact that
it lay in the middle of a mining area made it even more
surreal. Add in the communal bathrooms and dormitories
and it seemed to me a miserable alternative to the sunny,
modern edge-of-town primary school which I loved.
And that pretty well sums up what many people
thought of private education in the 1970s. I am sure that
a great number of elderly masters will protest, but from
an outside vantage point the 1970s public school was a
world of fusty old buildings, cold showers, drugs, buggery,
bullying, corporal punishment and — perhaps most of all
— academic mediocrity.
Llanabba Castle, the lousy North Wales school in
Decline and Fall, inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s brief career
as a schoolmaster, seemed to speak for them all: crumbling piles bought on the cheap after the war, where children could be disposed of during term time, far away from
the family home. We all knew that public school boys went
on to the best universities and so on seamlessly into the
top professions, but that was more to do with the social
connections they made.
That line would not work in a novel
Private education has in
any longer. Independent schools have
effect become the grammar
been one of the most remarkable
rebranding successes of the past 30
school system in exile
years. Their brochures now speak of
a world in which little Algernon will
be nurtured rather than beaten, smothered with pastoral
care rather than ill-treated to toughen him up. We are now
the safe option, they seem to say: send your sprog here
and keep him away from the crazed knifemen who hang
about the corridors of your average inner-city comp.
The transition in academic image has been more
remarkable still. Independent schools have become synonymous with exam success — even to their enemies.
No one any longer complains about dim children from
private schools admitted to Oxbridge thanks to the old
boy network or because they would help bolster the college rugger team; rather they moan that privately educated children have gained better exam results through the
unfair advantage of having had a better education.
Ironically, the improvement in academic standards in
private schools probably owes much to an initiative by the
Major government to raise performance in state schools.
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When the latter were forced to publish their exam results
in the mid-1990s, private schools were under no obligation to follow suit. Indeed, many of them declined to do
so for several years, making the excuse that education was
not just about exam results but about building character
and so on. I remember being handed a private school brochure a few years ago which was full of slogans such as ‘a
hothouse flower will surely wilt’ and ‘a stretched violin
string will one day break’. It was pretty easy to read the
subtext: our exam results are crap.
But gradually, as private schools were forced to publish their results, they realised that exam league tables provided a direct comparison between the state and private
sectors. You could blow your trumpet all you liked about
character-building and creating ‘rounded individuals’, but
it wasn’t going to look good when prospective parents
opened the newspaper to discover that the school where
they were sending their children at a cost of many thousands of pounds a year was achieving less good results
than the local comprehensive. If you wanted to keep the
classrooms full you were going to have to use exam results
as a selling point.
Combined with that is the change in make-up of independent schools. The private sector gained a lot of ex-state
grammar schools during the 1970s — schools of ancient
foundation which were not owned by the local authority
and thus could not be forced to join the comprehensive
system. At the same time, the early 1990s recession did for
a lot of the Llanabba Castles, the minor public schools in
remote locations. If the school had ever existed it would
have closed down 20 years ago and since been turned into
posh apartments.
The private education sector has in effect become the
grammar school system in exile. There are still some in the
public school system who abhor being measured by exam
results. Earlier this year — funnily enough after his school
appeared outside the country’s top 50-ranked schools on
some measures — Eton headmaster Tony Little bizarrely
called for all public exams to be banned before the age of
18. Exam results perhaps don’t matter so much to Eton:
Mr Little could fill its places with oligarchs’ children even
if he set the fees at £50,000 a term. But heads of independent schools need to be aware that there are a great
number of parents — myself included — who would not
dream of spending upwards of £10,000 a year going private if there were a good grammar school within striking
distance. Independent schools really have no option other
to sell themselves by promising to teach your child with
a rigour that no comprehensive school will manage. The
promise of character-building cold showers doesn’t work
if you are trying to lure customers to a school any more
than it would to a hotel.
Lord Moynihan’s recent complaint that far too many of
Britain’s Olympic team were educated at private schools
— see page 5 — might once have been interpreted as an
accusation that the selectors were biased towards anyone
with the right school tie. Now it comes across as quite different: small wonder that private school pupils are running faster and jumping further when they are the ones
who have been educated in an environment where competition is not a rude word and individual success something to be praised and not embarrassed about.
guide to independent schools | 8 september 2012 | IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN | 8 SEPTEMBER 2012 | GUIDE TO INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS
Spectator 110X87.5 2012.indd 1
Quarter page Adverts_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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on here
Rates of exchange
Thank heavens language studies have evolved
since my day, says Sophia Martelli
F
rench exchanges — remember those? My
first was a disaster. The family resided in a
large honey-coloured stone farmhouse-cumchâteau complete with turquoise swimming
pool in the hills above Aix-en-Provence; my
exchange Stéphanie was glamorous with long dark hair.
Sounds idyllic; but add me — moreover, me at the age
of 13: cripplingly shy, hormones a-bubble, sprouting
spots and smells and sporting braces and the kind of orange plasticA trip helps students to
framed glasses even your most unchic granny wouldn’t wear — and
discover that French people
you’ve got a French exchange catasdo not in fact wear berets
trophe. Stéphanie took one look at
me, flicked her hair and said (I could
understand this much French) that she was going to the
disco alone.
Today, foreign exchanges are more of a rarity. That’s
partly because of the difficulty of matching compatible
teenagers, and also because there is a downward trend in
the number of students taking languages. In a survey by
the CfBT Education Trust, it was found that the number
of students taking a language GSCE decreased from 78
per cent in 2001 to 40 per cent in 2011. It’s a bit shocking, really. The reason, according to the CfBT, is ‘dissat14 isfaction with assessment at GCSE and A-level’. French
and German have been the hardest hit, declining 56 per
cent in a decade. However, the introduction of the Education White Paper (DfE 2010) has lead to a ‘notable
increase in the take-up of languages in the current Year
10’, although teachers in both the maintained and independent sectors ‘remain gravely concerned about the
nature of the GCSE and the way it is assessed as well
as the distribution of time within the curriculum for languages study’.
It’s not all bad news. For pupils in the independent
sector, the range of languages is broadening — Mandarin, for example, is offered at 36 per cent of independent
schools (though sadly only 14 per cent of maintained
schools). This obviously poses a problem in terms of
exchanges: only the most adventurous or well-travelled
teenagers need apply. And as for some of the other languages available at indie schools — Ancient Greek and
Latin — well, for heaven’s sake, not all of us can afford
time travel.
But the truth remains, says Kate Board, head of languages strategy at the National Centre for Languages,
that ‘if you have the means to do it — and not everyone
does — foreign exchanges for pupils are indispensable’.
Nick Mair, chairman of the Independent Schools’ Modern Language Association, agrees: ‘Our rule of thumb
is that a language trip is equal to half an exam grade.’
It brings the language to life. While every teacher tries
to introduce elements of that country’s culture into the
classroom, a trip helps students to discover that French
people do not in fact wear berets and that Germans are
lederhosen-free. And how, without going to the country
of origin, would they ever find out that frogs’ legs, snails
and two-foot-long sausages are in fact delicious?
In an era of health and safety and heightened child
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protection, exchanges are being replaced by the easier
option: homestays, where one — often two — students
are sent to live with a vetted, certified host family for a
week or two. The host family is experienced and supported by the organising operation; the huge advantage
being that there isn’t the return leg of an awful exchange.
However, there’s a temptation, especially if a student is
particularly tongue-tied, to speak the language that actually allows communication — i.e. English.
Sending children to specialist boarding schools,
for instance Château de Sauveterre, is another (more
expensive) option. Days are structured: there are lessons on-site and practical work off-site in the nearby
towns. There is the added attraction of having fellow
English-speaking students share experience. Nick Mair
warns that while many of these schools are excellent,
research is advisable as there are ‘a large number of
companies looking for business, and not all courses are
well run or useful’.
A good option, he says, is ‘total immersion’ — in
other words, a language exchange where domestically
embedded students also attend a local school. This is
difficult, time-consuming and bureaucratic — and Mair
should know, he arranged one earlier this year; the legally binding contract he commissioned went through six
drafts. This achieved, nine 14-year-old students at Dulwich College were placed in families in France for three
to four weeks. So far, it has ‘surpassed our expectations’,
Mair says, ‘although it’s always best to wait for a month
to allow any trip stories to percolate to the teachers.’
This sort of exchange is nothing new — indeed, the
Rectorat de Versailles (which is responsible for the education of one in ten French schoolchildren) has already
sent 1,500 pupils to Spain and Germany using this format. English schools are less easy to convince, mainly
because health and safety regulations have made this
format harder to countenance. An exchange toolkit,
including the legal contract and other essentials, is available free of charge to interested schools through the
Dulwich College website.
For schools, language exchanges can be a creative
venture — for example, linking languages to other
subjects means the students gain even more knowledge. Germany and history, while a hoary old chestnut, is useful; France or Italy and art is uplifting; and
newly popular in any (European) language is business studies, where work placements can be arranged
in businesses that promote entrepreneurship — this
is certainly a sector that appreciates the two-for-one
benefits.
It seems there has been much progress and organisation — indeed, professionalisation — of foreign exchanges since the sink-or-swim options available during my
adolescence. But tenacity does pay off: my second French
exchange, arranged by a French family friend, plonked
me on a pebbly beach in the south of France with a funny,
feisty girl called Clotilde who talked 26 to the dozen. In
English. We are still firm friends, and our daughters are
now being groomed to be exchanged in due course. And
even though I barely learned any French, I still managed
to get an A for my GCSE; which leads me to suspect that
GSCE standards have been rubbish all along.
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Sophia Martelli - Rates of exchange_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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Life in the top set
The public school distinction is impossible to deny, says Matthew Parris. But is it social or academic?
T
raditionally, what parents sought for their
offspring was social cachet as much as academic qualifications.
An American lady once observed that
such was the polish and command conferred
on a young chap by a British public school education,
that you might have to marry an Englishman and live
with him for ten years before finally realising that the
fundamental problem was that he was just dim. ‘Rich
16 and thick,’ was the brutal, confiding response of the
headmaster of a private school whose sixth-formers I
had just addressed, when I asked him what sort of boys
came to his school.
Two claims are made for the purpose and merit of
private education and they cannot both be the truth,
though each may be part of the truth. Arguing in a
recent Times column that people put their children’s
names down for public (private) schools in order to
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purchase social advantage, I met an indignant response
from many readers. My correspondents insisted that
the financial sacrifices they made for sons and daughters were in pursuit of educational excellence, not social
caché. You couldn’t (each claimed) get a good education at the state schools available where they lived.
These often indignant claims had the ring of sincerity.
And yet if one listens to complaints from the Charity
Commission, from Lord (Andrew) Adonis (an architect
of Michael Gove’s splendid push to create more ‘independent’ state schools) or from Anthony Seldon, the
Master of Wellington College, one gets the impression
that many private schools show stubborn reluctance to
involve their own institutions much with state education, or to take scholarship students in serious numbers.
It’s hard to conclude that this reluctance rests only on
the question of educational standards.
I suspect, I’m afraid, that private schools believe that
what parents value in a private education is its distinctiveness and the sense of difference — even superiority — it will confer on their children; and they wouldn’t
want it diluted. My own
Oxbridge experience
was that the distinction Many private schools show
we felt between ‘public stubborn reluctance to
school boys’ and ‘gram- involve their own institutions
mar school boys’ was not
much with state education
mainly a matter of educational standards: we
had all, after all, passed the admissions hurdle; and I
doubt our final university examination results would
have given the academic advantage decisively in favour
of the public school boys. No, the public school boys
formed a social not an educational elite.
There’s something about a British public-school
grounding. There’s a patina, a confidence, an officer
quality, a way of talking — indeed there’s an identifiable sub-species of accent — that marks someone out
as privately educated. We who did not go to a public
school notice how those who did can recognise each
other within 30 seconds of being introduced at social
gatherings. Just as a cat at once clocks another cat as
a cat, though they may never have set eyes upon each
other before, so do members of this minority human
elite sniff each other out instinctively.
‘I love it when you talk like that,’ said Ann Leslie
once to the late Robert Robinson, who had been talking at length and most learnedly: ‘it reminds me of how
much we lost when the grammar schools went comprehensive’. The subtleties of that rebuke go deep and delicate; within it is submerged an answer to those who
claim that educational standards are the main, or perhaps even the only, selling-point of a private education.
You either believe there’s nothing really wrong with
class division in Britain, or you see it as a spanner in our
works. I see it as a spanner in our works. I wouldn’t ban
private education; I would start blowing it open with a
blizzard of state scholarships: at least a quarter of all
admissions. The response of our public schools to that
proposal would be a critical test of their (and their parents’) genuine indifference to class advantage.
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Tel. 01285 831 213 | Email. info@rendcomb.gloucs.sch.uk
Near Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 7HA
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T
Officer class: learning map-reading at the Crown and Manor Boys’ Club in East
London in 1944
Club class
Sponsoring state academies continues a tradition
of public-spiritedness, says Robert Gray
18 he notion that public schools should take their
place among the sponsors of the state academies was slow to take off. Indeed the idea
might have died an early death but for the
relentless dynamism of Anthony Seldon, the
headmaster of Wellington. Thanks to his inspiration, the
Wellington Academy at Tidworth opened in 2009.
Other independent schools — Eton, Winchester, St
Paul’s and Uppingham among them — soon followed
Wellington’s example. As sponsors they are expected to
set high standards for the academies, challenging hidebound ways and encouraging original thinking. Inevitably there have been critics. Co-operation between the
state and the independent sectors of education is, they
say, paternalism. Surely, though, paternalism is a great
deal preferable to indifference.
To that extent, at least, one may discern a distant echo
of the splendid work carried out in the missions and boys’
clubs which public schools established in slum areas at the
end of the 19th century.
At that time most teenagers in the country had left
school. The London School Board, set up under the Education Act of 1870, prescribed compulsory attendance
from ages five to 13; there were, however, exemptions
allowing children to leave at ten if they had attained the
required standard. Thus multitudes of adolescents, whose
parents were only too glad to be relieved of their responsibilities, were struggling for their livelihood on the streets,
with every consequence in degradation and crime.
On the whole, the privileged classes reacted to this
dangerous phenomenon with careless indifference. There
were, however, good and remarkable characters, many of
them Anglicans, who stood forth to confront the catastrophe. Samuel Barnett, the Christian Socialist incumbent
at St Jude’s, Whitechapel, founded Toynbee Hall in Commercial Street in 1884, as a centre from which Oxford and
Cambridge men strove to improve the life of the poor.
From 1889 to 1898 the Anglo-Catholic Arthur Winnington-Ingram proved an inspiration at Oxford House in
Bethnal Green. Meanwhile Cambridge colleges undertook equally valuable work in the south of London.
In 1879 another Anglo-Catholic, William Walsham
How, had been appointed suffragan-bishop of London,
under the surprising title of Bishop of Bedford. He took
on special responsibility for the East End, sending his best
clergy into the slums. Furthermore he encouraged public
schools to establish a presence there.
Eton was at the forefront, setting up in 1880 a mission
district ‘about the size of the Eton Playing Fields’ beside
Hackney Marshes; the area contained some 6,000 people,
‘mostly of the poorest’. This led to the formation of the
Mallard Street Club, the first public-school-founded boys’
club in London. Old Etonians arrived to foster sports,
soon discovering that the East End lacked for nothing in
competitive spirit. Others encouraged music and art. The
publisher A.G. Macmillan, great-uncle of Harold Macmillan, started a library.
Meanwhile, in 1883 Harrow had begun a mission on
the other side of London, among the potteries and piggeries of Notting Dale. And late in the summer, after the
excitements of public school cricket had run their course,
Eton (Hackney Wick) and Harrow (Notting Dale) played
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each other at Lord’s. Much later, in the 1920s, Arthur Bryant caught the spirit of the Harrow mission, as he appealed
for volunteers. Should anyone have a skill to impart, so
much the better — ‘but if you are a mere fool, like the
present writer — and possibly you are — there is plenty
to do.
‘You can get beaten at ping-pong, you can amuse the
audience by your ignorance of voice production … and
you can enliven our dances by your presence.
‘But what is needed above all is friendliness; and that
anyone, however accomplished, who has a human heart
inside him can give. It is an easy thing for Harrovians to
learn to know and appreciate the men and boys of the
Dale: they are so loyal and lovable.’
By the end of the 19th century, nearly all the great public schools maintained an association with the slums. In
1876 Winchester founded a parish at All Hallows, London
Docks; then in the early 1880s established a notably successful mission in the least salubrious area of Portsmouth,
where Father Dolling, an Anglo-Catholic of Irish origins,
achieved legendary status.
Later, in 1926, some old Wykehamists, the LlewellynSmiths, started a boys’ club off the Kingsland Road in
London, which in 1939 absorbed another institution at
Hoxton Manor to become the Crown and Manor Club.
Rugby followed Harrow into Notting Hill in 1889, and
remained a beneficent force there to this day. Its boys’
club helped to develop such notable sportsmen as Jimmy
Bloomfield of Arsenal and Alan Mullery of Spurs, as well
as the England wicketkeeper John Murray.
Spectator 180x110:Layout 1 23/08/2012 14:01 Page 1
As early as 1868, Dr Percival, the headmaster of Clifton, started a Ragged School in one of the poorest eastern
districts of Bristol. During the 1880s the school established in the area a workmen’s club, a young men’s club,
and a lads’ club.
In 1882 Marlborough set up a mission in Tottenham,
before settling for more proximate work with a boys’ club
in Swindon. In 1883 Tonbridge associated itself with the
Mission of the Holy Cross in St Pancras. The next year the
Bishop of Rochester persuaded Charterhouse to undertake moral restitution in the notoriously squalid neighbourhood on the borders of Bermondsey and Southwark.
In 1885 Wellington founded a mission in Walworth, reconstituted in 1935 as the Wellington Boys’ Clubs.
Of course the benefits of all this endeavour flowed
both ways. As Canon Scott-Holland observed in 1891,
the West End was chock full of useless gentlemen, whose
highest aim was to lounge around in their clubs. How
could such drones fail to be improved by coming under
the rugged influence of the East End?
The impetus which inspired the public schools to
run boys’ clubs in underprivileged areas has now largely exhausted itself, although Winchester still maintains
its association with the Crown and Manor Club in Hoxton.
The sponsorship of academies, however, offers a new field
of endeavour, and a new outlet for idealism. It remains
to be seen, though, whether the essentially secular rhetoric of the Big Society will prove as effective as 19th-century Christian principle in building bridges across the
social gulf.
Promoting Individual Aspirations
www.bradfieldcollege.org.uk
admissions@bradfieldcollege.org.uk
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science & Society Picture Library/getty images
A classical education: Stowe, painted by Norman Wilkinson for an LMS Railways poster in 1925
Ancient foundations
Fine architecture is an underestimated part of
independent schools’ mystique, says Harry Mount
T
rue privilege comes not so much from being
brought up in grand surroundings, but from
growing indifferent to them.
At Westminster School in the late 1980s, I
thought I was extremely streetwise in adopting a slight Mockney accent and bunking off the threetimes weekly church services.
In fact, any self-respecting Professor Higgins could
have seen through my accent as London Public School
from several miles away. My bunking off, too, revealed a
deep sense of entitlement.
Our church service — or ‘Abbey’, as we blithely
called it — was held in Westminster Abbey: the greatest church in the country, one of the great ecclesiastical
buildings of the world. These days, I’d kill to have the
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abbey to myself, as I easily could have
at school if I’d deigned to go to the services and hang around a bit at the end of
them. But then I was a spoilt philistine,
unconsciously learning Public Schoolboy Lesson Number One: never look
too impressed by anything, particularly
old, grand buildings.
Public school prospectuses now
emphasise the academic and sporting achievements of
the pupils. But, in the glossy photos of little Nigel Molesworth thwacking a foopball or Violet Elizabeth Bott
brandishing her lacrosse stick, they still tend to do it in
front of a suitably old, suitably imposing building.
I’m not sure the inclusion of grand architecture in the
prospectuses is necessarily conscious. But there certainly
is a connection in the popular imagination between private education and ancient buildings.
We pay lip service to the desire for modern, progressive education, but what parents of private school
pupils really want — and I’m with them on this — is
an old, regressive one. In the arms race to compete for
the chequebooks of Russian oligarch parents, private
schools pour money into photospectrometers for the
20
30/8/12 12:08:57
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Harry Mount - School architecture_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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chemistry lab, Olympic rowing lanes and compulsory
Mandarin. But the things that really give smart schools
any Hogwarts cachet are Greek optatives taught by
sadistic bachelors in chalk-stained, fur-trimmed scholars’ gowns, and crocketed Gothic pinnacles.
The Gothic bit is important: the older the buildings,
the posher the school. Shortly before the late, great Ronald Searle died, I asked him why
the school buildings in his archeThese days, I’d kill to have
typal private schools — St Trinian’s
School and Molesworth’s St Custhe abbey to myself, as
tard’s — were Gothic; and Gothic in
I easily could have at school
a wonderfully intricate way, all buttresses, Decorated Gothic windows
and cinquefoils. Searle in fact preferred classical Renaissance architecture; he had been a buildings nut since his
childhood among the Cambridge colleges — his grandfather was head porter at Peterhouse. But, he said, the
Gothic injected a level of Stygian gloom appropriate to
the gloriously dark humour of St Custard’s and St Trinian’s — itself named after St Trinnean’s School, Edinburgh, a real Scottish Gothic corker of a place.
Inadvertently or not, Searle had also struck on the
fact that England’s most famous public schools tend to
be real medieval Gothic, while their imitators, the 19thcentury, minor public schools — and prep schools like St
22 Harry Mount - School architecture_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
Custard’s, ‘built by a madman in 1836’ — are Victorian
Gothic Revival.
The nine schools laid down as official public schools
by the Public Schools Act of 1868 were all founded from
the 14th to the early 17th century, i.e. during the Gothic period, before Inigo Jones turned up with the classical orders under his arm. The most famous of them are
medieval foundations for a small group of scholars, usually paid for by royal endowment and attached to an
existing abbey or cathedral. Gothic Winchester College
was founded by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, next door to Gothic Winchester Cathedral in
1382. Gothic Westminster, founded in 1560 by Elizabeth
I, was built in the shadow of Gothic Westminster Abbey.
Gothic Eton was a little different: when it was founded
in 1440 by Henry VI, he had a new Perpendicular Gothic
chapel built to go with it.
The combination of good teaching and clever, poor
scholars, attached to a hallowed religious foundation,
meant the great and the good soon aspired to educate
their stupid, rich children at these places. Thus the surviving situation at the most famous public schools, where
some parents pay £30,000 of taxed income in school fees,
and others, with clever children in College, the scholars’
house, pay nothing. One Old Etonian scholar friend of
mine longs for left-wingers to attack him for his gilded
education. ‘Guess how much my parents had to spend
on school fees,’ he taunts state-educated critics. ‘Exactly
the same as you.’
By the 19th century, a few centuries’ worth of snob
value and intellectual credit had settled on Britain’s
leading public schools. It made sense that, when a new
wave of Victorian private schools was founded, they
went for the Gothic Revival — not just because it was
architecturally fashionable, but socially correct, too.
Of course, public schools picked up a few classical
buildings along the way during the 17th and 18th centuries. Westminster’s College building is a fine exercise in
restrained 1730 classicism by the Palladian pioneer, Lord
Burlington; Stowe is one of the great 18th century classical palaces, and landscapes, in the country. Still, though,
Stowe wasn’t designed as a school building; it began life
as a private country house, only becoming a school in
1923. Bryanston did much the same, taking over a Victorian classical country house in 1928.
It’s true, too, that some of Britain’s great grammar
schools have clung on to their fine, ancient buildings.
Most comprehensives, though, are in post-war, Stalinist, tower-block style, while few private schools have followed the modernist option.
And so the sometimes explicit, usually subliminal,
connection between ancient, beautiful buildings and a
good private education has taken root in rich parents’
minds, with an allied connection between ugly, modern
buildings and an inadequate comprehensive education.
If you happen to be looking for a collective Latin
motto for British public schools, then, you could do
worse than Sola via ante retro est: the only way forwards
is backwards.
How England Made the English by Harry Mount is published by Viking.
22
30/8/12 12:09:04
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Quater page Adverts_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
23
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24
30/8/12 10:24:00
Sta Travel
A year’s head start
Gap years these days are less about fun and
more about career preparation, says Will Gore
A
fter leaving school in the late 1990s, I didn’t
take a gap year. But I know enough about
what my mates got up to in places such as
Thailand, Australia and New Zealand to
understand that most of them didn’t try
to save the world or bring about world peace. A couple of friends tried humanitarian work, but they were
very much in the minority. As far I could tell, the point
of a ‘year out’ was to get drunk and chat up girls in exotic locations. Vital preparation for three years of getting
drunk and chatting up girls at university.
Times have changed. We’re all austere now. The gap
year is still thriving — more so, in fact, than ever — but
it has became a rather more earnest creature. Young
people are treating their year out less as an extended
holiday, more as a chance to get their careers up and
running. The same ferocious competition which exists
for places at top universities can now been seen in the
battle to win places on the best internships, work placements and volunteer schemes.
Over the past decade or so, the popularity of gap
years has grown to such an extent that a thriving industry has built up around them. Companies such as STA
Travel and Real Gap are doing a roaring trade. These
companies offer a wide range of options that reflect
the different skills and experiences that young people
are now looking to obtain. Learning to teach skiing has
always been a popular option, but now diving and cordon bleu cookery courses are just a few of the other
options that are available.
The dire economic climate and moribund state of the
job market, particularly for young people, has meant that
this mission in CV-filling is now more important than
ever. The gap industry was held in check a year ago, when
students scrambled to make it to university before the
new fees system was introduced. However, this appears
to have been no more than a blip. Research commissioned by American Express found that about a third of
young people in the UK were planning on taking a year
out in 2012, while STA has reported a recent surge of
interest from those looking to go on a gap year.
‘The negative news about young people struggling to
get jobs is really suggesting to those going to university or thinking of going that a degree is no guarantee of
getting a job,’ says Natalie Placko, head of marketing at
STA. ‘Some of those coming out of university also seem
to be realising they won’t be getting their dream job, so
are going travelling to get more on their CV so that they
are better placed to be competitive against other people
coming out of university in the search for jobs.’
As well as university leavers taking a year out, other
gap habits have started to emerge. STA and other companies now offer ‘mini gaps’ for school-leavers who are
going straight to university, but are keen to keep up with
those who are taking a full year out: a chance to take
part in a three- to six-month trip or scheme that will help
bulk up their CV.
Helen Allen, head of careers at Bradfield College,
has also noticed that in recent years some are using their
first 15 months after leaving school as an opportunity to
enter the job market straight away and give university
a miss altogether. ‘People are beginning to question the
value of university and whether they really want to go,
which has to be a good thing in my book,’ she says. ‘I do
believe a lot of people go to university and if you are a
fairly mediocre student going to a mediocre university,
is it worth being saddled with a potential debt of £40,000
to £50,000? I’d say probably not.’
Independent schools such as Bradfield have responded to the gap year boom, and most of them now support pupils who are considering a year out. Westminster
School brings in specialist speakers each year to help
their students assess the options that are available to
them and a number of schools, including Repton, Shrewsbury School and Hampton School, have all recently
hosted the Gap Year Fair organised by the Independent Schools Career Organisation, which gives pupils and
parents a chance to hear from companies running volunteer schemes, training programmes and tours.
The commitment to hard work and charity volunteering should be commended, of course. But I’m sure
there are still plenty of young people who still travel the
world on mum and dad’s credit card and end up with
nothing more to show for it than a damaged liver. Fair
play to them: but they might find that, when the time
comes to enter the jobs market, they find themselves at
the back of a long queue.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN | 8 september 2012 | guide to independent schools
Will Gore_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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Role of a lifetime
Children learn great life skills from school drama, says Tim Jelley
A
s a drama teacher, it frustrates me to see
that my subject is still sometimes reduced
to the idea of ‘The School Play’. Drama,
research shows, can do a lot for children:
it teaches teamwork, self-confidence and
empathy, not to mention spacial and cultural awareness
and the ability to speak well in front of an audience.
Many schools offer curriculum drama, but it’s taking
part in productions that brings the most benefits. The
idea of one box-ticking School Play a year is outdated
and inadequate. It’s sad that there are
still independent schools which think
The idea of one box-ticking
it’s enough.
The good news is that things are
School Play a year is
changing. Look at prospectuses and
outdated and inadequate
school websites and you’ll see that
most senior schools now place great
emphasis on drama. What was once
a short paragraph under ‘extra-curricular activities’ is
now several pages, or a web microsite. But perhaps the
biggest change is the number of school theatres under
construction. Governing bodies are persuaded to invest
many thousands, often millions, of pounds to give pupils
facilities that often surpass local professional venues.
(Indeed, several schools — such as Bedford, Monmouth,
The Grange and Tonbridge — also offer their theatres
26 Tim Jelley - Camilla Swift_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
as a resource for the local community.) Care and money
has recently also been expended on a number of exciting conversions of older buildings, such as at Aldenham,
Giggleswick and Epsom, with new buildings at Repton,
Radley and St Mary’s Ascot, among others. Schools
with older theatres are planning modernisations. Even
prep schools are beginning to get moving, with recent
smaller-scale ventures at Cumnor House and Newton,
Battersea, and construction getting under way shortly
at Ludgrove.
The school theatre is not a new idea. Ampleforth,
for example, opened its theatre building in 1911. (It’s a
gothic structure designed primarily as a buttress to prevent the rest of the school sliding into the valley below,
and it used to have a plunge bath in the basement,
which has since been converted into a studio theatre.)
Other school theatres, such as the Hayward at King’s
Ely and the Farrer at Eton, went up in the second half of
the century. Nonetheless, the venue for drama in most
schools has generally been a hall, dining room or gym.
In the era of The School Play, those spaces were adequate; if drama is going to be a big part of school life,
however, they can start to be problematic.
Of course, a shiny new theatre doesn’t always mean
good drama, and a dusty assembly hall isn’t always a sign
of its absence. Look at the prospectus and on the web-
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site, and ask questions at open days and visits. A senior
school which can show an extensive list of recent productions of diverse genres, styles and playwrights and
involving different age groups will have a lively drama
scene. While you would hope to see Shakespeare performed every few years, do they also do more contemporary or populist work? An annual musical is great,
but are there any other significant opportunities in nonmusical drama? Are the principal directors drama specialists? Do pupils ever get to direct productions?
But increasingly, the only schools with the capacity
to engage in this kind of dynamic programme, where
Teaching girls to have it all
Career decisions don’t only happen in the workplace,
says Camilla Swift, and careers advice should reflect that
H
elen Fraser, chief executive of the Girls’
Day School Trust, caused a stir recently when she suggested that ‘just as we
encourage our girls to be ambitious
about which universities we go to, we
also have to encourage them to be ambitious in their
relationships’.
‘Is this what we should be making space for our girls
to learn: that what too many women face nowadays isn’t
a “glass ceiling” because of their sex but a “nappy wall”
if they choose to have a child as well as a career?’ Fraser
asked. ‘That if you want children and a career, a partner
who shares the load at home really, really matters? Or a
partner who cares as much about you succeeding in your
career as they do about their own — and is a cheerleader
for you through your triumphs and setbacks. Is it about
teaching girls to find partners who will make space for
their own careers in a relationship?’ She went on to
quote Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook: ‘The most important career choice you’ll make is
who you marry.’
The press treated Fraser’s perfectly reasonablesounding speech as an outrage. ‘A school for husbands!’
shrieked one headline. Another article described Fraser
as ‘Miss Jean Brodie, but on steroids … Ms Fraser’s proposal reads as a 21st-century spin on Jane Austen-esque
calculations for bagging a man.’ Fraser is surprised that
her comments sparked such a furore. ‘It doesn’t seem to
me to be a particularly controversial point of view,’ she
tells me, in her brittle yet somehow firm voice. ‘The thing
that’s so surprising to me is that this attitude that comes
straight out of the 1950s — that girls have to choose
between a career and a family — keeps popping up in
discussions.’
‘Teaching girls how to choose husbands is not what
we do,’ she adds. ‘What GDST schools try to do is instil
there is always at least one project in rehearsal, are
those with theatres or dedicated drama spaces. In such
a space, every play becomes The School Play; as a boy
performing on the Ampleforth stage in the early 1980s,
I and my contemporaries regarded the major play of the
year as just one of many opportunities to get up there,
work hard and have fun being someone else for a couple of hours. And through my experience of running the
theatre at St Mary’s Ascot, it is clear that a high-quality
facility opens up countless creative possibilities to all
pupils, not just those you would expect to find hanging
around a stage door.
in their girls the confidence, knowledge, resilience and
ability to make wise choices, from their choice of career
to, ultimately, what partner you choose in life. Our girls
are bright and brilliant … I don’t want anyone saying
to them that they’re going to have to make a choice
between either having a career, or having a relationship
and children.’
Nobody could accuse the GDST of being an enemy
of feminism. The trust, which celebrates its 140th anniversary this year, was founded by suffragettes Maria
Grey and Emily Sherriff. In 1850 the women wrote a
treatise in which they argued against the popular opinion that girls ought only to be educated solely to attract
a husband.
Over the years, the trust has produced an array of
notable alumni: Mary Beard, Helena Bonham-Carter
and Enid Blyton among them. Even the ‘superwoman’
financier Nicola Horlick — perhaps the most famous
example of a woman who ‘has it all’ — is an ex-GDST
girl. And both of the female directors-general of MI5
were educated at GDST schools. It seems that Fraser
isn’t exaggerating: her girls really are bright and brilliant.
‘Our girls want to make a mark on the world,’ says
Fraser — and make a mark they do. But perhaps it’s her
next statement which explains why the girls do so well.
‘Of course our schools are terrifically good at supporting girls to achieve strings of A*s and As,’ she says. ‘But
if that’s all we do in our schools, then we’re really failing.’
It’s not all about results for Fraser. What she’s interested in is encouraging girls to enjoy learning, which often
means going off-syllabus. ‘To me, that first year of sixth
form is the most wonderful opportunity for intellectual
exploration and excitement,’ she says. ‘It’s not just what
you learn, but how you learn.’ This involves taking on
Open University Yass modules, which aim to give students an early taste of university-style studying, and the
Extended Project Qualification, for which pupils choose
their own research projects.
This helps instil in the girls a more rounded and
mature attitude to life, which will stand them in good
stead to face the combined pressures of work, family and
relationships. At a time when some 65 per cent of mothers with school-age children have jobs, isn’t that what a
21st-century female education really ought to do?
Tim Jelley - Camilla Swift_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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Hulton Archive/getty images
Choose your advisers wisely: Emperor Karl V of Germany had Erasmus, who presumably didn’t come cheap
Uncommon entrance
For those too rich to notice school fees, the world of private tutors
and school consultants is an attractive option, says Stephen Robinson
C
ommon Entrance is looming and Milo’s
progress at his London prep school has
been frankly disappointing. It’s not just
that his academic attainment is below
par. He also underperforms on the extracurricular activities which the top public schools
take so seriously now that they have multi-million-pound theatres, music halls and sports centres.
Milo has never troubled the debating society or featured in the annual school play, and he hates playing
football as much as he enjoys watching it at Stamford
Bridge with his father, Rupert.
Listing ‘Watching Chelsea’ as
your principal interest will not get
Drawing up a comprehensive you into St Paul’s, Westminster or
Eton, where Rupert went in the late
report could set you back
1970s, in the good old days when
as much as £10,000
any duffer could get in. Milo’s form
master has warned them that they
should aim no higher than Radley,
or, God forbid, Harrow (‘These days it’s totally Shanghai-on-the-Hill,’ Caroline, his mother, has been told).
But in case laying out £15,000 a year, before sundries,
for a day prep school has failed to raise your child out
of educational mediocrity, there are other ways to buy
yourself out of trouble. Quintessentially, the ‘concierge’
28 service for people with less time than money — or,
possibly, just far too much money — is the latest into
the market. For a negotiated fee, your pampered, idle
dunce can be transformed into a high-achieving, socially
concerned, arts-loving, 400-metre-running renaissance
teenager.
But this further polishing will certainly be out of
the reach of the English private schools’ traditional
constituency of the striving professional classes. Oliver
Joyce of Quintessentially says the absolute minimum
for tutoring is £60 an hour, though the best tutors who
can teach a variety of subjects and who are beloved
in the W11 and SW3 postcodes command a scarcely believable £250 an hour. For the ‘rounding’ of the
child, there are summer camps for sports, music and
informal drama.
‘The best tutoring is regarded as a rarefied commodity these days,’ says Joyce, ‘and parents are very conscious that they only have one chance to put their child’s
education right.’ He concedes that while £250 an hour
may seem silly money, it is dwarfed by the demented
bidding wars in New York where tutors are lured from
investment banker to investment banker with inducements of $1,000 an hour.
For the burgeoning market of the children of the
foreign and ex-pat global super-rich, these firms over-
Stephen Robinson - Uncommon Entrance P28_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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come cultural misunderstandings by providing a dedicated ‘educational consultant’ to draw up a shortlist of
suitable schools. Often foreigners have to be put right
in their assumptions. A Chinese oligarch might like the
look of, say, Ampleforth from its website, but then be
put out to find he will be paying £30,000 a year to have
his son educated by monks. The consultant will accompany the child and parents on school inspections and
‘consult, negotiate, and at times make personal recommendations to these selected schools on your behalf’.
Drawing up a comprehensive report could set you back
as much as £10,000. Joyce concedes a phone call might
be made to favoured common-room contacts to set up
a meeting for the child with the admissions tutor, but
denies the firm browbeats the schools into taking their
preferred clients’ children.
Gabbitas has existed as a teachers’ and tutors’ agency
since 1873, and over the years it has had Evelyn Waugh,
W.H. Auden and Sir John Betjeman on its books. As
Britain’s private education sector has expanded while
seeking the dollars, rupees and renminbi of the global
economic elite who seek a classic English public school
education, Gabbitas and the other consultancies have
become facilitators further to increase the competitive
advantage of the privately educated.
Gabbitas will arrange ‘interview technique sessions’
for children seeking admission to private schools to
‘help you boost your confidence, make the most of your
abilities and create the right impression’. It also runs
annual summer schools, where for £210 a day public
school boys and girls over the summer buffed up their
CVs with sessions meeting senior staff at HSBC, the law
firm Withers, and something called Glasgow Caledonian University (London branch). And finally, for that
all-important push into Oxbridge, Gabbitas will stage
mock interviews in each subject, overseen by an expert
who has ‘appropriate experience with interviewing at
one of these universities’.
No one was available at Gabbitas to say whether
these experts with inside information might still have
links to the Oxbridge colleges, which might seem to
raise ticklish questions of conflict of interest. Could it
be that in Oxbridge courts and quads, admissions tutors
are making life-changing decisions about teenagers,
some of whom have been expensively coached by these
tutors’ friends and colleagues?
The Oxbridge interview gets ever more important as public schools protest that some of their very
brightest are being discriminated against by left-wing
admissions dons determined to up the state school
intake. The survival of the private sector against political storms in the 1970s, and ever rising fees since then,
shows the strength of its survival instinct. When the
top universities put up barriers to the privately educated, the sector spins off a cottage industry of consultants and tutors to protect the advantage. Occasionally,
there is nothing to be done even for the very rich,
except to manage the ridiculous expectations they
have for their children.
‘Sometimes,’ says Oliver Joyce, ‘we just have to say,
I’m sorry, your son is just never going on to get a First
at Cambridge.’
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Stephen Robinson - Uncommon Entrance P28_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
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Girls allowed
Female choristers aren’t traditional, admits Will Heaven. But their
voices are beautiful and so, often, is their effect on unruly choirboys
I f you doubt the viciousness of choirboys, read
Lord of the Flies. William Golding’s choristers
emerge shimmering across a beach in immaculate black cloaks and mortarboards (just as they’d
have dressed in his native Salisbury). A few weeks
later, they’re smeared in war paint and are in the
process of murdering a boy called Piggy. He squeals
at them, ‘You’re acting like a crowd of kids’, before
plunging 40 feet to his death.
We didn’t kill anyone when I was a choirboy, but
there were near misses. The head chorister once processed solemnly into evensong with a red wound on his
forehead, about the size of a 5p coin. Little did Salisbury
Cathedral’s congregation know that there had been an
attempted mutiny — he’d been shot that afternoon with
a bow-and-arrow.
During one choir festival, we discovered that the
Winchester boy choristers addressed their staff-members with the words, ‘Please, sir.’ Oh, this was too good
to be true. We attacked them ruthlessly in the cathedral close, chucking fir cones and yelling in mock terror,
‘Please, sir, please sir, three bags full, sir!’
There’s good cause for all this lurking barbarism:
for more than 1,000 years, the rarefied world of English
cathedral singing was exclusively male. The choristers
were boys; the lay vicars (the altos, tenors and basses)
and the organists were men, not to mention the priests.
Even in medieval times, when tame dogs roamed freely
during cathedral services, girls and women were strictly
barred from the liturgy.
It was the organist and choirThere were worries that
master, Dr Richard Seal, who took
the decision to start a girls’ choir at
the girls’ voices wouldn’t
Salisbury in 1991. The boys were not
carry in the cathedral
best pleased. ‘They felt the cathedral
had been their stamping ground for
centuries and that they were at risk
of being sidelined,’ Dr Seal told me. So he was careful
not to upset them: ‘I decided that when I went into the
song room for a practice with the boys, I would never
mention the word “girl”.’
The grown-up purists massed ranks, too. These
were mostly gentlemen of the old school, who treasured their Ernest Lough records and whose buttonhole Anglicanism made them regulars at evensong. The
ruddiest face among them? None other than that of Sir
30 Will Heaven - Girls Allowed_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
Edward Heath, who was living out his retirement at
Number 59, the Cathedral Close. (You can just imagine a furious letter being dispatched up the road to the
Bishop’s Palace.) But even these high-ranking traddies
couldn’t sway the cathedral authorities, who backed Dr
Seal to the hilt.
By late 1996, when I became a chorister at Salisbury,
the time for revolution had passed. Cathedral life had
been reordered: the services were divided between the
two choirs, meaning that boys no longer had to perform
in public six days a week. Emilia Hughes, a former girl
chorister (and now a world-class soprano soloist), told
me: ‘They’d have denied it, but the boys loved having
us around. It gave them a life away from the cathedral.’
Right on all counts.
But Emilia did remember one telling detail: at the
annual Southern Cathedrals Festival, the girl choristers
were banned from singing with the Chichester Cathedral
boys’ choir — because Dr Alan Thurlow, their choirmaster, was in Ted Heath’s camp. (Perhaps it’s karma that on
his retirement Dr Thurlow was replaced by a woman,
Sarah Baldock.)
And it goes on. Even now there is fierce opposition
to girl choristers in the shape of the Campaign for the
Traditional Cathedral Choir. On the CTCC’s website,
Dr Seal’s decision is described with epic outrage: ‘Then,
in 1991, something happened that few could have foreseen, which had no historical antecedents whatsoever
and which cast an immediate question mark over the
future of cathedral music…’.
In the eyes of the CTCC’s members, Salisbury — one
of the great medieval cathedrals of England — has committed the ultimate act of betrayal. By starting a girls’
choir, they tampered with the entire English choral tradition. According to the campaign, the boy treble’s voice
‘is capable of achieving unmatchable heights of perfection… However satisfying or sweet, the young girl’s
voice cannot compare.’
The problem with is that it’s complete rubbish. We
boy choristers never had reason to be snooty about the
girls’ singing. Their sound was different, yes — perhaps
less heavy than ours — but believe me it was just as
beautiful to listen to.
At the beginning, I’m told, there were some worries
that the girls’ voices wouldn’t carry in the cavernous
spaces of the cathedral. But as they learned to blend,
30
30/8/12 11:56:49
the choir’s total sound thickened. Soon they could sing
Byrd, Wesley, Stanford and Parry just as well as could
the boys. And far from sounding weedy, they could be
heard over the lay vicars and even the cathedral’s fine
Father Willis organ.
In fact, we boys recognised that they were often our
musical superiors — in particular, that they learned the
notes more quickly. And they certainly put us to shame
in the song room. Dr Seal remembered one girl putting
her hand up in one of the first ever practices. ‘I wonder
if we could do that bit again,’ she said, ‘because I don’t
think we’ve got it quite right.’ In 1,000 years, that had
probably never happened.
Of course, none of this has shut up the
naysayers. They’ve recently been getting
cross that St Paul’s Cathedral has allowed
one female alto, Caroline Trevor, to sing
with their lay vicars, because ‘the musical
colours and feeling of the female voice are
entirely different to the male alto’. The
objection really is feeble.
My two older brothers were Salisbury
Cathedral choristers like me and we have
a younger sister, Millie, who also became
one. So, frankly, I’m bound to be supportive of girl choristers. But leaving my prejudices aside, the traditionalist arguments
seem needlessly antediluvian.
How exactly do girl choristers pose a
threat to the male cathedral choir? The answer is: not
at all. The boys’ musicianship hasn’t suffered (ask my
brother Tom, who left school with four Grade Eights).
Nor have they lost practice hours. Their time in the
cathedral choir stalls is slightly reduced, but only a
small percentage of that time is spent singing anyway, as
opposed to nodding off during the Dean’s sermon. No
cathedral boys’ choir has closed down because of this
female insurgency.
Meanwhile, girls are finally doing something that’s
been unjustly prohibited for centuries: helping to fill our
cathedrals with the most beautiful music on earth.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN | 8 september 2012 | guide to independent schools
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Literary tragedy
Our children’s love of books is being allowed to die, says Sophia Waugh
T
he love of literature is not dying. It is being
killed. And it is not, as some Luddites feared,
being killed by technology such as the Kindle,
it is being killed by us. I fear it is almost deliberate.
The tree is still planted; ask a group of 11-year-olds
whether they were read to as little children and nearly all
of them will still say yes. The tree is watered and watched
over in the early years in primary school, and even at the
beginning of secondary school. But then comes the terrible time when the tree is not so much chopped down as
32 Sophia Waugh_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
neglected. It is deprived of water and light and only the
strongest growth survives.
Claire Tomalin wrote recently that the reason children
no longer read the classics is that, because of the speedy
nature of the modern world (especially television), most
are not capable of the sustained concentration needed to
read a novel which slowly unfolds over hundreds of pages.
She is partly right. They can concentrate intensely on a
game on their mobile telephone such as Temple Run for
hours at a time. But each game only lasts a few minutes
and that, alas, is the length of their attention span. But we
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30/8/12 12:18:33
cannot just blame technology and screen entertainment
for the dying interest in literature. We must, I’m afraid,
blame the current educational system.
As long as there are old people who can mutter ‘in
my day we…’ into their beards, we will have criticism of
change. The English exam system in particular is under
constant fire: have the standards dropped? Are the questions too easy? Is the marking just? I don’t want to enter
into all of that in too much detail, but I will say this: ‘in
my day’ by O-Level we had read some Chaucer, various
plays by Shakespeare, a swath of
poetry and a fair amount of fiction.
Isn’t it teachers’ job to make
I remember reading (in school) The
older literature accessible?
History of Mr Polly (H.G. Wells)
I know that it can be done
and Cranford (Gaskell) among others. We went into our exams without
books and wrote about three texts,
from which we had to have memorised quotations to suit
any theme. I ‘did’ Wuthering Heights, Henry IV Part One
and some poetry.
When I first became a teacher, ten years or so ago, the
children wrote coursework essays on a Shakespeare play
and a post-1914 drama as well as a comparative essay
on a pre-1914 and a post-1914 novel. The next year they
scrapped the comparative study, but kept in a pre-1914
novel. In final examinations they were tested on a modern novel (some of which should certainly not have been
on the syllabus, but that’s another story) and some poetry.
All well and good.
But the world has changed. Now it is possible for a
child to have an A* in both English Literature and English Language without
writing on, or reading, anything (apart
from a Shakespeare play) written before
1914. And because they don’t have to
read it, we don’t teach it. To be fair, with
modules, controlled assignments and
exams tripping on each other’s heels, we
don’t have the time.
So in the last two years of school
life a child need only read two novels,
a modern play, some poetry and a play
by Shakespeare. Is that really enough to
instil a lifelong love of books? How can
those children without access to books
at home ever learn to revel in the other
worlds fiction has to offer, particularly as
so many schools have ripped out libraries to make room for computer suites
and public libraries everywhere are
under threat of closure?
It might be argued that pre-1914 fiction is too inaccessible for many children.
But isn’t it our job as teachers to make
it accessible? And I know by experience
that we can. I have taught The Woman in
White to a B-band class whose hostility
when the book was handed out was tangible, but who became totally enthralled
in the story. And why shouldn’t they?
Count Fosco is every bit as compelling
a baddie as Derek in EastEnders, and
his machinations, though more sophisticated and carried out with a more sinister charm, are just as easy to
understand. I taught The Hound of the Baskervilles to
another B-band and will never forget reading it aloud to
them under a tree on the field. They honestly gasped with
excitement at the end of a chapter and groaned when the
bell went. That was not my teaching: that was the book,
the words, the story that was still reaching across the years
to them.
I know a ten-year-old boy, sixth out of seven in a family in which none of the older siblings has bothered to finish school. He loves reading. Where other children lie to
their mothers about how much they have spent on sweets,
he buys a book with his birthday money and pretends it
was half price for fear of getting into trouble. Because of
his chaotic family life he has already been to five primary
schools. At the moment he is encouraged and nurtured at
school, but what will happen to him when he goes to secondary school? If school becomes a world without books,
at what point will his interest be killed through lack of
care?
Of course we must send children off with a clutch of
GCSEs and the ability to function in the world, but aren’t
concentration and imagination as important in the real
world as in the nursery?
In the next round of adjustments to the system, can we
please return the great classical novels of our country to
where they belong? Not the classroom, but through the
classroom into children’s hearts and minds and imaginations.
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Old masters
Luke Martineau on painting the teaching profession
I t is always tough painting busy people. I worry that
I am wasting my sitter’s time; that I am going to get
paint on his or her carpet. But it can be an altogether more terrifying experience when that person is
one’s own headmaster.
Happily, my headmaster at Eton in the 1980s was
Eric Anderson. He and his wife Poppy had a warmth
and an easygoing interest in the boys which made them
p opular and effective. Eric’s intellectual and moral
seriousness gave him gravitas, and his very deep voice
was the object of much affectionate mimicking by the
boys. He and Poppy were among the first to encourage
my fledgling painting career when they commissioned a
still life for their fireplace. So at least I felt sufficiently
at ease in the great man’s company when, a few years
after leaving, I was asked to do a drawing of him for my
old school.
A later subject was my old Latin teacher, Stephen
Spurr, now the headmaster of Westminster. Before landing the job in London, Spurr spent three years in charge
of Clifton College. Since he had spent the little time he
had at Clifton rebuilding its staff (and making people
redundant in the process), he was mildly surprised to be
afforded a three-quarter-length portrait. As he put it to
me, ‘I’m not exactly Mr Popular round here.’ Perhaps
that’s why he was so keen to insist on the inclusion of
‘Omnibus una quies operum, labor omnibus unus’ as an
inscription in the top left-hand corner of my picture. The
idea that we are all in it together, even if the head has a
certain distance on proceedings that gives him an over-
34 Luke Martineaux - Old masters_Schools Sept 2012_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
view — a sense of the bigger picture —
formed the basis of a theme.
With Ralph Townsend at Oundle,
it was another story altogether. Ralph
had been my English teacher for my
last two years at school, and was heading to Winchester, where he remains.
How appropriate that we should have
met for the first time since I left Eton,
famous for its strange uniforms and
arcane, theatrical codes and traditions,
at a fancy dress party, and that I should
receive the commission to paint this
brilliant academic, a man who combines flamboyancy and a deep spirituality, dressed as I was in full doublet
and hose, looking like a gangling Lord
Percy. Painting Ralph actually was
scary, but only because of the awe I had
for a genuine mentor. What I realised
in the process of painting him was that
we were updating that mentor-pupil
relationship: whether the resulting picture is any good seems less important
now than the fact that we remodelled
our friendship for a later stage in our
lives.
More recently, I was asked by
Bradfield College in 2011 to paint the
outgoing (in both senses) head Peter
Roberts. His office, situated in the
heart of the school, underlined the
approachability that seems the key ingredient of modern headship. By contrast, and like many public schools
founded in the Victorian era, the first headmasters of
Bradfield appear from their portraits in the school dining
hall — protected if not by bullet-proof glass, then glass
which is resistant to peas, blancmange and other edible
missiles — to be the sort who would not have found
unruly behaviour amusing. One skull-faced martinet,
Robert Douglas Beloe (1915-1928), even seems to have
been painted, hand raised, in the middle of dishing out
some unpleasant punishment, his bony features perfectly encapsulating the notion that school is for discipline
and character-building, mainly through the infliction of
pain. How times have changed: Peter, youthful and stylishly dressed, not wearing his academic gown, wanted to
be painted in conversation, and certainly not on a raised
plinth dispensing wisdom.
Perhaps the most successful painting I have done of
any headmaster is my most recent, reproduced at the
head of this article: Dr and Mrs Anderson, in the street
at Eton, talking to boys. Strictly speaking, this was a picture not of a headmaster, but of the Provost, commissioned as a leaving present for the Andersons on Eric’s
second retirement from Eton life. It’s not actually a
proper portrait either, but a conversation piece: in every
sense, for conversation is at the heart of the Eton educational ethos. Maybe the reason the painting works has
something to do with that female presence in a very male
world, or maybe I have been going wrong all along, and
it’s a headmistress commission I am after.
34
30/8/12 12:13:06
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Guide to Independent Schools

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