A UK independent school (also referred to as a private school) is a school that is not financed through the taxation system. The term "public school" is also used in this context, referring to a select group of independent schools in the UK (roughly 10 per cent of the total) which are in general older, traditional and are members of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. Independent schools are funded by private sources, predominantly in the form of tuition charges, gifts and long-term charitable endowments, and are not subject to the conditions imposed by accepting state financing. There are around 2,500 independent schools in the UK, which educate around 615,000 children (just over 7% of all British children, rising to around 18% of pupils aged over 16).
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In contrast to the usage in the United States and other non-Commonwealth countries, the term public school is commonly used in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to refer to a school which is privately owned and run and does not rely on funding from state sources. Such schools were originally termed "public" in the sense that they were open to anyone who could pass entrance examinations and afford the fees, without religious or other restrictions. Up until the late medieval period, the majority of schools were controlled by the church and had specific entrance criteria; others were restricted to the sons of members of guilds, trades or livery companies, for example the Merchant Taylors' School.[1]
The need for professional trades in an increasingly secularised society, particularly from advancements in philosophy, medicine and law, required schools for the sons of the gentry which were independent from ecclesiastical authority and open to all. From the 16th century onward, boys' boarding schools were founded or endowed for public use[2]—schools which were subsequently reformed by the Public Schools Acts.
The term public school is now commonly used to describe private schools in general, particularly those that are members of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.[3] Amongst the most famous public schools in England are the 'Clarendon Schools' which were the subject of the Public Schools Act 1868: Charterhouse School, Eton College, Harrow School, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, St Paul's School, Westminster School and Winchester College.
There are now more than 2,500 independent schools in the UK educating some 615,000 children, over 7% of children (rising to more than 18% of 16+ pupils) throughout the country.[4][5]
Most of the larger independent schools are either full or partial boarding schools, although many are now predominantly day schools; by contrast there are only a few dozen state boarding schools. Boarding-school traditions give a distinctive character to British independent education, even in the case of day-pupils.
Most independent schools, particularly the larger and older institutions, have charitable status. It is claimed by the Independent Schools Council that UK independent schools receive approximately £100m tax relief due to charitable status whilst returning £300m of fee assistance in public benefit and relieving the maintained sector (state schools) of £2bn of costs.[6] The Charity Commission is currently formulating tests of public benefit for charitable schools as required by the Charities Act 2006.
Some independent schools are particularly old, such as The King's School, Canterbury (founded 597), St Peter's School, York (founded c.627), Sherborne School (founded c.710, refounded 1550 by Edward VI), Warwick School (c.914), The King's School, Ely (c.970) and St Albans School (948). These were often established for male scholars from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds; however, English law has always regarded education as a charitable end in itself, irrespective of poverty. For instance, the Queen's Scholarships founded at Westminster in 1560, are for "the sons of decay'd gentlemen".
The transformation of free charitable foundations into institutions which sometimes charge fees came about readily: the foundation would only afford minimal facilities, so that further fees might be charged to lodge, clothe and otherwise maintain the scholars, to the private profit of the trustees or headmaster. Also, facilities already provided by the charitable foundation for a few scholars could profitably be extended to further paying pupils. (Some schools still keep their foundation scholars in a separate house from other pupils.) After a time, such fees would eclipse the original charitable income, and the original endowment would naturally become a minor part of the capital benefactions enjoyed by the school. In 2009, senior boarding schools were charging fees of between £16,000 and nearly £30,000 per annum.[7]
The educational reforms of the 19th century were particularly important under first Thomas Arnold at Rugby, and then Butler and later Kennedy at Shrewsbury, the former emphasising team spirit and muscular Christianity and the latter the importance of scholarship and competitive examinations. Edward Thring of Uppingham School introduced major reforms, focusing on the importance of the individual and competition, as well as the need for a 'total curriculum' with academia, music, sport and drama being central to education. Most public schools developed significantly during the 18th and 19th centuries, and came to play an important role in the development of the Victorian social elite. Under a number of forward-looking headmasters leading public schools created a curriculum based heavily on classics and physical activity for boys and young men of the upper and upper middle classes.
They were schools for the gentlemanly elite of Victorian politics, armed forces and colonial government. Often successful businessmen would send their sons to a public school as a mark of participation in the elite. Much of the discipline was in the hands of senior pupils (usually known as prefects), which was not just a means to reduce staffing costs, but was also seen as vital preparation for those pupils' later roles in public or military service. More recently heads of public schools have been emphasising that senior pupils now play a much reduced role in disciplining.
To an extent, the public school system influenced the school systems of the British Empire, and recognisably "public" schools can be found in many Commonwealth countries.
The Independent Schools Council (ISC), through seven affiliated organisations, represents 1,289 schools that together educate over 80 per cent of the pupils in the UK independent sector. Those schools in England which are members of the affiliated organisations of the ISC are inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate under a framework agreed between ISC, the Government's Department for Education (DfE) and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). Independent Schools not affiliated to the ISC in England may be inspected by either School Inspection Service or Bridge Schools' Trust. Independent schools accredited to the ISC in Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland or others in England out with the inspectorial bodies listed above are inspected through the national inspectorates in each country.[8]
Independent schools in Scotland educate about 31,000 children and are called Private Schools. Although many of the Scottish independent schools are members of the ISC they are also represented by the Scottish Council of Independent Schools, recognised by the Scottish Parliament as the body representing private schools in Scotland. Unlike England, all Scottish independent schools are subject to the same regime of inspections by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education as local authority schools and they have to register with the Education and Lifelong Learning Directorate.[9][10] The large private schools in Scotland include the High School of Glasgow, The Glasgow Academy, Kelvinside Academy, St. Aloysius' College, Hutchesons' Grammar School, George Heriot's School, Stewart's Melville College, Dollar Academy, Strathallan School, Glenalmond College, Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh Academy, Robert Gordon's College, George Watson's College, Loretto School, Gordonstoun, St Leonards, and Fettes College.
Historically, in Scotland, it was common for children destined for private schools (usually sons of the upper classes) to receive their primary education at a local school. This arose because of Scotland's long tradition of state-funded education, which was spearheaded by the Church of Scotland from the seventeenth century, long before such education was common in England. Independent prep schools only became more widespread in Scotland from the late 19th century (usually attached to an existing secondary private school, though exceptions such as Craigclowan Preparatory School and Cargilfield Preparatory School do exist), though they are still much less prevalent than in England. They are, however, currently gaining in numbers.
Independent schools, like state grammar schools, are free to select their pupils, subject only to the general legislation against discrimination. The principal forms of selection are financial, in that the pupil's family must be able to pay the school fees, and academic, with many administering their own entrance exams - some also require that the prospective student undergo an interview, and credit may also be given for musical, sporting or other talent. Some schools are more or less formally confined to a particular religion, or may require all pupils to attend services regardless of their personal religion. Nowadays most schools pay little regard to family connections, apart from siblings currently at the school.
Only a small minority of parents can afford school fees averaging over £23,000 per annum for boarding pupils and £11,000 for day pupils, with unpredictable extra costs for uniform, equipment and extra-curricular facilities.[7][11] Scholarships and means-tested bursaries to assist the education of the less well-off are usually awarded by a process which combines academic and other criteria.[12][13]
Independent schools are generally academically selective, using the competitive Common Entrance Examination at ages 11–13. Schools often offer scholarships to attract abler pupils, so as to improve their average results; the standard sometimes approaches the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) intended for age 16. Poorly performing pupils may be required to leave, and following GCSE results can be replaced in the sixth form by a new infusion of high-performing pupils, which may distort apparent results.[14]
Independent schools, as compared with maintained schools, are generally characterised by more individual teaching; much better pupil-teacher ratios at around 9:1;[15] longer teaching hours (sometimes including Saturday morning teaching) and homework, though shorter terms; more time for organised sports and extra-curricular activities; more emphasis on traditional academic subjects such as maths, classics and modern languages; and a broader education than that prescribed by the national curriculum, to which state school education is in practice limited. As boarding schools are fully responsible for their pupils throughout term-time, pastoral care is an essential part of independent education, and many independent schools teach their own distinctive ethos, including social aspirations, manners and accents, associated with their own school traditions. Many pupils aspire to send their own children to their old schools in their historical buildings, over successive generations. Most offer sporting, musical, dramatic and art facilities, sometimes at extra charges, although often with the benefit of generations of past investment.
Educational achievement is generally very good. Independent school pupils are four times more likely to attain an A* at GCSE than their non-selective state sector counterparts and twice as likely to attain an A grade at A level. A much higher proportion go to university. Some schools specialise in particular strengths, whether academic, vocational or artistic, although this is not as common as it is in the State sector.
Independent schools are able to set their own discipline regime, with much greater freedom to exclude children, primarily exercised in the wider interests of the school: the most usual causes being drug-taking, whether at school or away, or an open rejection of the school's values, such as dishonesty or violence.
In England and Wales there are no requirements for teaching staff to have Qualified Teacher Status or to be registered with the General Teaching Council. In Scotland a teaching qualification and registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) is mandatory for all teaching positions.
In England and Wales a preparatory school, or prep school in current usage, is an independent school designed to prepare a pupil for fee-paying, secondary independent school. The age range is normally seven to eleven or thirteen, although it may include younger pupils as well. An independent school which only caters for under sevens is a "pre-prep" and the junior departments of prep schools which cover the first years of schooling are also called "pre-preps".[16][17]
The Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools (IAPS) is the prep schools heads association serving the top 500+ independent prep schools in the UK and Worldwide. IAPS is one of seven affiliated associations of the Independent Schools Council.[16]
There are 130,000 pupils in over 500 schools of all types and sizes. Prep schools may be for boys or girls only, or may be co-educational; for instance, one of the leading prep schools, Clept Esten in wales is a small school open for girls only. They may be day schools, boarding schools, weekly boarding, flexi-boarding, or a combination. They fall into the following general categories:[16][17]
The role of public schools in preparing pupils for the gentlemanly elite in the period before World War II meant that such education, particularly in its classical focus and social mannerism, became a mark of the ruling class. For three hundred years, the officers and senior administrators of the "empire upon which the sun never set" (The British Empire) invariably sent their sons back home to boarding schools for education as English gentlemen, often for uninterrupted periods of a year or more at a time.
The 19th century public school ethos promoted ideas of service to Crown and Empire, understood by the broader public in familiar sentiments such as "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game" and "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". Ex-pupils often had a nostalgic affection for their old schools and a public school tie could be useful in a career, so an "old boy network" of former pupils became important.
The English public school model influenced the nineteenth century development of Scottish private schools, but a tradition of the gentry sharing primary education with their tenants kept Scotland comparatively egalitarian.
Acceptance of social elitism was set back by the two World Wars, but despite portrayals of the products of public schools as "silly asses" and "toffs" the old "system" at its most pervasive continued well into the 1960s, reflected in contemporary popular fiction such as Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File, with its sub-text of supposed tension between the grammar school educated protagonist and the public school background of his more senior but inept colleague. Postwar social change has however gradually been reflected across Britain's educational system, while at the same time fears of problems with state education have pushed some parents who can afford the fees or qualify for bursaries towards public schools, which are now often referred to as independent schools.
Labour Party leaders Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Foot and Tony Blair were educated at independent schools, but the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and current Labour party leader Ed Miliband, attended a state school.
Whilst the current Conservative leader and Prime Minister, David Cameron was educated at Eton (and the Conservatives' Chancellor George Osborne attended St Paul's School), all Conservative leaders from 1965 to 2005 were educated at selective state grammar schools, including former prime ministers Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major.
With the exception of Charles Kennedy, all other past leaders of the Liberal Democrat party, including David Steel, Paddy Ashdown, and Menzies Campbell, were educated at fee-paying schools. Without precedent, both main candidates in the 2007 election for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats – Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne – were educated at the same independent school, Westminster School.
In 2003, 84% of senior Judges in England and Wales were educated at independent schools, as surveyed in 2003 by law firm SJ Berwin.[18] This is especially significant considering that just 18% of British sixth formers study for their 'A' levels at independent schools.[4]
Independent schools are often criticised for being elitist and such schools are often seen as outside the spirit of the state system. However, the treatment of the state sector as homogeneous in nature is difficult to support. The spectrum of state schools, their intake and performance is enormous, going from 'super selective', selective, right down to what Newsam referred to as 'sub secondary modern'.[19] Many of the state grammar schools are highly selective and state funded boarding schools require substantial fees, which may introduce further barriers to entry. Even traditional comprehensive schools may be effectively selective because only wealthier families can afford to live in their catchment area and it may be argued that the gap in performance between state schools is much larger than that between the better state and grammar schools and the independent sector. Smithers and Robinson's 2010 Sutton Trust commissioned study of social variation in comprehensive schools (excluding grammar schools) notes that 'The 2,679 state comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated: the least deprived comprehensive in the country has 1 in 25 (4.2%) of pupils with parents on income benefits compared with over 16 times as many (68.6%) in the most deprived comprehensive' [20]
Nevertheless, many of the best-known public schools are extremely expensive, and many have entry criteria geared towards those who have been at private 'feeder' preparatory-schools or privately tutored. Going some way to countering the charge of exclusivity, a large number (c. one third) of independent school pupils provide assistance with fees. The Thatcher government introduced the Assisted Places Scheme in England and Wales in 1980, whereby the state paid the school fees for those pupils capable of gaining a place but unable to afford the fees. This was essentially a response to the decision of the previous Labour government in the mid-1970s to remove government funding of direct grant grammar schools, most of which then became private schools; some Assisted Places pupils went to the former direct-grant schools such as Manchester Grammar School. The scheme was terminated by the Labour government in 1997, and since then the private sector has moved to increase its own means-tested bursaries.
The former classics-based curriculum was also criticised for not providing skills in sciences or engineering, but was perhaps in response to the requirement of classics for entry to Oxbridge up until the early 1960s, as well as a hangover from the pre-20th century period when only Latin and Greek were taught at many public schools. It was Martin Wiener's opposition to this tendency which inspired his 1981 book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850-1980. It became a huge influence on the Thatcher government's opposition to old-school gentlemanly Toryism. Nowadays, independent school pupils have "the highest rates of achieving grades A or B in A level maths and sciences" compared to grammar, specialist and mainstream state schools, and pupils at independent schools account for a disproportionate number of the total number of A levels in maths and sciences.[21]
Some parents complain that their rights and their children’s are compromised by vague and one-sided contracts which allow Heads to use discretionary powers unfairly, such as in expulsion on non-disciplinary matters. They believe independent schools have not embraced the principles of natural justice as adopted by the state sector, and private law as applied to Higher Education.[22]
Generally political attacks on private schools have been opposed by concern that there should be no totalitarian state control of education.
In 2006, pupils at fee-paying schools made up 43% of those selected for places at Oxford University and 38% of those granted places at Cambridge University (although such pupils represent only 18% of the 16 years old plus school population).[4][23] However, the progression of pupils to Russell Group universities, including Oxbridge, is complex. For example, many independent schools (and most of the prestigious schools) take pupils at thirteen, so they would be expected to attract the strongest applicants from many feeder schools. In effect the system 'distills talent' so that a higher probability of progression to the most selective universities would be expected: as noted above, the increased probability of Oxbridge entrance is roughly (43 to 38)/18 or about two to one.
A major area of debate in recent years has centred around the continuing charitable status of independent schools, which allows them not to charge VAT on school fees. Following the enactment of the Charities Bill, which was passed by the House of Lords in November 2006, charitable status is based on an organisation providing a "public benefit" as judged by the Charity Commission.[24] Pending the Charity Commission publishing its definitive guidance on "public benefit" at the end of 2008, there remains an incentive for independent schools to share their sporting, musical and other facilities with the public or local state schools, and supplement their charitable endowments with an increased number of subsidised scholarships and bursaries.
In 2002, Jeremy Smith and Robin Naylor of the University of Warwick conducted a study into the determinants of degree performance at UK universities. Their study confirmed that the internationally recognized phenomenon whereby “children from more advantaged class backgrounds have higher levels of educational attainment than children from less-advantaged class backgrounds"[25] persists at university level in the United Kingdom. The authors noted “a very well-determined and monotonically positive effect defined over Social Classes I to V” whereby, for both men and women, “ceteris paribus, academic performance at university is better the more advantaged is the student's home background.” but they also observed that a student educated at an independent school was on average 6% less likely to receive a first or an upper second class degree than a student from the same social class background, of the same gender, who had achieved the same A-level score at a state school . The averaged effect was described as very variable across the social class and A-level attainment of the candidates; it was "small and not strongly significant for students with high A-level scores" (i.e. for students at the more selective universities) and “statistically significant mostly for students from lower occupationally-ranked social-class backgrounds”. Additionally, the study could not take into account the effect of a slightly different and more traditional subject mix studied by independent students at university on university achievement. Despite these caveats, the paper attracted much press attention. The same study found wide variations between independent school, suggesting that students from a few of them were in fact significantly more likely to obtain the better degrees than state students of the same gender and class background having the same A-level score.[26]
A subsequent study led by Richard Partington at Cambridge University[27] showed that A-level performance is "overwhelmingly" the best guide to what class of degree an undergraduate was likely to achieve at Cambridge. Partington's summary specified that "questions of school background and gender" ... "make only a marginal difference and the pattern – particularly in relation to school background – is in any case inconsistent."
A study commissioned by the Sutton Trust[28] and published in 2010 focussed mainly on the possible use of US-style SAT tests as a way of detetecting candidate's academic potential. Its findings confirmed those of the Smith & Naylor study in that it found that privately educated pupils who, despite their educational advantages, have only secured a poor A level score , and who therefore attend less selective universities, do less well than state educated degree candidates with the same low A-level attainment. A countervailing finding of the same study was that for students of a given level of A-level attainment it is almost twice as difficult to get a First at the most selective universities than at those on the other end of the scale. In addition, and as discussed in the 2010 Buckingham report 'HMC Schools: a quantitative analysis', because students from state schools tended to be admitted on lower A-level entry grades, relative to entry grades it could be claimed that these students had improved more [29]. It is also worth noting that given that independent sector schools regularly dominate the top of the A level league tables, and that their students are more likely to apply to the most selective universities, especially the ones requiring 3 A or A* grades at A level, independent sector students are particularly well represented at these institutions, where they are disproportionately competing with each other and where only the very ablest of them are likely to secure the best degrees.
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