Off the wall

pete quentin, 5 April 2008

In this week’s Times Education Supplement (TES), Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of Tony Blair, has a comment piece entitled ‘Low-cost lessons from the independent sector’.

Amongst some sections of the private education world, Dr Seldon is considered to be somewhat of a dangerous species; a reputation stemming from Seldon’s close proximity to the New Labour government. In particular, Seldon is associated with a vociferous championing of independent/state sector collaboration; a contentious position because it has generally involved promoting a one-way flow from the private. (Seldon’s latest move has been to collaborate in a Wellington College-connected academy in Wiltshire).
Seldon often talks of knocking down the ‘wall’ between private and state sectors, in the pages of the TES and elsewhere. This week Seldon has identified what he considers to be the aspects of the independent sector which ‘…have made the independent school sector in Britain the most successful in the world’. Each element which Seldon has identified is to be whole-heartedly agreed with: in particular the critical difference which small class and school size make to teaching and learning, one of the main causes of the private/state standard divide which the government – and apparently academic researchers – stubbornly dismiss. Seldon also lists the private sector’s ability to implement effective disciplinary measures, the hugely significant sense of affiliation and belonging which ‘house’ type systems foster and the respect with which teachers are treated with, both by schools and pupils. Importantly Seldon also acknowledges the unequivocal impact of a greater number of privileged pupils, both with respect to their attitude to learning and their parents’ involvement. Seldon’s final point, and what presumably determined the piece’s headline (as it doesn’t cost anything – or rather it costs less), is the hugely effective impact independence: autonomy being the ‘…greatest single success of the independent sector’. And it is at this point where Seldon appears to betray his own loss of independence from government influence by arguing that ‘the greatest achievement of Labour in the past 10 years…is to give the state schools more freedom than they ever enjoyed before. Seldon can only be alluding to a parallel education system – or perhaps, rather generously, to the academies programme – for in the average maintained school the greatest mistake which New Labour has made in the past 10 years has been to seize the Conservative’s tools of central control and positively straightjacket schools.
Maybe the moral of Dr Seldon’s piece is in fact the way in which the private sector is letting the autonomy which has been so important to its generation of excellence, slip away.