Dame Damns Schools for Not Being More Like Dame Schools – Damn it!
Civitas, 21 July 2009
The Charities Act of 2006 demanded not unreasonably that, to qualify for the tax breaks that accompany charitable status, bodies seeking it must prove themselves of public benefit. Less reasonably, Parliament left the task of stipulating what constitutes public benefit to the Charities Commission.
Its Chair Dame Suzi Leather (whose name, I hope she won’t mind me confessing, never fails to remind of the leather-suited sixties rock singer Suzi Quattro) insists that merely to provide their pupils with education, and thereby relieve the Exchequer of the estimated £2 billion cost of so doing, does not constitute enough of a public benefit to qualify independent schools for the charitable status that is estimated to save them jointly the comparatively small annual sum of £180 million.
Dame Suzi’s view is that: “Charities such as… independent schools… can legitimately charge fees, but cannot be, in effect, exclusive clubs. What we want to ensure is that they give access to a sufficiently wide section of the public.”
Last week, the consequence of Parliament having left it to Dame Suzi to determine public benefit came home to roost. It did so in the form of a ruling by her Commissioners that three independent schools and a nursing home fail to benefit the public.
The organisations now have a year to come up with plans that will satisfy the Charities Commission or else risk losing their charitable status.
Although the Commission has denied this to have been the grounds, according to the Daily Telegraph, the schools were apparently judged to have failed to provide a public benefit because they did not offer enough free places to children whose parents could not begin to afford their fees. So small is the operating margin of some of these schools that they could not possibly offer the substantially greater number of free bursaries they seemingly now must to satisfy Dame Suzi and her fellow Commissioners.
It is unlikely these schools will leave the Charities Commission’s ruling against them unchallenged. Nor, it seems, will they be without good grounds for doing so. According to a letter in today’s Times written by an eminent QC:
‘The proper interpretation and application of the public benefit test is governed by longstanding case law, which the Act preserved. There is no authority for the public-benefit test as enunciated by the Commission.’
Far be it from me to muddy the water still further, but it seems far from clear to me that, were independent schools to provide more free bursaries than they already do, that would constitute a public benefit, or even necessarily much of a private one.
As some have already pointed out, given their academic selectiveness, were independent schools to offer substantially more free bursaries, they would only cream off from the public sector its most able pupils. Widening the attainment gap between state and private schools still further hardly seems to me the best way independent schools might go about benefiting the public, however much it might do to the privately educated Dame Suzi, who also sent her own children to independent schools.
Moreover, there seems reason to think that not all the children who would thereby attend independent schools will benefit from doing so. According to a recently published study commissioned by the Sutton Trust: ‘the defining characteristic of their time at school’ of children from working class backgrounds, who attended private schools in the 1980s and 1990s on the Assisted Places Scheme, was their ‘feeling like the poor relation’.
Still, if there have been one indisputable public benefit independent schools have provided by their awards of free bursaries, it has been to give the lie to the claim made in today’s Times by Alan Milburn, chairman of the Government’s panel on social mobility, that ‘there is previous little evidence that schools selecting pupils does anything to close the attainment gap’ between children from impoverished family backgrounds and other children.
A sixth former at Rugby has just won a place Cambridge, after receiving a free bursary there, after growing up with her Sri Lankan parents in a semi in Wembley, her father being a security guard, her mother a lab technician. The young lady in question has stated that:
‘A school like Rugby gives you much more self-confidence… In my old [state] school I would have thought Oxbridge was… somewhere I wouldn’t get into. Here, you’re told … that you have a reasonable chance.’
If that young lady’s testimony does not constitute evidence that selective schooling can do something to close the attainment gap, I don’t know what does.
Grammar schools also once had a similarly galvanising effect on the self-confidence and academic performance of their pupils of working class background. I know. I was at one and can vividly remember the effect mine had on the many working class boys from it who went on to Oxbridge and other good universities.
Anyway, roll on the almost certain up-coming test case between Dame Suzi and the currently beleaguered independent schools.
Charity might well begin at home. Dame Suzi has assured that at least one charity is now going to end up in court in order to retain its charitable status.
Suzi Quatro (only one ‘t’) had her first hit in 1973. 🙂 Otherwise, a good post.
With regard to the question of the “brightest”, the state system operates on a bizarre double-standard. On the one hand, many teachers do not wish to provide such children with an appropriate education, as this would be “elitist”, “divisive”, and so on.
On the other hand, the same teachers do not wish to see such children being allowed to go elsewhere for their education, as this would also be “elitist”, divisive, etc.
The only way to resolve the contradiction, short of openly stating that they would prefer such children not to receive an appropriate education at all, is for the teachers to pretend that such children do not exist, which they are apparently allowed to do. One article on gifted children in the state system described them as “invisible”, lacking any legal recognition of their needs.
Another article referred to them as the “last minority”, lacking the protection that ethnic and religious minorities possess within the education system.
This is clearly not to the advantage of the children involved – back in 1999, the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham, expressed his concern at the large number of “particularly bright teenagers” he found in Young Offender Institutions” – victims of an educational system that was not required to meet their needs, leaving them bored and frustrated, all too apt to turn to anti-social behaviour.
Attempts to provide for the needs of such children have met with failure, due to opposition from the various teaching unions, amongst others. Current policies seem to show even less regard for their needs.
I recently came across an article on educational practice in America. A survey conducted in two states showed that one in five of high school drop-outs, when tested, revealed IQ ratings placing in them in the “gifted” category – a much higher proportion than the proportion of gifted students amongst the general student population.
One of the authors of the article pointed out that America was currently involved in intense economic competition – with China and India, amongst others – and wondered how long it could afford an educational system which had so little appeal to its brightest students.
Perhaps those people in this country considering education from the viewpoint of the “public good” could ask themselves the same question, and then ponder the answer.