Dear Secretary of State for Education

Schools need the autonomy to be able to nurture each child, and parents deserve to be able to find this in schools for their children.

This autonomy and individual approach already exists, however, in the independent school sector

Dear Secretary of State for Education

As the dust settles on the election, and you settle down to the serious business of preparing legislation for education reform, you may wish to hear some thoughts from the independent schools sector on your propositions. Much of what you propose is exciting and radical; it will be even more exciting and radical, though, if you embrace the existing excellence in the independent sector and draw on the long-standing expertise of our schools.

Your proposal to allow parents to set up their own schools is based on the fundamental principles of parent choice and accountability of schools to parents. This is absolutely right – parents should have as wide a choice as can possibly be engineered for their children’s education, and they should be able to exercise an appropriate degree of supervision, to check that their children are benefiting from the education they are receiving. If they cannot find that choice or that willingness to be held to account in any of the schools on offer to them, then they should at least have the option to consider designing their own.

Parents want schools to meet their children’s needs, and schools need the freedom to respond to these needs – not just in a general way, but in a very specific and individualised way. Schools need the real flexibility to be able to jettison the national curriculum entirely and design individual programmes of study for individual pupils, drawing on a range of qualifications, and challenging the expectation that learning at each level is age-related. Your proposals in this respect for school freedom could make a significant difference in allowing schools to tailor the education that they offer to each individual child.

Schools need the autonomy to be able to nurture each child, and parents deserve to be able to find this in schools for their children. This autonomy and individual approach already exists, however, in the independent school sector, in hundreds of tremendous schools. 7% of the country’s children are already educated in the independent sector, and this figure rises to more than 18% in the over 16’s. Parents already choose an independent school education because they can see the benefits of an exceptional education which puts their child first, and which helps them to become the best that they can be. 

Of course, this individual approach to education, working in partnership with parents, costs money. Investing in the future of our country and our wider society is worth it, though: you yourself have said that ‘there is nothing more important to the fairness of our society and the future prosperity of our country than getting education right’. If we value education as a society then we need to be prepared to pay for it. It is difficult to get a good education, with highly qualified teachers, small class sizes and well-resourced schools, ‘on the cheap’. The true cost of an excellent education can be seen in the fees which first-rate independent schools charge in order to be able to provide this kind of education, and many parents work extremely hard and make enormous sacrifices in order to be able to send their children to such schools.

Parents simply want the best for their children. If parents felt that they were able to access the excellence that already exists in the sector, then you may find that they did not need to set up their own schools, with all the additional costs and bureaucracy that organising that infrastructure would entail. Enough money is spent on administration as it is; surely we should be ensuring that every penny of the funds available is spent on the children?

Think how much more freedom these parents would have if the funding to which their child is entitled (and to which they contribute in their taxes) were to follow the child to whichever school they chose. Would not the new pupil premium that you propose be more fairly distributed if you were to allocate it to the child rather than more generally to the school in which the child is currently educated, or even by postcode? True commitment to parental freedom of choice would give all parents much more control over the funding that followed their own child.

I think that you would find that independent schools would welcome the opportunity to match this funding with bursary support of their own – already, ISC schools provide annually more than £540 million in assistance with school fees, and do so without the benefit of the per pupil funding to which, strictly speaking, each pupil should be entitled, given that their parents pay income tax. When excellent schools are staring us in the face, why not consider making it more possible for our children to access them?

Independent schools are not exclusive institutions: no fewer than 4 out of 5 independent schools, according to the 2010 ISC census, are involved in partnerships with state schools. We want to educate the children of our country. We value our independence, though; even the much mooted independence of academies is still subject to the vagaries and whims of central government. We know what we are doing, and we believe that we can offer it to more young people. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to education simply want the best for the next generation.

The offer is open – if we can work together, we will be making a better world. Now that really would be getting education right.


Yours

Dr Helen Wright
Head of St Mary’s Calne, one of the leading independent schools in the country