While I was pleased to see that the headmistress of my old school, James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich, reads the Guardian (Letters, 25 April), I agree with Tim Lott (Opinion, 22 April) that private schools should be abolished. When I attended Jags in the 1950s it was grant maintained and at least half the pupils post-11 were paid for by the local authority, including me. The remaining half who did not reach the academic standards demanded by the 11-plus and who had often attended the private junior sector (as I did) continued to pay fees. There was some genuine social mobility with many girls going on to successful careers.
The situation is now very different. Girls at Jags have an excellent and highly privileged education and are among the elite 7% who make up the very small but extremely powerful private sector in this country. I would remind the head that approximately 50% of students at Oxbridge come from that 7%.
I have spent the whole of my teaching career working in comprehensive schools, constantly dismayed at the appallingly low funding and lack of opportunities for young people, but thrilled at the high quality of commitment shown by gifted teachers for all their pupils.
I am sure that the headmistress of Jags has good intentions, but she is naive to think that she is genuinely enhancing social mobility in a school so richly resourced and as selective as Jags.
Liz Armstrong
Hadfield, Derbyshire
• If fee-paying schools were abolished, just think of the efforts that would be made by the parents of children transferring to the state sector to ensure that all schools were up to the mark. State schools across the country would benefit enormously from the skills, the cultural capital (and the money) of such families.
Such a move would be the most effective way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor, a move that the Finnish government had the foresight to effect back in the 1970s. Look where they are now – far ahead of Britain in the OECD’s Pisa rankings which measure educational progress around the world.
Fiona Carnie
European Forum for Freedom in Education
• Letters defending private schools or even portraying them as agents for social mobility must surely be part of the new trend for fake news?
The headmistress of James Allen’s Girls’ School gives us a heartrending account of the struggles of her mother sending her off to private education on the back of her work in the school kitchen. She probably has few pupils in her school with mothers currently in such employment – even if they are working full-time, they would be struggling to pay the rent and eat with three children in tow. Finding the upwards sum of an extra £10k a year from her wages would be laughable. If she was a single parent she would be more likely to be visiting the local food bank. No reference to the working poor from this headmistress.
Joan Errington
East Grinstead, West Sussex
• Two heads of private schools reiterate that old canard of a justification for their continued existence, that they give bursaries to those who would otherwise be unable to pay their extortionate fees. Both suggest that this would facilitate social mobility. What they do not tell us is that such bursaries are by competitive “scholarship” selection. By so doing, of course, they are hoping to boost the average IQ of their own establishments to the detriment of the local schools which these “clever” children might otherwise have attended, thereby rendering a truly comprehensive system of state provision an impossibility.
The key question to both of them is: would they be prepared to select these “deserving poor” pupils by lottery? Or even solely from the ranks of those on free school meals? I think they should be asked.
J Brian Harrison-Jennings
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
• Two heads of private schools share their uplifting tales of social mobility and “supportive partnership work” with state schools. Notwithstanding my own experience as head of an “inner-city comp” in one of the most deprived parts of the country, whose nationally recognised success in transforming lives was achieved using skills, stamina and professionalism beyond anything to be found in the private sector, I am anxious that we nail this “social mobility” concept. We all approve of it and it is increasingly cited as a justification for just about anything but, rather like “consumer choice” and “market reform”, its meaning is problematic.
In the endless queues round the block outside Wimbledon, if an individual from the back of the queue is moved nearer the front then for each significant “winner” there are many “losers”. This is social mobility. Alternatively, if we expand Centre Court to provide more seats, there are many “winners” and no “losers”. This is social transformation.
Steve McMahon
Chester
• Promoting social mobility through public schools being seen as positive is in itself problematic. Firstly, it ignores the fact that social mobility can only exist in a class-ridden society, thus underpinning privilege, and secondly, that in an unequal society someone climbing the social ladder sends someone down. Greater social equality, without rank being set by those already privileged, would enable all people being respected for their abilities and contribution to society.
Roy Grimwood
Market Drayton, Shropshire
• Are we to take at face value the claim that private schools “support” the state sector by offering bursaries? Or might we inquire as to precisely which pupils benefit from this selfless largesse?
Are bursaries directed purely to the academically bright or are they also offered to troubled kids at risk of exclusion? The irony is of course that the private sector has the cash to provide close pastoral support – just the ticket for this group of kids.
Alistair Richardson
Stirling
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