Education. It’s a notoriously divisive issue. There are those who believe that the only way to ensure a first-rate education is to pay for it. And there are those who don’t. Comprehensive headteacher Jo Ward falls firmly into the latter category. “If you paid me £500,000 a week, I wouldn’t teach in a private school,” she said in ITV’s new two-part documentary School Swap – The Class Divide.
Aimed at exploring the gulf between state and independent schools, the show sees the head and three pupils from Warminster, a £27,000-per-year Wiltshire boarding school, trade places with their counterparts at a 700-plus pupil state school in Derby. Unsurprisingly, Warminster has half the pupils and twice the budget of the Bemrose School, where admission numbers are increasing weekly. The majority of new pupils speak English only as a second language.
“I try to meet every new pupil’s parents before they start school,” claims Warminster head and former army officer Mark Mortimer. “I don’t see how Ms Ward can to do that.”
This is by no means groundbreaking TV and it does little to dispel the public versus private stereotypes. But it was heartening to see the teenagers take more away from the experiment than their teachers.
Bemrose pupil Nazh, who moved to the UK from Syria in 2011, is ambitious and aims to become prime minister. Her enthusiasm rubs off on Warminster’s Katy, who observes that Warminster students are given the “chance to try everything”. But for the Bemrose pupils, opportunities are fewer and far between.
For public school boys Xander and Jon finishing at 3pm comes as a shock. Used to staying in school until 5pm, they soon concede that with more spare time on their hands, they could get into more trouble. And Katy fears the bigger class sizes could easily become a distraction.
Mr Mortimer, meanwhile, took away nothing other than the startlingly obvious realisation that there are bigger problems in life than “whether to have asparagus or beans” for lunch.
Ms Ward remains apprehensive about her week at Warminster – to be shown on 25 August – but determined to uncover the mystery behind why so many privately educated children go on to excel in the world of work. “I’ve got this horrible sinking feeling it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” she says.
And I’ve got a horrible sinking feeling that she might just be right.
