The headmaster of Colfe’s School says he would welcome a debate about the role of independent schools within our education system (Letters, 18 June). The debate is simple. As long as rightwing governments continue to close state school playing fields, cut the education budget to below first-world standards and generally make life difficult for state schools, they will flounder. By contrast, the well-funded private schools will provide even more state-of-the-art facilities and more middle-class parents will bankrupt themselves in order to get their children into these institutions.
The pleas from the Independent Schools Council about bursaries and assisted places are just tokenism. The continued existence of a private fee-paying sector is a big part of what keeps this country in the educational and social dark ages. It’s 70 years since Churchill and RA Butler failed to grasp this particular nettle. The only good thing that might be said about Brexit is that it may finally force us to confront these systemic problems in our national life – but at what cost.
David Redshaw
Gravesend, Kent
• Perhaps Helen Brown (Letters, 18 June) is missing the point in her letter on private schools. My children also have “hard-working parents”, but however hard I worked (in my case as a teacher in a state school), I would never be able to afford to send them to a private school. How can we ever hope to achieve a more equal society when some children benefit from a better education simply because of their parents’ financial situation? Should not all children have the right to a decent education?
Jane Moorhouse
Worcester
• Your editorial (17 June) mentions an 8% cut in funding per pupil in English schools since 2009. This is certainly not representative of some schools and colleges. The sixth-form college of which I was principal and am now a governor had £4,719 per student for the year ending August 2010 and £4,128 per student for the year ending August 2018 – a cut of over 12% in eight years. However, this ignores the effect of inflation. If the ONS figure for inflation is incorporated, the value of the 2018 figure drops to £3,315 in 2010’s pounds – a cut of almost 30%. That this is impossibly unsustainable should be clear to anyone. We are a wealthy country, yet we cannot afford to educate our young people – a shameful indictment of our government and its priorities.
Dr Ambrose Smith
Principal, Aquinas College, 1989-2011
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