On 29 October in Credit crunch: When they can’t afford the school fees any longer, I addressed the issue of children being withdrawn mid-year from their fee-paying schools due to the credit crunch. Canvassing the press, I see that in the past three months, this precise subject has become a rather hot topic for the media and a rather pressing issue for more and more families. The credit crunch has adversely affected all of us in some way or another, and not everyone finds themselves in a crunch because of negligence of the type witnessed by the banks of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. Some people are just experiencing tough luck — flotsam in the bigger, choppier seas of the current economy. The ensuing sharp practice of some mortgage lenders when dealing with mortgagees facing challenges as a result of these difficult times has been highlighted by the press and chastised by political and community leaders. But sharp practice by school bursars?
The very institutions which are entrusted with the education of future citizens and leaders in a full array of subjects, including moral education and citizenship, should be leading the way in helping parents in financial difficulty to find a way to keep their children in school while allowing them to rearrange their finances. Goodness knows, many schools are doing just this: fee arrangements are being agreed and bursaries are being granted by many schools to allow children in critical phases such as GCSEs and A levels to complete those courses or others to finish off their school year so as to minimise disruption to their lives. This is all very laudable. So what kind of example could the Girls’ Day School Trust (which owns several dozen schools in the UK and is estimated to educate ten percent of all privately educated girls in this country) have possibly been trying to set in terms of moral education and citizenship when it allegedly* rudely excluded a Year 7 Streatham and Clapham High School pupil mid-way through morning classes in front of all of the pupil’s classmates? The pupil was allegedly* escorted to reception where she was allegedly* left unattended for several hours until her mother could be contacted to collect her. The girl’s only crime was that her school fees were allegedly* £5,100 (the equivalent of less than two terms) in arrears. She was humiliated in a way that a Texan or Californian court would probably be happy to award damages for.
The girl’s family had been particularly hard hit by the credit crunch: the unexpected arrival of a new baby and the demise of a business whose client base was heavily weighted with estate agencies coupled with an ex-husband with court-ordered responsibility for school fees and child support who had not been able to meet those obligations had all meant arrears of school fees had accumulated. The mother offered to assume the fees going forward to see her daughter through the year but was unable to assume the arrears incurred by her ex-husband. This was, apparently, unacceptable to the school. The mother had anticipated that the cash flows would not be available going forward on a long term basis and had secured a place for her daughter at a local secondary school for September but no one could take her before. It would have been easy for the school to allow the mother to assume the fees for the remaining two terms and to pursue the father for the arrears separately. The girl would have been spared the humiliation she suffered and the trauma of being left without a school mid-year. One also has to wonder whether the school can, in this economy, fill the girl’s place mid-year. If not, what is the opportunity cost of allowing the girl to continue at the school….especially if her mother could borrow the money to keep her in school until the end of the year?
Schools may be businesses, but they are also human businesses which touch on human dignity in a similar vein to hospitals. In my mind, they have a greater duty to their clients than businesses in less “human” industries. Moreover those schools that are charities (as the Girls’ Day School Trust is) arguably have an ever greater duty as a charity. The GDST’s alleged* treatment of its pupil on the first day back at school in January was the antithesis of all things charitable.
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* I know the girl in question and heard her account firsthand but feel compelled, given the increasing litigiousness of fee-paying schools, to caveat this posting appropriately.
Snowdon on Schools 