The public benefit that will cut out the middle classes

Two weeks ago, I got into a heated argument at the Balham Bowling Club, a trendy little bar in Balham. A barroom brawl, you ask? Or a case of twenty something IT or PR girls cat fighting for the local twenty something hunk? Not quite. The occasion was a friend’s 40^th birthday party and the subject of discussion was the public benefit provided by fee-charging charitable schools.

I’d met A earlier in the evening and had had a delightful conversation about schools with her. When B, her equally delightful husband, joined in, he mentioned that his oldest child was attending a school of the original Dulwich Estate. He was bemoaning the level of fees and the prospect of even higher fees so that the school could offer bursaries to others. But B felt that he should not have to pay more than the cost of his own child’s education. Frankly, I could sympathise, but I found myself spouting off about public benefit and the fact that these endowed schools had benefited from decades and even centuries from their charitable status and therefore could not squirrel out of their public benefit obligations under the (relatively new) Charities Act 2006.

All of this raises tough issues for middle class parents who want to send their children to charitable independent schools. Under the 2006 Charities Act, charities which operate schools need to affirmatively demonstrate that they provide a public benefit. This used to be presumed under the old law. Now, the onus is on them. Last week, the Charities Commission, which regulates charities in England and Wales, issued guidance on what constitutes a public benefit and how this obligation can be discharged. Reading between the lines of that guidance, it seemed pretty clear to me that the easiest way to discharge the public benefit obligation is through the provision of bursaries and the sharing of resources (such as teacher time) or the sponsorship of academies —- all of which involve incremental costs to the charities which must, in the case of unendowed charitable schools, find the money elsewhere.

The problem is that with the exception of a small handful of charities operating independent schools (such as Christ’s Hospital, Whitgift Foundation, Eton, the Dulwich Estate and Winchester), most charitable schools do not have any significant endowment which allows them to allocate investment income to bursaries and other sure-fire ways of meeting the new public benefit requirement. For those schools, the trustees are under pressure to ensure that they fulfil the requirements of the new Act, and in the absence of a prescribed path by the Charities Commission, many will feel the need to take what seems to be the most obvious way of fulfilling that requirement: bursaries. The catch-22, however, is that the money for the bursaries has to come from somewhere and in the absence of endowments, that means full-fee paying parents.

So what are parents to do? Well, they can choose to send their children to a non-charity independent school. Many of these are propriety commercial operations with a profit motive, so while parents may not be contributing to the fees to send the kid from the neighbouring council estate to their child’s prep, the profit motive may mean that they are paying a similar amount to line the pockets of the proprietor of the school. Of course, they can also choose to send their child to a non-charity independent school which is not-for-profit (like the schools of the New Model School Company) and rest assured that they are spending their hard-earned money on their own child and no one else’s.

The reality, however, is that most of this country’s independent schools are charities. Of the almost 1,300 schools which make up the Independent Schools Council, over a 1,000 are charities. And very few are endowed. All of these charities will have to comply with last week’s Charities Commission guidance. The effect, however, is that middle class parents sending their children to unendowed charitable schools will be priced out of those schools by increased fees to subsidised lower income families. It arguably won’t take long for those schools to become polarised with children of the upper classes and lower classes, with the middle classes noticeably absent. This clearly cannot be the right result.

An affordable private school alternative in London: the New Model School

Looking at the keywords people are using to hit my blog, I see that affordable education is at the fore of most of their minds. Not surprising given the number of parents who have taken their children out of independent schools already in response to the credit crunch and the anticipated exodus from those schools at the beginning of the next academic year once the credit crunch has had longer to make lives more miserable.  I’ve already discussed some affordable options earlier this month and last month, but today I have another for you.

You’re in luck if your child is high ability scholarship material (although full or even sizeable scholarships are few and far between), or you’re so poor as to qualify your child (of even average ability) for a full bursary at the local prep or public school.  You’re really lucky, though,  if you don’t have to worry about the price tag and can send your child to any school in the country.  The one group left out of all of this is that of middle class parents of non-scholarship level children. What options do they have?  GEMS and Cognita, the private companies I looked at on Sunday in Would you like fries with your education? professed to be focused on providing affordable no-frills schools targeted at just this group.  But as we discovered, many of those schools charge fees that rival those at the top of the fee bracket, and certainly none in London was anywhere near more affordable than the average fee-paying school that made no pretension of being affordable.

The New Model School Company may fill part of the gap in this market.  Created by social think tank, Civitas, it aims to provide another choice for parents who feel the state system is not providing the education that it should.  Its model is based on three premises: providing a top quality education, keeping fees as low as possible (fees in 2009 will be £5,250 per year, under half of the fees charged by most London day schools) while providing that top quality education, and establishing a model that can be replicated elsewhere.

The first New Model School, Maple Walk,  was established in Kensal Green, Northwest London in 2004.  Its facilities aren’t fancy: it is principally housed in a church hall, although new premises have been bought near Roundwood Park in Brent a few miles away.  The school will relocate in September 2009.  It had two pupils in 2004 and currently has almost 100; there are over 100 pupils registered for entry in each of 2010 and 2011.

I attended the launch in Docklands this week of the New Model School Company’s second school, Faraday School,  which will serve the Docklands, North Greenwich and the East London neighbourhoods.  (This school will be located on Trinity Buoy Wharf, next to the free ferry that goes to North Greenwich.)

Faraday School is expected to follow a curriculum very similar to that of Maple Walk: a strong emphasis on the basics (numeracy and literacy) with science, French, Latin (in the higher primary years), PE, PSHE, history, geography and the other usual suspects all included.  The head teacher at Maple Walk, Sarah Knollys, addressed parents at the Faraday launch. Some of the points which caught my attention were the use by the school of a phonics reading system (rather than whole language which disappointed a whole generation) and the teaching of history in a chronological order.  (It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many schools like to teach in “themes”, something that drives me bonkers and inevitably produces a cohort of kids who don’t know that the Pyramids preceded the Protestant Reformation.)  Specialist teachers are brought in where needed.  Despite the absence of fancy facilities, Maple Walk participates in what I would call many “rich” activities: song, dance and poetry reading competitions, yoga (as part of PE), and Latin.  Maple Walk’s head said she is open to any enriching experiences that are affordable.  One immediately thinks that English Speaking Union speech and debate or maths competitions could easily be integrated into the curriculum, for example.

We’ll have to see how the kids from Maple Walk stack up when they participate in standardised tests and/or apply to competitive secondary schools.  But on the surface, Maple Walk and Faraday seem to be two schools worth keeping tabs on.  And of course, if the New Model School opens a school in South London, I may be among the first to fill out a free registration form…

For more information on the New Model Schools, see http://www.newmodelschool.co.uk/

Credit crunch: When they can’t afford the school fees any longer

The credit crunch has begun to hit my middle class circle recently in a very personal way.  When the last bubble burst (dot com, circa 2000), I was younger. No kids. No mortgage. Very few real responsibilities.  Most of my friends at the time were similarly situated. It was a blip for us.  We moved on.  This time, however, we are all older; many of our friends have kids in school, and a good handful have kids in fee-paying schools.  But the credit crunch has come down hard on many in our circle: redundancies and failing family businesses and the inevitable need to pull kids out of fee-paying schools.  

Some would say that a private education is a luxury to begin with.  So what if your kid has to “go state” with the masses now?  After all, Paul McCartney’s kids did it, Gordon Brown’s are doing it, and David Cameron’s are too.  Some of the state school registrars I have called up in the past few weeks asking for places for children of friends seemed to revel in the private sector families all of a sudden begging at their doorsteps. (Two registrars at London state secondary schools directed two high ability and achieving daughters of a friend to a local school which I am sure former education secretary Estelle Morris had in mind when she said there were some schools she wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.)  The reality is, we have kids being forced to leave the school environments they know and are nurtured by in circumstances which add further to the sense of insecurity such a move (especially mid-year) brings.  More often than not, the children affected are not from the moneyed established classes for whom the credit crunch is but a credit pinch but rather from families who have prioritised education over other discretionary spending in the family budget.  And let’s not forget that while they’ve been paying fees to the independent sector, their parents have continued to contribute to the state sector through their taxes. 

I have come to the conclusion that transferring from the private sector to the state sector outside of the usual transfer points (ie Reception, Year 7 and Sixth Form) requires more than perseverance: it requires good letter-writing, good follow-up, good kids to brag about who will help a recipient school’s league table position, and, ideally, a few good connections.  If your kid is having to change schools mid-year, replace “good” with “exceptional” in the previous sentence. And add lots of luck.

My friend’s daughters did manage to secure places for January in Years 7 and 8, respectively, at a highly sought after school in London which I won’t name in case it results in unwanted scrutiny by LEA authorities.  Two down, one to go.  Another friend has a son finishing off his GCSEs at a fee-paying school. He, like the girls, is a catch: scholarship material and high athletic ability.  It remains to be seen whether he, too, will be able to secure himself a coveted spot at the very same London state secondary.

These are clearly desperate times for people who, like my friends, would prefer not to take their kids out of their current fee-paying schools.  Alternatively, if they must take them out and no viable local state school options are available, what can they do? I’ll explore options for keeping your kids in their current schools and alternate arrangements in future posts.