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/

Would you like fries with your education?

When I see a characterful individual restaurant open another branch, I always despair.  Will it retain its character and quality? Will it expand and become a chain equivalent to Pizza Express or Wagamama — perfectly adequate but lacking that je ne sais quoi that the individual restaurant possessed?  I feel the same way about schools.  When we think of English independent schools, we naturally think of the Etons, Westminsters and Winchesters: individual schools with character and a sense of purpose owned by a charitable trust. Of course, some are owned by individuals who feel passionate about education in pursuing their profit motive. Think the Colonel at Hill House, Joanna and David Thomas at Thomas’s Day Schools, and Lady Houstoun-Boswall at the Harrodian and later Hampton Court House School.  But what many people don’t realise is that many independent schools (and even some supposedly posh ones) have in the past five years been bought or established from scratch by investors for the sole purpose of turning a profit for investors who may have very little of the passion that one expects of anyone involved in something as important as education. 

Friends recently expressed an interest in sending their son to the school attended by Princes William and Harry in Kensington.  Its sister school, Pembridge Hall, was the object of much brouhaha two years ago when its headmistress suggested women have Caesarean sections early in the month in order to be sure of getting one of the five places opened each month for children born that year.  People assume that with a clientele such as the princes and demand that requires rescheduling the birth of a child, these must be pretty unique schools. In fact, they are but revenue units of a chain of 13 schools and half a dozen crammers owned by Alpha Plus, which is now owned by Delancey, a property investment company. (Delancey bought Alpha Plus just under a year ago for a rumoured £100 million, some £74 million more than the £26 million paid five years earlier for the group by private equity firm, Sovereign Capital.  Sovereign Capital reported an IRR of  53% on its investment.)  And Southbank International School, attended by the children of many expats in the City, is but one in a chain of over 30 schools in this country plus others internationally.  That chain is owned by Cognita, which is backed by Englefield Capital.  The Hampshire School, with its Kensington address, is but one of dozens of schools in the UK and abroad owned by GEMS, which was founded by Dubai entrepreneur Sunny Varkey.  Alpha Plus, Cognita and GEMS emerged in the past few years, ostensibly to shake up the private school market and to offer value private education (read: literacy and numeracy and traditional schooling, but perhaps not the equivalent of a West End theatre for little Isabelle’s Year 2 play or an onsite swimming pool.)  A laudable idea, perhaps, given the significant percentage of parents who are disgruntled with falling standards in the state schools and  who say they would send their children to private schools if they could afford to do so.   But has the theory been put into practice? And is the corporatisation of our schools a price worth paying for a cut-rate education?

It is curious that Southbank International School and the Hampshire School do not post what they charge in tuition fees on their website.  I visited Southbank a few years ago and it was relatively expensive with respect to its peer group back then. I can’t imagine that Cognita has paid good money to acquire it only to lower fees.  In fact, I have heard parents I know with children there grumble about the increases there, and I know some who have pulled their children out as a result. So much for an affordable education there now that it’s under the Cognita umbrella.  And what about the Hampshire School? Well, we have no way of knowing what they charge because they don’t make this publicly available on their website. I should point out that it is the norm for schools to publish this information on their websites.  Are they withholding the information because its fees are perhaps not in line with Mr Varkey’s mantra that he’s trying to provide an “affordable education”? Wetherby School and Pembridge Hall, which are owned by Alpha Plus (which also owns the Davies Laing & Dick crammers), are at least up front and publish their fees.  But they charge £4200 per term — more than the going rate for the average London prep.  Again, so much for economies of scale, passing on affordability, and shaking up the private sector. 

Let’s assume for the moment that there are some affordable schools in these groups (and I believe there are some), and let’s ignore the fact some of the schools really are quite expensive (so much so that they have to refrain from posting the fees on their websites).  Is corporate ownership desirable? How long will it be before the quirkiness, history and colour of the established schools brought under these corporate umbrellas is eroded by the economies of scale imperative on which the groups operate?  How can a newly established no-frills school ever hope to achieve character when pushed to provide a return acceptable to the private equity houses (in the case of Alpha Plus and Cognita) that own them?  The project has not been long in the making, and I’m afraid if we revisit this question in a few years’ time, we may find that the expensive corporatised schools have turned into a homogenised slush while the truly “affordable” private schools under those corporate umbrellas are so strongly driven by the profit imperative that they fail to develop any of the character.  In short, I fear we’ll end up with a bunch of McDonald’s restaurants and maybe a few Carluccios, but in they end, neither really has much individuality any more, does it?