A truly British McEducation

I was recently surveying the latest rubrics in The Times’ appointments section and noted two public schools seeking what are effectively business development directors for their schools’ international expansion.  I guess I hadn’t realised that what had started as a trickle of ad hoc satellite schools in Thailand and China was quickly becoming a deluge in the Middle East and further afield.

Brighton College and Wellington College are two of the schools which have recently announced mass roll-outs of franchised operations.  Brighton College plans to open two schools in Abu Dhabi in 2011 and 2013, with others to follow in Oman, Jordan, Romania, Vietnam and India.  Wellington College has plans to open approximately 15 schools, beginning in China in 2011 and following with Malaysia, Qatar, Bahrain and India.  This is not a new phenomenon: Dulwich and Harrow have had franchises in China and Thailand for about a decade, while other public schools have created the odd satellite; Repton Dubai, Oxford High GDST in China, Haileybury-Almaty, Shrewsbury Bangkok and Bromsgrove Bangkok come immediately to mind.  Brighton and Wellington are fairly unique, however, in the scale of their planned operations.  Both are motivated by the franchise fees which will be used to fund bursary places and capital projects in the UK.

The franchising of a marketable British brand (or at least until A Levels are thoroughly discredited through grade inflation and curriculum dilution) outside the UK seems very sensible to me in light of the pressures imposed by the Charities Commission on independent charitable schools to provide “public benefit”.  After all, as I discussed in The public benefit that will cut out the middle classes, the absurd result of the Charities Commission’s guidance is that schools will feel compelled to offer more bursaries — bursaries which many do not have the endowments to fund.   The result?  Increasing fees for non-bursary pupils.  Taken to its absurd conclusion, this would result in most charitable schools having a polarised population of very poor and very rich pupils.  So taking cash from franchised operations to fund these places in the UK and hence preserving a broad economic spectrum of pupils seems eminently sensible.

The repatriation of profits to Britain may be morally questionable to some.  Soft imperialism has been a term that has been bandied about.  Frankly, I’m not too worried about that; the premise for the success of these franchises is that there is a stratum of the local foreign market which has the means to pay for a private British education and is more than willing to pay for it. Moreover, I have no doubt that the local population will soon wise up to the fact that they can replicate the British model on their own and squeeze the franchises out once the local market becomes better established.  This may be precipitated by the profit motive in the local market or perhaps by nationalist sentiment when locals realise that profits from the satellite schools are funding kids back in Britain rather than kids in New Delhi, Bangkok or Abu Dhabi.  I have no doubt that the consumers in these far-flung locations have the wealth and know-how to look out for themselves.  Many probably have incomes far in excess of the average parent of a public school child in England.  

This is precisely why I think the British public schools engaging in franchising or thinking about it should do so with caution.  With the exception of perhaps Harrow, very few of the public schools which are establishing satellites are household names abroad.  As much as many of the franchising schools like to think of themselves as major public schools (and let’s face it, most of them are not in this league), the cachet and hence pulling power of most public schools is not so great that they couldn’t be supplanted by generic locally-established British-modelled schools.  And when it sinks in that consumers are not really getting a Harrow, Dulwich, Repton or Wellington education but rather a knock-off co-branded education, the momentum for local home-grown competitors to the British satellite schools will grow considerably and threaten the viability of the satellite school model.

Franchising offers an opportunity to certain public schools to ensure that they can meet the public benefit requirement that the Charities Commission has imposed without increasing fees and alienating the middle classes.  If they want to take advantage of this they should do so quickly because it won’t take long for satellite school consumers to develop the expertise to establish their own home-grown schools which can give them as much, if not more, than any of our satellite schools can offer.  When that happens, the franchisor schools will find their franchise fees dry up and perhaps, if they’re unlucky, they’ll even find they’ve received little return on their investment. and perhaps seen their most valuable asset — their name and reputation — highly devalued. At that point, selling a birthright for a mess of potage comes to mind, and that cannot be a good thing for any school.

The best kept British school secret…

Over the next few days, I’m going to share with you a few affordable school gems if your current school has become unaffordable. Note that I am not defining “affordable”. We each have our own snack brackets. Some of you have kids at the likes of Eton or Benenden which you can’t afford as we continue to be increasingly credit-crunched. You may still be able to afford other public schools (yes, there are more affordable public schools!)  Some of you may have kids at boarding schools further down the foodchain (aka at “minor” public schools, as Mr. Snowdon corrects me.) There are still options for you. And some of you may have kids in public day schools. There are still, unbelievably, options for you, too, to explore. Today, I’m going to start with the more expensive options, and during the course of the next week, I’ll work through the various snack bracket options.

We’re unique in the UK in having a small, relatively unpublicised state boarding school system.  There are under three dozen such schools in the UK, most of which offer 11-18 schooling .  A small handful cater to the primary level — but don’t get me  going on that one; as a North American, when I hear people talk about little Peregrine going to Summer Fields or Sunningdale at age 7, I always think of that famous saying: “The English hate children. They keep their dogs at home and send their kids off to high class kennels called Eton and Harrow”.  Having spent ten years in this country now, however, I have begun to appreciate that boarding school for older children may offer something special or at the very least be a necessity in some circumstances.  But I just don’t get it for primary school. Seven is just too bloody young to get rid of your kids.

State boarding schools are open to children who are holders of EU passports.  You pay no tuition but you do pay for boarding — currently around £3000 per term.  You can see why state boarding schools are of limited interest to those who cannot afford London day school fees — you’d be swapping one £10k price tag for another of a similar amount.  (I suppose you could still see it as a saving when you take into account the food the average teenager consumes at home. Oh, and the long hot showers which the meter now registers and which you now pay for…)  But for someone currently paying £15-25000 per year for a boarding school in the private sector in the UK, there are substantial savings.  If you’re a snob, you can still brag to your friends that little Arthur is “away at school” and still talk about him coming home for an “exeat”.  Since the state boarding schools are so little known, very few in your social circle need to know that your stock portfolio is a fraction of what it once was and that little Arthur has actually “gone state!” 

 There are other advantages to state boarding schools.  Some, such as Cranbrook in Kent (one of my favourites) are grammar schools.  Local kids have to sit an entrance exam; only those in the top ability band are offered places.  I think many at Cranbrook would agree that the intake for boarding places is of a slightly lower ability level.  Slighty above average Atticus could therefore get into a “better” school (academically) than he would otherwise get into as a day student at his local grammar school (assuming there is one) by sitting the 11+ in a grammar school district.  Other schools, such as Hockerill Anglo-European College, offer the international baccalaureate and have average scores to give IB schools Sevenoaks and King’s College Wimbledon a run for their money.  (I also loved this school’s language focus: I heard groups of pupils speaking in German and across the courtyard, another group speaking in Spanish; it clearly attracts EU pupils from other countries.) Old Swinford Hospital School in the West Midlands is another one of my favourites.  Once a public school, it is still steeped in all the tradition and physical plant one would expect of a public school.  There are approximately 30 other state boarding schools. I must admit that there are some I would not send my child to as a day pupil if I lived in the catchment area, so I certainly wouldn’t consider paying to send my child to board at those. But there are some good ones (including my favourites above) and they are certainly worth exploring.  Plus, with the Russell Group universities increasingly discriminating in favour of state school applicants, why not enjoy bragging about little Jack being at boarding school and giving him the best shot ever of getting into Oxbridge?

 For more information on the state boarding schools, see:  http://www.sbsa.org.uk