Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
140-159)
DAME JUDITH
MAYHEW JONAS,
DR ANTHONY
SELDON AND
SIR SIMON
JENKINS
2 JULY 2008
Q140 Chairman: You cannot defend
the indefensible. We all know that many of these organisations
were set up to meet an obvious charitable purpose—the poor
and needy—and they have become institutions for the privileged.
That is just a fact. There is nothing wrong with that; that is
what institutions do, but the question is why they should have
a taxpayer subsidy?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: You
are concentrating on the poor and needy side of it. The relief
of poverty is a head in its own right, but I am saying that education
per se is still a charitable heading in its own right, leaving
out rich or poor. That is where universities and schools come
in, and that is still the law. We are in your hands in that respect.
Q141 Chairman: No. The hands that
you are in are the definition of "public benefit". The
presumption is not simply that education by itself is a charitable
purpose; education for public benefit is a charitable purpose.
The question is: what is public benefit? Public benefit involves
attention to people who cannot access the fee system, so we are
exploring what it means for a sector that charges fees. Everyone
has to think their way through it, and that is what we are doing
with you.
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: Which
is what we are doing.
Q142 Paul Flynn: Caerleon Comprehensive
School in my constituency has for the past four or five years
achieved a standard in musical education that is matched only
by specialist musical schools, and it has done this over a long
period. There are good feeder schools and they achieve excellent
levels of work in the community and elsewhere. Why on earth should
they not have the benefit of all these perks from the taxpayer
that a bog standard public school with average achievement gets?
What is the difference between the two?
Sir Simon Jenkins: They do; they
are state schools and get a subsidy from all of us.
Q143 Paul Flynn: You say it is a
subsidy but it is part of the system. They have opted out of the
system. What I am suggesting to you is that Wales is in the fortunate
position of not having many public schools. We are not as fortunate
as Finland which has none; it has one system. By creating the
public school system and opting out of the state system we have
created a two-tier system with all its inherent problems. One
of the advantages we have in the area is that the only public
school is usually inhabited by the sons of daughters of gullible
English settlers who come in and do not understand that if you
have one system the best teachers will go to the state system
and the best quality of education will be derived from that. Is
there not an inherent problem in this system because it creates
educational apartheid? If we can move away from Tudor times to
the present century, is this not the effect of it? It is damaging
education by creating a two-tier system where the resources are
likely to go to the top tier. Not only that, but we give these
schools charitable status.
Sir Simon Jenkins: I believe it
is unhelpful to the conversation about charitable status whether
or not the school is good enough. It is equally unhelpful to discuss
whether the children who go to these schools are poor enough.
Q144 Paul Flynn: A great deal has
been said about the wonderful standards achieved, for example
if a pupil wants to play a cello and so on, but there are state
schools that achieve at least as much as public schools. There
are great state schools.
Sir Simon Jenkins: I totally agree.
That is the way the independent schools defend themselves at the
moment, and I would do likewise if I was in their shoes. I do
not buy the argument; I agree with you. But I do not believe the
issue is whether or not they are particularly good but whether
they are charitable. I do not even think that by saying they give
bursaries or allow poor people into those schools they are relieving
the poor by taking those people into public schools. The state
system relieves the poor. I think they will have a lot of trouble
proving that they are charities but I do not see why they should
not. I believe that most of them will be able to do so.
Q145 Paul Flynn: They are not charities
in any way that most members of the public would recognise as
bodies that are devoted to doing good. Basically, they are created
to give privileged people an even greater privilege in their education.
At least three-quarters of them come from privileged backgrounds.
That would not be seen as a charity in the view of the man or
woman in the street.
Sir Simon Jenkins: Here I agree
with something that Dr Seldon said. One of the dangers in what
is now proposed is that the schools do hive off particular bits
of their activities in order to say, "This is us being a
charity", and, "This is us being a private sector service
provider." I believe there is a sense in which you will get
a division within the schools in which one group is dedicated
to proving that charitable status is justified and the rest of
them go about the serious business of making money. I think that
would be a pity. On the other hand, I believe it is right that
these institutions, however they were founded, are clearly in
a business that no one would normally recognise as charitable.
They have to find a way of being there if they want to justify
this deductibility. I believe that most of them will not bother.
Q146 Paul Flynn: Do public schools
still take pupils on a residential basis from the age of six or
seven? We hear of old members of families who were torn away from
their parents at the age of seven or eight and went away to residential
schools—something which most us would regard as a form of
child abuse. This was common among the upper classes at one time.
Does this still exist? Is such a practice worthy of charitable
status?
Dr Seldon: Yes, indeed. There
is less boarding in junior schools though it is still there. It
occurs much more in senior schools. I do not think that this should
be something just for independent schools. The academy that we
are founding called Wellington Academy in Wiltshire will have
boarding and I would like to see that available in many if not
all state schools. I think it is an ideal formula, certainly weekly
boarding, for a lot of children and families.
Q147 Paul Flynn: And for young children?
You would not find somebody from a working-class family boarding
their children at the age of seven.
Dr Seldon: We would not have wanted
to send off our children at that age.
Q148 Paul Flynn: But does it still
exist?
Dr Seldon: The "charitability"
of it is obviously part of the overall junior school. It does
still exist principally for those families who live overseas;
they may be service families or whatever, but the greatest proportion
of boarding is in senior schools. In junior schools it has declined
quite a bit. Well done to the school or schools in your constituency!
The best state schools are every bit as good, if not in many cases
better than, as independent schools and that is good. You said
that we had to live in this century. We now have all these independent
schools. The logical conclusion, surely, is not to banish them
but to think how we can share and learn for the benefit of both
sides. The learning, which we have not even begun to talk about,
is so profound. That is what I think should happen rather than
that they should be abolished. My concern about getting rid of
charitable status is that we will just have both sectors drifting
further apart. If I was a Labour MP, which I am not, I would say
that the solution is not to ban independent schools but to make
the state sector so darned good that no one will want them. Who
in their right mind would spend £8,000 or £25,000 a
year?
Q149 Paul Flynn: I have no idea.
Dr Seldon: I bet you have met
some people who have made that choice. Why would anyone do that
if the state sector was good? That is what I would be doing if
I was a government department.
Q150 Paul Flynn: Several thousand
families mostly from England come to my constituency—civil
servants settle there—and I tell them they would not be
in their right minds to send their children to a public school
because of the quality of the local education. Things are a bit
better in Wales; there is a different situation there.
Dr Seldon: We have to live in
the world as it is.
Chairman: We want to keep our eye on
the ball. I do not really want to go into debates about different
sectors, good and bad and all that. We are dealing simply with
charitable status and public benefit and trying to test that point.
Q151 Paul Flynn: I was very interested
in what you said about bursaries and assisted places in schools.
We had rare examples with bursaries where a child from a council
estate with the wrong accent and background was pitch-forked from
his home community into the entirely alien and hostile atmosphere
of a public school and suffered greatly as a result. On the other
hand, I think that most of the children who got assisted places
came from pushy middle-class families who were just on the brink
and could not afford to send their children there. It worked out
that most of the people who took up assisted places were not the
poor and talented; they were the middle-class pushy ones. Is that
not the truth of what happened?
Dr Seldon: There are many different
reports about assisted places, but certainly the widespread perception
was that it was abused by the middle classes who filled in forms
to show they had zero income. That is a perception about assisted
places. It is also true that many thousands of children from less
well off backgrounds benefited and went on to top universities.
But the point is simply that if the main way in which we gauge
whether or not independent schools meet charitable status is the
number of bursaries then that will be injurious. The problem that
concerns me greatly is the divide between both sectors and it
will damage that and push apart those sectors rather than bring
them together. The model I prefer is one of partnership that we
have not spoken about; the second is academies. There one is not
plucking out odd children here and there and denuding state schools
of those special children. Every child is special but I am referring
to those who are specially talented in particular ways. One leaves
them in their social environments with their peers and close to
their parents. Rather than just helping odd ones you are helping
50, 100 or 1,100 children in the case of our academy. We will
have extensive linkages between both schools and I think that
is good. I should like to see every single strong independent
school founding an academy like universities. This is an exciting
development which I would wish the Government and Labour Party
would celebrate more.
Q152 Paul Flynn: Is there evidence
of the bursaries going to the pace-makers and the ones who are
leaders in state schools who go into the public sector to the
detriment of those schools?
Dr Seldon: Being a head I winced
sometimes in plucking out a top footballer. You think of the effect
that would have on the team from which they come. It may be the
case that that child will have a better sporting education and
all-round education and opportunities in my independent school,
but every action has an equal and opposite effect. I do not see
that as being the most socially responsible way of doing it. Having
said that, I think there is a case for bursaries for certain children
in certain cases. I am not against the system overall; I just
think there are much better ways of doing it which include trust
federations and academies.
Q153 Paul Flynn: Dame Judith, you
said that public schools did great community work. How can they
do that when they have children who are drawn from all over the
country rather than what a state school can do where the children
do community work but are rooted in the community outside the
school gate?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: Of course
it depends on the nature of the school. Many independent schools
are urban day schools, so obviously they are more representative
of the community.
Q154 Paul Flynn: But the majority
are not?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: No.
There are a large number of independent schools.
Q155 Paul Flynn: As a group are you
content to remain part of the dependency culture? Would you not
be better off standing on your own two feet and not having subsidies
as a mock charity which clearly you are not?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: I dispute
the words "mock charity".
Q156 Paul Flynn: A pretend charity?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: That
is not something we would recognise. Independence is the key and
is the right word to emphasise. The schools we represent value
their independence enormously because it gives them the ability
to do things beyond the national curriculum with different pupil/teacher
ratios and different emphasis on sport, culture and other additional
activities. But the world is not as simple as it used to be. Every
academy in this country now is independent, so the old difference
between maintained and public schools has been very much blurred
by the creation of academies and specialist schools which are
independent maintained schools. In the good old days when I was
chairman of an LEA I knew what a maintained school was. These
days there is a range of maintained schools, a large number of
which are independent and relish their independence.
Q157 Chairman: If independence is
the key as you keep saying why are you so anxious to keep this
attachment to the state through subsidy? Surely, the assertion
of independence is that you want to be free of all that. Do you
not have member schools that say to you they do not want to go
into all this and prove they are delivering public benefits to
the poor in a particular locality? They just want to get on with
the job they are doing and would rather cut out all of this stuff
and forgo charitable status in order to get on with that job.
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: Strangely
enough, they have not yet come to that conclusion. They value
their charitable status and links to their historical origins
and what they are doing in the community. There is another model.
There are independent schools which are for profit and are owned
by people. Those groups tend not to belong to us. Proprietor schools
or those set up to make a profit for shareholders are completely
independent and are not part of us at all.
Q158 Julie Morgan: How many independent
schools do not have charitable status?
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: I do
not think I have those figures. I am aware that about 1,067 of
our schools have charitable status, but I have not added up all
the rest. Perhaps someone behind me might have done that.
Sir Simon Jenkins: I know of a
totally private prep school that is profit-making and provides
about two-thirds of its places to the local education authority.
That is a huge public benefit and makes the Chairman's point;
it is getting on with the job of providing education for local
kids. It does not go wittering on about charitable status.
Q159 Mr Prentice: I think I can help
with this point. There are 1,300 independent schools in the ISC,
of which 1,044 are charities leaving 256 schools under your umbrella
that are not charities but companies or something like that.
Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas: There
are 2,500 independent schools in the country.
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