There’s a significant detail missing from your account of the inequality in school green space (Revealed: students at top private schools have 10 times more green space than state pupils, 16 June). Starting with Margaret Thatcher’s government, local education authorities were encouraged to sell their playing fields for development. Others built on their own land as they expanded. Between 1979 and 1997, 10,000 playing fields were sold off. Many schools used to have swimming pools; now pupils have to be taken to privately run leisure centres. Labour slowed but did not stop the sales, then they resumed with the coalition government. ITV reported that Michael Gove intervened in 2012 to overturn advice to halt the sales.
Winchester College, whose rowers you show on the River Itchen, has slowly removed public access to its lands in the 40 years that we’ve lived here. Bridges have been allowed to decay and not been replaced, footpaths have been allowed to erode and not been repaired, while land has been fenced and walkers corralled on to narrow strips alongside playing fields. Fields where our children once skated on ice when the river flooded are now inaccessible. A few years ago, my husband’s old school, Bradfield College, was fundraising for a golf course for the pupils – charitable donations being tax deductible, of course. You can imagine where that appeal went.
Judith Martin
Winchester
The inequality in green space for private and state school pupils is not just staggering but grotesque. As a state school headteacher, I am seething about it after a visit to Rishi Sunak’s alma mater, Winchester College, a couple of weeks ago. I calculated that students there have three times as many teachers per pupil as my students, eight times the amount spent on their education, and 36 times as much space. And that’s not to mention the truly lavish facilities and the glorious setting.
I work as an adviser for one secondary school with no green space at all around the school buildings – just a sports field that can only accessed by walking through a busy traffic system. There are plenty of state schools worse off than mine. The idea that there is any sort of level playing field in educational opportunities is laughable – and the fact that so much of public school land was granted originally to create opportunities for poor children makes this inequality obscene.
Name and address supplied
Some private schools have maintained that they allow local state schools and communities to share their facilities. During the Covid period in 2020-21, I used to go running near a well-known private school in London and was surprised that the school felt it necessary to hire security guards to keep local residents off its vast playing fields. This is in an area where many people do not have access to gardens and there are few public parks.
What great PR it would have been for the school to have been more generous in sharing its green spaces during that period in particular.
Sophia Crowther
Coulsdon, London
Bedford school has a £6m theatre and a £3m music school? The disparity in arts facilities in private schools compared with those in state schools is at least as shocking as that in the provision of playing fields, and much more damaging to the nation as a whole.
Anna Hodson
Todmorden, West Yorkshire