Two big challenges face us in education. The first is not simply to reduce the number of underperforming comprehensives but to eradicate them, replacing them with successful all-ability academies. The second is to forge a new settlement between state and private education.
Every successful private school should sponsor an academy, replacing underperforming comprehensives. Each fee-paying school should turn itself and the academy into a federation of private and state schools, following the lead of institutions such as Dulwich college, Wellington college and the King Edward VI Foundation schools in Birmingham.
And by sponsoring an academy I don’t just mean advice, the loan of playing fields and the odd teacher. I mean the private school taking responsibility for the governance and leadership of an academy, staking its reputation on the academy’s success.
The forces against such a development are deeply entrenched in the state and private sectors, mirroring prejudices on the left and right of politics that go back decades.
Everyone knows that the status quo is terrible — a rigid separation between many of the nation’s most privileged schools and the rest. Yet nobody has had a credible plan to do much about it except to say how bad it is and why it will never change because, well, this is England, it’s cultural, and it all began with Henry VIII.
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The call now is for activists, not fatalists. There is no reason why the Berlin Wall between the state and private sectors of English education cannot be brought down fairly quickly if every private school sponsors an academy.
We still have far too many underperforming schools. My ambition from the moment that academies started to prove themselves successful was to replace the bottom half of the comprehensive system with academies, unless the comprehensives were improving rapidly. By academies, I mean sponsored academies.
The purpose of academies, in respect of underperforming schools, is to replace existing governance and local authority control with independent sponsors, untainted by past failure, who demonstrate the capacity to create a new, excellent, all-ability school.
For this, a large number of outstanding sponsors are needed, able to manage perhaps a thousand more secondary schools. And private schools should be among them.
Consider the statistics. There are 8,000 former pupils of private schools at Oxbridge, compared with a mere 130 students who, at school, were eligible for free school meals. So 130 Oxbridge students are drawn from the poorest 13% of secondary school pupils, while 8,000 — 62 times as many — are drawn from the most privileged 7%.
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Three in four judges, two in three top barristers and half of leading company chief executives, solicitors, journalists and politicians were educated privately. England in 2011 is governed by a prime minister educated at Eton, a deputy prime minister from Westminster, a chancellor from St Paul’s. Alumni of Charterhouse, Rugby, Radley, Wellington and Cheltenham ladies’ college are in the cabinet too; almost all are children of wealthy parents.
Seen in this way — the dominance of a privately educated elite over the social, economic and political life of this country — you realise why it is so important, if we are ever to be one nation, to have the people who run private schools involved institutionally with state education too.
This is a moral cause. But it is also an economic imperative. It was visits to schools in Singapore, Finland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2007, where I saw not only uniformly high standards but also a relentless drive to raise them further, that transformed my thinking on the scale of the task we face in England.
I shudder to think of my visit to a comprehensive in Sunderland where the previous summer only 15 16-year-olds had got five good GCSEs including English and maths. A local authority official said to me: “Lord Adonis, you need to understand that they used to leave here, go down the hill, and turn left to go into the shipyards, or turn right to go down the mines, but now there aren’t any jobs so they might as well walk straight into the sea.”
That school has now been closed and replaced by an academy sponsored by Sunderland University and a local high-tech company.
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Now we have a radical and practical agenda to end the private school isolationism of the past, in line with the charitable missions of the private schools themselves. It is for every successful private school to sponsor an academy and transform itself into a state-private school federation. It is time to bury the past and build a better future.
Lord Adonis is a former minister for schools. This is an extract from a lecture on private and state education. The full text can be found at tinyurl.com/3va5s22