Sir Kevan Collins is a force to be reckoned with. He is the CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, the charity that is dedicated to “breaking the link between family income and educational achievement”. No person I know is more dedicated to improving the lot of the disadvantaged.

I shared a platform with Sir Kevan recently at Celtic Park, right in the heart of Glasgow’s Parkhead district, where the average life expectancy for men is 54 years. He began his talk that day by saying that he would look anywhere and everywhere for ways to raise educational standards for the children from white working-class backgrounds.

Sir Kevan’s words were refreshing. I share his passion. I don’t mind where we find resources to provide educational opportunities for our students at Huntington School. And that includes the independent school sector.

It would be easy to take a knee-jerk, narrow philosophical stance and ignore the riches on offer to our students via the Independent/State Schools Partnership (ISSP). Since 2006, when York’s ISSP was founded by Jonathan Taylor, erstwhile headteacher of Bootham School, and Patrick Scott, then head of educational services at York City Council, hundreds of York’s state school students have benefited hugely from participating in ISSP events.

As I write this, dozens of our students are on their way to the second of three weekends of ISSP “masterclasses”, where the theme is “Notions of Beauty”.

The sessions range from one entitled “Beauty in Dark Places (why in troubled times do people yearn for beauty?...Friendship in the gulag, memorials on the battlefield, poetry in The Tower, lipstick in concentration camps - all show how people have faced down horror with beauty)” to “Beautiful Equations Through Art (mathematicians will tell you that there are some equations that are ‘just beautiful’. For others they just look like squiggles. For our masterclass, however, we will take these squiggles and make them actually beautiful!)” . How great do they sound?

Over the years, our students have enriched both their minds - for the educational sake of it - and their examination outcomes, with a plethora of A and A* grades in GCSE Latin. The ISSP provision enriches our students in a way we cannot afford. All participant schools pay a small annual fee and most of the provision requires no financial contribution from parents.

‘Amazing’ partnerships

Of the many parental testimonials that pay tribute to the educational value of the York ISSP, this one stands out: “I really cannot thank you both enough for giving him this chance and for believing in him even when he was at his low point. It’s thanks to ISSP that he will have more opportunities with his education. It really is an amazing and outstanding programme and B has been so fortunate to take part.”

All of which brings me back to Sir Kevan, the government’s Green Paper and a very real threat to our cherished York ISSP.

One of my favourite Sir Kevan aphorisms is: “With professional compliance you get a deeper buy-in.” What makes the York ISSP work so brilliantly for the three independent and eight state secondary schools that participate is the voluntary nature of the venture. Over the years we have built lasting relationships between schools, based upon professional trust and a shared desire for us to educate children, no matter their socio-economic background. We are all working to do the very best for our students. It is this common cause that binds us securely together.

We epitomise Sir Kevan’s notion of “professional compliance”. We have bought in to York’s ISSP because we have cast aside any prejudices and embraced what’s on offer for the sake of our students.

Simply put: we do not need to be compelled to collaborate.

The trouble is that the proposals in the government’s current Green Paper, Schools that Work for Everyone, seem to be aimed at forcing independent schools to support the state sector by sponsoring new free schools and helping to turn around underperforming schools.

At one point, the policy document proposes that “the biggest and most successful independent schools should face exacting requirements” in exactly how they should invest resources into supporting state schools.

Don’t undo all our good work

For starters, it is counterproductive and wrong, not to mention patronising towards school leaders in the state sector, to suggest that free schools opened by independent schools will automatically be successful.

My independent headteacher colleagues would say that they would not contemplate telling me or my state headteacher colleagues how to do our jobs.

What worries me more, as we wait for the next stage in the government’s plans, is how the Green Paper proposals may have unintended consequences.

The more onerous the requirements to sponsor state schools, the fewer resources independent schools will have to support partnerships. Much of the good work of partnerships like ours will have to stop as independent schools are forced to turn their resources and energies to sponsoring.

The deepest irony is that our York ISSP is cited in the Green Paper as an example of the two sectors working in harmony to the benefit of all our students - this is the same Green Paper that could be our partnership’s death knell.

York’s ISSP works because it is inspired by the purest educational principles. It works because, like Sir Kevan Collins, we will do anything to improve the lot of our most disadvantaged children. Ultimately, it works because it is voluntary. If the government forces independent schools to work more closely with state schools, it will merely push the two sectors further apart.

John Tomsett is head at Huntington School in York, and a member of the Headteachers’ Roundtable. He tweets @johntomsett