I am in education because I want to help young people and to make the word a better, fairer place.
Austerity and the need to find 570,000 new secondary school places by 2025 requires new thinking, and independent schools can help. My proposal is low risk, high reward, zero capital cost, and zero additional cost to the tax payer. We would not re-run old assisted places-type models but a new, properly planned and transparently accountable partnership-based approach that would change the lives of thousands of young people.
The current education Green Paper seeks to increase ‘good school places’; we can help. This would be a more authentic partnership than shotgun weddings around academy sponsorship, and we can play a particularly valuable role in supporting our country’s most disadvantaged families.
In last week’s TES, Nick Hillman argued that state sector funding for bursaries had had only modest success. I believe he is right and I will explain why.
First, in the past, funding didn’t go to those most in need. So, I propose that a system of government bursary funding would only go to children who qualify for the pupil premium.
Second, in the past these schemes were costly to the taxpayer. I therefore propose that government funding of pupil premium-based bursaries at independent schools matches the level of funding those children would have received in the maintained sector.
Additionally, there should be no capital funding from government. (Bear in mind that just to build schools to accommodate, say, 10,000 children would cost up to £200 million.)
And I am not alone in my views. Sir Peter Lampl, one of the greatest educational philanthropists of our time and a leading promoter of social mobility at the Sutton Trust (and, incidentally, an alumnus of Reigate Grammar), is a strong advocate of government support for places at independent schools.
Working with a new model of funding, this is an idea whose time has come. It is motivated by a desire for social justice, it is affordable and it will make a contribution to a better society.
Having worked in the maintained sector for over 20 years, including being headteacher of two state schools, I think some teachers in the state sector would be surprised to learn that huge numbers of independent schools have a values-based commitment to social mobility. At my school, for example, we saw a significant increase in bursary applicants after we established a partnership with Raven Housing, our local housing association which helped to promote the scheme to their tenants.
Already, we have double the proportion of FSM children as the average state grammar. Additionally, over 150 children are on means-tested fee support.
Under the system I am proposing, we would use our own fundraising capacity to ‘top up’ pupil premium funding to create a free places at the school. Across the sector, we could create thousands more places for children qualifying for pupil premium support.
By contrast, opening new grammars, as Theresa May proposes, will be expensive, will fail to target those most in need and will have a negative impact on other local state schools.
Even if the number of children qualifying for FSMs at state grammars double, these schools will still, on average, educate only 5 per cent of children qualifying for FSMs. And establishing new grammar schools will, of course, cost the taxpayer millions in school-building programmes (and invariably overrun on cost and time).
For bursary programmes, we can learn the lessons of the past. My proposal is just part of a bigger package of solutions, of course, but it would create opportunity for social mobility, be cost neutral and would be 100 per cent targeted at FSM pupils. We want to help.
Shaun Fenton is headmaster of Reigate Grammar School
