With a new government and a dramatically reshaped cabinet, it is surely time for an equally new approach to the discussion about independent schools.
Ed Dorrell, in his recent piece “Selective sixth-forms? Better than lending out the pool”, suggests one way that independent schools might engage is through more partnership work, such as that at the excellent Harris Westminster, specialist maths sixth forms and the London Academies of Excellence (LAE).
These projects have huge merit and provide one aspect of the value independent schools can offer the national education canvas but there is more to the sector than Oxbridge entry and top exam results, and there is a whole palette to paint with if the sectors work together.
The next five years present a great opportunity to build a different relationship with government, to ask new questions, tear up the rule book and inject some fresh thinking.
With new ideas coming forward to the new government, there is surely a great opportunity now to look for different answers to the problems that all types of schools, and all types of teachers, come up against and can play a part in solving.
The biggest issues facing education are not about state versus independent; that is a sideshow.
How to help underachieving pupils of all backgrounds develop high aspirations; how to help children understand the issues about gender identity; how to help teenagers cope with the constant onslaught of their ever-expanding social networking, which 21st-century technology makes an inevitability: these are the real issues we should be discussing as educators, alongside all of us pushing for as much funding as possible for hard-pressed state schools.
It is time for a radical rethink of what the independent sector can offer the wider education sector. And to my mind, that is the freedom to innovate. Independent schools are fee-charging opt-outs from high-quality free-at-the-point-of-delivery state provision. This means that, pretty much by their very nature, they have a parent body that is highly supportive of their aims and ethos. These are communities who trust their schools and are not only prepared to see them try out new things, they expect it.
Innovation inevitably results in some failures on the way to success, meaning innovation is best attempted in a community with a high trust in the organisation driving the change.
Nearly all maintained schools - no matter how outstanding Ofsted has judged them to be - will inevitably have a part of their community who are more suspicious of them and of education in general. They are also strait-jacketed by an accountability regime borne of being recipients of billions of taxpayers’ pounds.
This means that although many state schools still manage to pilot innovative thinking, it is a much higher-risk space to do so, and centrally controlled finance means funding will always be harder to find and will require greater justification to obtain. This is a key reason that any number of educators are drawn to working in the independent sector in the first place: risk-taking in maintained schools is harder.
Independent schools, then, are in a virtually unique position to serve as crucibles of innovation in the nation’s education system. With the right structures in place, those who seek ways to develop new methodologies and philosophies that will deliver a deeper, richer education for their pupils can apply that very opportunity to ensure every single one of the 7 million children in schools in this country benefit from the thinking they develop.
My hope with this new post-election dawn is that we might work with the government and schools of all types and sizes to develop the UK’s first education innovation council. This group of school leaders, committed to finding new approaches, would gather challenges from their regions to share and seek suitable partners - which may often be independent schools - to run action research to solve real problems facing today’s children.
Imagine how powerful it would be to see teachers and leaders from all types of school coming together online or in person to work together to identify areas where research and development would be particularly valuable, to develop solutions together, to test hypotheses - often at the lower risk crucibles of innovation which independent schools could provide - and then to show real-terms results that came at no cost, financial or ideological, to the state.
Independent schools are already on this journey through a range of partnership networks (of which Harris Westminster and LAE are only some of the more high-profile examples). How much more could we do with similar partnerships to develop and support state provision that specialises in the creative and performing arts, sporting excellence or cultures of community service, let alone actively working together to solve problems faced by every school in the country?
If we can find a way to engage government to support us in the creation of a national education innovation council, we could work together to build the greatest educational powerhouse in the world, using some of the world’s best-known schools to fuel change for everyone.
Bursaries and resource-sharing are valuable but it is the intellectual capital in independent schools that provides the greatest opportunities - the challenge will be to mine it, harness it and set it to work.
