Blog

Today, we submitted our consultation response on the government’s proposals to slim down safeguarding guidance to schools. Thanks to all those who took the time to call or write in with their comments.

Charitable status is back in the news again, almost. Last week saw the publication of yet another report about the Charities Act 2006, this time from the Select Committee which oversees the work of the Charity Commission.

Spring is finally here, bringing with it the launch of ISC's Annual Census. The Census is the only chance we have to look into the not-too-distant past, reflect on the whole picture and to get some idea of what’s been happening in the sector. It’s an impressive document, 48 pages of stats and tables, number crunching at its best by our research team. It looks at everything from pupil numbers; fees and fee assistance; public benefit; regional and ethnic trends; gender and age groups to the internationalisation of independent schools. So delve beyond the headlines and you’ll see that there is a lot more in the figures to merit close scrutiny, too.

The coverage of this month’s Academies Commission report (Unleashing greatness: Getting the best from an academised system) is predictably polarised. There was a media emphasis on one of the findings – that some academies might be manipulating admissions to improve results (a “low road approach to school improvement”). There was an anti-academies response, trashing both the report and academies (“abject failure”, “dreadful damage” etc). And there was more balanced acknowledgement, echoing the substantive message of the report, of both individual successes and raised expectations, together with a warning that that the “transformative potential” of academisation could not rest on academy status alone.

Politicians of all colours seem to have developed a fondness for telling independent schools what sort of public benefit they ought to be providing. Most recently, Lord Adonis has criticised independent schools for failing to live up to the charitable principles of their founders and has suggested that the sole route to salvation for them lies in sponsoring academies. This is a curious state of affairs as the law on public benefit has recently been made clear: last year the courts upheld the Independent Schools Council’s (ISC) judicial review of the Charity Commission, underlining that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of charitable engagement and that there is a wide variety of ways in which schools live up to their responsibility to reach out and serve those who do not pay fees.

‘What they want’, according to Jonathan Taylor, Headmaster of Bootham School, is inspired teaching by inspirational teachers. With the help of a public-private partnership which is already bearing fruit in York, here Jonathan explains the wider meaning behind this partnership and its potential for further development in line with children’s needs and aspirations. Is this partnership a model for the future?

Barely a week passes without an ideologically-driven assault on independent schools. The ideologues tend to fall into two categories. There are those who find the very existence of schools outside the state sector repugnant to their worldview. Their aim is the abolition of independent schools (and they are creatively opportunistic in finding ways to advance their cause). Arguments about the fundamental right of parents to choose an education system for their child, or the wilful perverseness of vandalising a sector which is the envy of the world, fall on deaf ears.

But then came the words of Lord Moynihan, commenting this week precisely on selection for the Olympics. It is, he said, ‘wholly unacceptable’ and ‘one of the worst statistics in sport’ that half of our Olympians in London 2012 were educated at independent schools. The Prime Minister chipped in too, saying that independent schools have ‘more than their fair share’ of medals.