Headmistress:'Politicians should back wider access

10 November 2003

State education funding should "follow the child" and be available to spend in independent schools, a top girls' school head said today.

Pauline Davies, president of the Girls' Schools Association, told members at the start of their annual conference in St Andrews that the independent sector was keen to explore ways in which access to its schools could be widened, as it was in many other European and Commonwealth countries. State funding should follow the child, perhaps in the form of a voucher, she said.

Mrs Davies, headmistress of Wycombe Abbey School, Buckinghamshire, said: "It is clear that official figures mask the true cost of education in maintained schools and that nearly a quarter of the money provided for each child is not being spent in the schools themselves. It is likely, therefore, that the gap between per capita spending in the state sector and our costs is nothing like as wide as it might appear at first."

Many schools, said Mrs Davies, were actively trying to build up their bursary and scholarship schemes in order to offer financial assistance to children whose families could not afford to pay school fees. This was a particular challenge for girls' schools, many of them without long established foundations.

But, she went on: "We must not let politicians off this hook. We know that the majority of people support the idea of using public funds to support access to our schools for children from low income families. The Conservatives have recently showed a welcome willingness, with their education passports proposal, to consider a limited voucher-style experiment. And Labour, with their encouragement of independent sector involvement in the Academy programme, are edging towards a recognition that the state need not be the universal provider of state education."

On university admissions, Mrs Davies said that admissions policies which distinguished between candidates on the basis of their performance in relation to average achievement at their school would be unfair to many applicants from good schools in both independent and state sectors.

"It will be difficult, if not impossible, for many of our students to demonstrate exceptional performance in context since our schools are already achieving so highly. Students at high achieving schools and colleges in the maintained sector will be penalised too.

"Are we, as a country, really going to say to bright teenagers and their parents that the only way they can be sure to have their university applications taken seriously is to transfer to the worst achieving school they can find. This is a counsel of despair so far as school improvement is concerned.

"Prior attainment, as measured by A level grades, or equivalent, is the best single indicator of academic success and retention at undergraduate level. Surely the focus should be on raising attainment in schools, starting at the primary stage and building on this at secondary level, but it will take time and schools must have adequate resources," said Mrs Davies.

Mrs Davies also suggested that recent advances in girls' achievement might be studied for its lessons in raising standards in general. "I have frequently thought that the education of girls would provide an excellent model for raising expectations and thus achievement on a national scale. The timescale might make it rather unattractive, even though the notion of building for the future is a given for anyone directly involved in education. We know at first hand that children do not make progress overnight and that vision, commitment, energy and time are needed if individuals are to make real and sustained progress."

The full text of Mrs Davies' speech is available from the ISC Press Office. External