Late last year Britain’s independent schools received a wake-up call. Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, delivered it. Far too many of them, he said, have become the ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs’ because of an ‘apparently endless queue’ of wealthy foreigners who have pushed fees sky-high; there’s a ‘fees time bomb ticking away’ and one day, when it explodes, a lot of these schools are going to be screwed. It really was that blunt. Cue cheers from struggling parents all over the country, and squeals from school governors, who’d rather no one asked too many questions about the £30,000 price tag on a child’s yearly education.
Martin Stephen, the former High Master of St Paul’s School, once issued a similarly forthright warning about extortionate fees in the pages of the Daily Telegraph: ‘I was rapped so hard on the knuckles that I nearly lost my hands,’ he remembered recently.
But could it be that the answer to this problem — rich foreigners pricing out British families — is staring us in the face? If there’s an ‘endless queue’ of aspirational foreigners for our top private schools, why not go to the source, educate them overseas and then use the profits from this to fund bursaries and scholarships for pupils in the UK? It’s a progressive idea, and one that a handful of independent schools are already trying out.
The famous red-brick buildings of Wellington College belong to the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire. That’s where Queen Victoria herself laid the foundation stone of the public school in 1859. But scroll down a few pages on Google and you’ll find another Wellington College. It has an identical look: the same classical buildings, including state-of-the-art facilities and a 500-seat theatre, surrounded by the same green playing fields.
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