Tristram Hunt is right: private schools do need to do more for the state sector

Please can we give Tristram Hunt a break? I’m right behind him when it comes to getting private schools to share their largesse with the state sector, and I mean, properly share. My children go to a little Catholic state school in West London just down the road from a terrifically expensive girls school, let’s call it St Peter’s. Well, over the last year, St Peter’s burnished its credentials on the social outreach front by sending in some of its sixth form girls to teach Latin. My son was in that Latin club, and I can tell you just what happened. The wretched sixth formers gave the children strawberry Haribos to bribe them to keep quiet while they got on with texting. After about ten sessions, the child didn’t pick up a word of Latin, and the grammar he was taught – not that there was anything as systematic as grammar tuition – was simply wrong.