Why we need no-frills, low-cost private schools

If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In the last two decades, the British private schools industry has pulled off a trick that most business-school textbooks would tell you is impossible: attracting more business while becoming more and more expensive.

Schools have broken out of what is usually the most rigid of all the dismal science’s iron laws: that as prices rise, demand declines. Parents contemplating the size of the bill for the term that has just begun — with all those must-have extra ski trips and other treats — might care to ask why the market in education has somehow failed to deliver decent schools at affordable prices. It’s a market that supplies the educational equivalent of Mercedes and Jaguars but not many Fords, dependable vehicles that may not be prestigious but get you where you want to go.

‘I find I get very few inquiries about this,’ said Andrew Boggis, the chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, the trade union for the country’s leading public schools. ‘If most people didn’t feel they were getting value for money, then they wouldn’t be paying.’

Well, maybe. Then again, perhaps parents are too polite to mention their concerns to head teachers. After all, wallet-emptying school fees have become as much a staple of middle-class dinner-party conversation as that other rampant form of inflation, house prices.

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Nor is this just an illusion. Schools really are getting more expensive all the time. Research by the Halifax found that British school fees had risen far faster than the rate of inflation in the past 20 years.