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Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Religious schools will be hit hardest by Labour’s VAT tax raid

Imagine the government pledged to introduce a 20 per cent tax rise on ‘bankers’. Then imagine that, when the details were announced, the new tax made no distinction between HSBC executives and lowly bank tellers on £19,000 a year. Furthermore, imagine that the public debate failed to mention the people who were going to suffer most from the policy; that commentators argued over whether the tax rise was technically workable, while ministers self-righteously declared that they were sure the richest people in the country could cope with paying a little more. Far-fetched? Yes, but not a million miles from Labour’s proposed imposition of VAT and business rates on independent schools.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The rise of the state-private pupil

When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents pore over the university admissions and the A-level grades of state secondary schools, they should ask themselves whether all those results are attributable to the school or whether there may have been outside help. Not that anyone’s going to tell you. In a fee-paying school you don’t normally need to go outside; that’s why you pay those whopping fees. Granted, exams are overrated but the world being what it is – obsessed with top universities – lots of parents will do whatever it

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The toddlers being prepared for the seven-plus exam

The feverishness of the private prep-school market in London has reached such a pitch that children in the nursery class at Eaton House Belgravia are being prepared for the seven-plus from the age of two. ‘Some of them are still in nappies, and some of them still need a nap,’ the headmaster Ross Montague tells me. ‘We have folding camp beds, and our lovely nursery team of six teachers deal with that.’ While seeming to be kind to each other, these parents are in fierce competition Montague, an ex-professional footballer who used to play for Brentford before he was injured and then retrained to become an educationalist and school superhead,

Philip Womack

Keir Starmer is blind to the brilliance of private schools

Despite protestations from every quarter, Sir Keir Starmer will press on with his malicious plan to slap VAT on private school fees. I can only assume he’s doing this because he believes an excellent education, stemming from hundreds of years of tradition, is entirely undesirable. Look, there’s no question about it. Our private schools are the cat’s pyjamas. They attract discerning parents from all over the planet, even from New York, that bastion of elitism, where bankers and lawyers duke it out to hire Juilliard grads to teach their four- year-olds the violin. Recently, I met a financier from that city. So enamoured was he of London schools that he

Flora Watkins

Can school rugby survive safety concerns?

The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain. Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a micro-fracture to the elbow, one of the nurses from reception caught up with us. She was so concerned that she’d gone on to the RFU website, which confirmed that contact is indeed legal from Year 4. (Although the spear tackle that Gus’s friend had executed definitely isn’t.) ‘Striking a child outside of sport is abuse,

Arabella Byrne

The pitfalls of the Accelerated Reader programme

To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a hint of exasperation. Stretch her we did. That summer, we read T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats aloud, laughing at the names Bombalurina and Macavity. We read Eleanor Farjeon’s Kings and Queens and wondered at how we were all Elizabethans. We read The Diary of Anne Frank and thought about annexes. We read

Sophia Waugh

What the Cass Review means for schools

When the Cass Review was published in April, many of us working in schools heaved a sigh of relief. For many teachers the muddle surrounding the position of transgender children and those working with them caused serious concern. A maths teacher in Swindon was sacked for addressing a student as ‘she’ and writing her ‘dead name’ on the board, even though she/he was asking to be entered into a girls’ maths challenge. Most teachers are in the job to impart knowledge, to encourage thinking and to play a part in guiding a child towards adulthood. We are not there to judge, mock or belittle. But we found ourselves increasingly confused.

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

What to do with school photos

They lurk at the back of cupboards. Some are hidden under beds; others are tucked between books. I have been collecting them from a young age, but I still don’t know what I’m meant to do with them. What do you do with school photos? I suppose I could take pictures of my own school photos and bin the originals. But I just can’t do it Whenever I come across one, I enjoy the moment of reminiscence. I cast my mind back to my time in the netball team and choir. Then there are the series of house photos. My friends and I have braces in the early years and

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Elstree, Berkshire Elstree – which educates boys and girls from three to 13 – is nestled in 150 acres of stunning countryside near Newbury in Berkshire. The school, which celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, says that its aim is two-fold: ‘to find out how a child is intelligent rather than how intelligent a child is’ and to teach pupils that ‘effort is king’. From Year 4 onwards, children can choose to flexi or weekly board and from Year 5 pupils are taught by individual specialists in all subjects from Year 5, compared with the usual Year 7. Although Elstree is non-selective, school-leavers have received scholarships to – among others

Peter Hitchens

Tried and tested by the Common Entrance Exam

This is about something that did not happen to me at school, an exam I dreaded, but never had to take. It was the only examination that ever really worried me, and it was called Common Entrance. Do not confuse it with modern imitations bearing the same name. In those days, preparing for it involved (for me, anyway) translating English into Latin and French (a proper knowledge of irregular verbs and a wide vocabulary in both those languages was required). It also demanded thorny and tricky types of mathematics, an astounding grasp of largely Imperial geography – and a full knowledge of English history since the Conquest. I actually understood

Wednesday

The Spectator

Which schools get the most pupils into Oxbridge?

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2023 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from state schools: 72 per cent, up from 52 per cent in 2000. Of the 80 schools, 29 are independent, 29 grammar or partially selective, 17 sixth-form colleges and five are comprehensives or academies. (Schools are ranked by offers received, then by offer-to-application ratio. If schools received fewer than three offers from one university, this number