Higher earners 'should pay for state schooling'

A leading independent school head said today better-off parents should be expected to pay to send their children to state schools.

Anthony Seldon, head of Brighton College, who is writing a biography of Tony Blair, said universal free state education had failed because funding from taxation could never match standards in the independent sector.

The only way to bridge the gap between state and independent schools, he said, was to insist that all those who could afford it should pay. State schools would be better funded as a result and for many middle-class parents the sums required would still be less than fees at independent schools. Mr Seldon proposed an entire new tier of "partnership schools".

Standards at these could be raised to such a level, through a mix of private and state finance, that he envisaged three-quarters of parents sending their children to them. Parents would be charged fees according to a means test administered by the Inland Revenue.

Purely state-funded schools would continue as a "safety net" for the poorest 20 per cent, while a small "rump" of parents would continue to send their children to private schools, for largely "social" reasons. Mr Seldon said the effective mergingof the state and independent sectors would end the hypocrisy of middle-class parents who "played the system" to send their children to the best state schools, while criticising those who paid for their children's education.

In a thinly veiled attack on commentators like Fiona Millar, former adviser to Cherie Blair, he said: "Why should worthy parents be made to feel morally inferior to parents who use the state sector?

Queensbury School in Dunstable today claimed to be the first to throw out all its "junk food" vending machines and replace them with healthy alternatives that sell additive-free cereal bars, natural fruit juices and yoghurts.