Use taxes for private education says head

An independent school head today called on the Government to back parent power and allow taxpayers' cash to be used to buy places at fee-paying schools.

Pauline Davies, head of Wycombe Abbey School, said parents should be allowed to use the equivalent of state spending on their children in the form of a voucher to buy them a private education.

The policy would dramatically increase parental choice, she said, and allow poor pupils access to education at the best schools.

Mrs Davies was speaking in St Andrews, Scotland, at the opening of this year's conference of the Girls' Schools' Association, which represents 207 schools and 110,000 pupils around Britain.

Ministers have consistently opposed vouchers, while backing closer links between the state and independent sectors, arguing that the Government's priority is to raise standards in state schools.

But vouchers have now been adopted as Conservative Party policy and Mrs Davies, president of the association, said new research exposed the Government's opposition as purely ideological. The Government's figure for annual state spending per pupil, £2,821 in 2001/2, ignored an extra £1,729 per pupil spent by Whitehall and local government on bureaucracy, according to the independent Institute of Public Finance, bringing the real total to £4,550 per head.

If this sum were made available to parents in the form of a voucher, that would close the gap on average costs of sending a child to an independent day school, which is just over £5,000, Mrs Davies said.

"Independent schools are keen to explore ways in which it can widen access to its schools," she added. "In many other countries it is possible for families at all levels of income to secure places for their children at independent schools."

"Parents would have a wider choice of schools in this country if funding followed the child."

The Tories have embraced proposals for a voucher-style experiment while the Government's City Academies showed Labour had accepted that the state "need not be the universal provider" of education.