Is the day of the private school over?

Last year Britain’s private prep (or primary) schools lost 3,000 pupils, the biggest decline in six years. Boarding numbers are steady, but only because more than 40 per cent of Britain’s nearly 70,000 boarders now come from abroad — mainly China and Hong Kong.

In London, the demand for private day schools remains buoyant. ‘But, as with boarding, that’s very much down to the international super-rich, many of whom move to London precisely for the bragging rights of an English education,’ says one educational consultant, who wishes to remain anonymous.

‘In contrast, with British-born families, there’s definitely a trend of using state education for primary and — if all goes well — sticking with it at secondary. And the more parents see “people like us” choosing state school, the more likely they’ll follow them. It’s a virtuous circle.’ Parents are acutely aware that Oxbridge and Russell-Group universities (not to mention more and more blue-chip firms) are actively recruiting state-schooled candidates. Brampton Manor Academy in Newham, one of London’s poorest boroughs, last year received 41 offers from Oxford and Cambridge.

And even regardless of this, the quality of many state schools has drastically improved. Take Holland Park School, for example. Two decades ago, parents from the neighbouring mega-mansions would never have dreamed of sending their children there, even those in nearby high-rise estates saw it as a last resort. Today, however, a £70 million rebuild (funded by the sale of prime school land) means the comprehensive school now boasts a 25-metre swimming pool, a gym and basketball courts in the basement. Its choir has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, the cricket team has played at Lord’s. Communal areas are graced with Ercol furniture.

Holland Park School’s story is, of course, a bit of an outlier. Most other inner-city state schools lack that kind of financing. But a new emphasis on discipline and dedicated teachers prepared to devote their spare time to extra-curricular activities mean sometimes it’s hard to spot the difference between the two sectors. And with the gap between fee-paying and state schools narrowing quickly, the merits of a ‘free’ education have never looked more appealing. Of course, the decision is made far easier by the fact that, for most, private school is now entirely unaffordable. Over the past 12 years, school fees have risen an extraordinary 49 per cent, with London’s average now £29,685 a year, while boarding schools charge an average £34,695.

‘My son is a lawyer; he and his wife [are] not even considering private for their children,’ says Dr Martin Stephen, former head of St Paul’s School in Barnes (annual boarding fees: £38,991) and author of The English Public School.

‘When you witness that, you know private schools are at risk of making themselves extinct,’ Stephen says. ‘If you are only talking to the super-rich you are creating problems for yourself. The world outside wants more equality but they’re not paying attention to that, they’re like Marie Antoinette in the palace of Versailles gazing at her reflection and failing to realise that a revolution is brewing.’

Harris Westminster Sixth Form, where more than one third of the intake have parents earning below £16,000, received 37 Oxbridge offers. No wonder talk at private-school coffee mornings is dominated by ambitious mothers wondering if they’ll boost their offsprings’ future prospects by moving them into the state sector. ‘I deliberately chose a new, very urban, free school for my son, which did have its share of frankly scary pupils but which I knew would give him the Oxbridge edge,’ one high-flying City lawyer mother told me recently. ‘It worked. Cambridge snapped him up.’

Oxbridge aside, London state schools are producing spectacular results, with a recent league table reflecting academic progress showing secondaries in the capital taking all top-10 slots nationwide. Many educationalists attribute the high standards to reforms such as the free-school movement, which allows parents to set up their own schools, and the transformation of many comprehensives into academies, allowing heads more freedom to control their own budgets and curricula.

‘The reforms took a long time to work through, generally they’ve been a huge success,’ says Mark Peel, author of The New Meritocracy: A History Of Independent Schools. ‘Why would parents pay £30,000 a year when there’s an alternative offering more or less what you want for free?’

Parents considering taking the plunge are encouraged by examples of thriving state-school alumni. Take artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen and BBC bigwig Kamal Ahmed (both educated at Drayton Manor High School in Ealing), and author Zadie Smith (at Hampstead School). And while professions such as law and medicine are still dominated by public school alumni, in business the number of CEOs who attended state schools is about to overtake those educated privately, with role models such as John Lewis head Sharon White, alumna of Connaught School for Girls in Leytonstone.

‘More and more parents for whom private schools would also be an option chose us,’ says Holland Park head, Colin Hall. They include former Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove, who sent his son there. ‘At work it’s a completely different vibe to when I joined 25 years ago. Then everyone was flaunting their Old Marlburian or Harrovian ties; now you keep that information very quiet indeed,’ says one Old Wykehamist banker. ‘Noticing that definitely helped my decision to send my kids state. Plus, in a cosmopolitan city like London, I really like to think my children will be able to mix with anybody.’

The word ‘anybody’ might not be entirely accurate. The Good School Guide’s Melanie Sanderson says: ‘The number of state schools middle-class parents choose tend to be in expensive areas or to be very highly selective. Parents will move heaven and earth — attend church, rent a house in the right catchment area, prep their kids assiduously for grammar entrance — for places at such schools. Equally there are schools they’ll do anything to avoid.’

In leafy Muswell Hill, in north London, parents talk of the ‘Fortismere’ effect on marriages, when couples who are frightened of their inner-city state options move to the tiny catchment of this high-quality state school, only for the marriage to end after one half is left unhappy about the uprooting.

Others, however, relish an unexpected new social life. One old Westminster friend who moved south of the river to send his children to a sought-after comprehensive says: ‘There’s a crowd of once slightly fearful and now smug parents like me. We go to dinner at each-others’ houses and congratulate each other on how enlightened we are, while knowing our children are mixing with other nicely brought-up children like them.’

After all, a report into middle-class children who were sent for ideological reasons to their local average or poorly performing schools showed that they mixed ‘virtually exclusively with other middle-class children’. ‘Knowing the other is not the same as empathising,’ the authors observed.

At Holland Park, Hall says he still meets ‘a number of parents who see a comprehensive as a risk’, compared with going private. ‘I’m always candid with them,’ he says. ‘I say the quality of your child’s education will be just as good. It’s whether you want your children to experience the real world or you would prefer them to be in a rarefied, elitist bubble.’