Peter Taylor-Gooby
Education is the gift that goes on giving. It enriches your life, in terms of access to a wider culture, employment, social status, health and happiness.
It is also what economists term a ‘positional good’. In other words it’s not just the absolute amount of education you have that matters, but also what level you’ve attained relative to others (how far up you are in the rank order of educated people). What helps most in getting a high status job is not just having a good education, but having a better education than other candidates.
This fact is one of the strongest selling points of the private sector. All the cases made for the UK system of private education stress excellence in education and that excellence is implicitly relative to the state sector. So it makes sense (in purely economic terms) to pay – if you can.
Unfortunately one of the core values of our society is equality and paying for privilege contradicts that value.
This presents the private sector with a problem when making the case for the sector as a whole or in seeking to attract parents and students to particular schools. How do you sell something that people want (privilege), but that conflicts with a value most people believe in (equality)? Answer: you side-step the conflict and avoid talking about it.
This blog will illustrate the way private schools sell privilege without actually mentioning it by examining how the advantages of private schooling are treated at two levels:
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on the webpages of the Independent Schools Council[i], which present the sector as a whole, addressing government and policy-makers; and
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in the case of individual private schools addressing parents with a view to encouraging them to send their children to a particular school.
When making the overall case for the private sector, the ISC stresses practical contributions, primarily in cash terms.
It points to the amounts of public money saved, the contribution to schooling, the foreign revenue, the contribution to local economies and so on. There is much to be said here, of course, and all these points can be challenged. I want to focus attention on the fact that the ISC does not add: ‘And of course private schools help parents who can pay secure advantages for their children over those who can’t.’
Instead it makes claims about the ‘partnership’ contributions of private schools to the state sector. These are real but vary between schools, can be targeted on the higher-status state schools, are often designed to attract pupils from the state to the private sector, and in any case trivial in relation to the total amount of activity in all schools.
The ISC webpages also include a ‘Find a School’ section directed at parents. Each school includes a paragraph summing up what it offers.
Examination of the language used in these paragraphs provides an insight into how schools sell themselves. It is here that the private sector confronts the privilege/unfairness dilemma most directly – the fact it is asking people to buy an unfair privilege. I chose 30 schools, the 10 closest to the centres of Canterbury, Birmingham and Newcastle, to examine how this is handled.
The four words most frequently used to describe private school education are: ‘individual’ (15 references); ‘excel’ and related word (‘excellent’, ‘excelling’ and so on: 14 references); ‘achieve’ and ‘achievement’ (10 references) and ‘confidence’ (nine references).
In addition, most of the schools refer to the level of resources they offer, using a range of language (‘small classes’, ‘a variety of playing fields’ ‘extensive grounds’, ‘facilities’ and so on).
This is perhaps what one might expect. Private education costs a very great deal and parents will want to be sure they are getting something for their payment.
Two features of the language used to sell private schools are of interest:
First the importance of the much-referenced ‘individual’ in the way the benefits of the school are presented.
This is often linked to words like ‘potential’, ‘achievement’, ‘attention’ and ‘needs’. In other words, the implication is that you will buy an education focused uniquely on your child that will help that child get on in life.
Secondly the references to ‘confidence’, character, and how the school will help build these character traits, often in the phrase ‘confidence to succeed’ or ‘the confidence needed to achieve’.
The schools are sometimes presented as communities, but much less frequently. There are references to ‘caring’ (two references) and to ‘community’ (five). Also to ‘responsibility’ (two). But the bottom line is individual success.
When private schools present themselves to parents, they focus primarily on individual outcomes, on how your child will succeed. They also focus on how they shape character to enable the people they help educate to grasp the benefits of advantage.
Nowhere do the presentations engage in comparisons with the state sector.
Nowhere do they say their resources are ‘better than the those offered in academies or local authority schools’ or that the students they turn out will have the confidence to succeed over those who have used state schools in a highly competitive world. These arguments are basic but they are implicit and never stated.
Where does this take us?
There are two implications: private schools are about buying advantage and, in our competitive world, that is privilege – advantage over others.
However they are reluctant to spell this out, so that issues of equality and fairness can enter the debate. They retreat to focus primarily on the success of the advantaged individual without making clear that what they have in mind is success over someone who didn’t attend private school.
If we want to make the case against private schooling we need to open up debate and point out the intrinsic unfairness of the existence of a privileged sector of schooling accessible through payments which most parent simply cannot afford.
The fairness argument could then lead to pressure to direct the charitable funding of the private sector, tied to education as an activity attracting charitable reliefs, more broadly across the whole of schooling.
Peter Taylor-Gooby is professor of social policy at the University of Kent. He was awarded the OBE for services to social science in 2012. Taylor-Gooby is the author of a number of studies of attitudes to welfare in Europe and the UK, and more recently of The Baby Auction and Ardent Justice, novels which seek to examine modern social issues.
[i] The ISC is an umbrella body for the seven main associations of private schools,with more than 1300 schools as members. https://www.isc.co.uk/
