Educational Apartheid – a personal view
In 1971 apartheid hit me head-on. The racial brutality of the Vorster regime was in my face from the first day ashore in Cape Town and its manifestation was something with which I was going to confront for the next four years of my life. It was especially shocking, therefore, to read of the independent-state sector divide in today’s UK being written about in such stark terms. Is this yet more politically loaded hype against the independent sector or a long-awaited revelation of the extent of educationally induced social segregation?
My mentor from my early career in teaching, Alan Quilter, was adamant that there was a single teaching profession uniting all those who taught in the independent and maintained sectors. Alan’s Wells Cathedral School, which in a headship of twenty-two years he took from Trollopian obscurity to both musical and all-round eminence, saw Wells as a bridge school between the two sectors and relished its government funded music scholarships as engines of social mobility and opportunity. The sad demise of grammar schools and the Keith Joseph Darwinian experiment of Assisted Places made the picture more complex in the 1980s while the Blair / Adonis revolution of the 1990s, briefly abandoned by Brown and now revived by Cameron / Gove, is truly transforming the educational landscape with the huge expansion of academies and the advent of Free Schools.
In this context is it not a paradox that while the UK independent sector enjoys world-wide regard as a bench-mark of excellence (some of the best international schools are the satellites of British famous public schools) it is also being bullied at home on the altars of social inclusivity and mobility? Its independence is its DNA and independent school’s existence is entirely conditional on parents, many far from affluent, paying fees from earned taxed income. While much of Gove’s agenda is about “levelling up” the independent sector remains a target for persistent envy-based criticism and campaigning to “level down”. The independent sector should be left to raise all standards through having to be competitive and free to decide their corporate social responsibilities.
For apartheid to be apartheid it must be pernicious and deliberate. To claim that the independent sector fosters apartheid is to insult all those who have given their careers and donations to these world-class institutions. It also throws into confusion all those “Blanken” and “Nie-Blanken” signs that greeted me in the post office in Adderly Street forty years ago and the institutionalized racism for which they were the tip of the iceberg,
Anthony Millard, Chairman
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