Quaker socialists discuss private schools
'It was asked: could there be free Quaker state schools?'
The Quaker Socialist Society (QSS) discussed how state schools and Quaker private schools can promote ‘life-long Quaker values’ last month.
Priscilla Alderson, from Dorchester Meeting, who clerked the online session, said a main theme was ‘relations between individuals and the systems we live within. To socialists, the overriding system is social class… Equality flourishes in inclusive local schools when all kinds of children learn and work together, supported by the mixed local community and the elected local authority’.
Francis Green, professor of Work and Education Economics at the Institute of Education, University College London, began by discussing ‘the democratic deficit when private schools educate seven per cent of children in Britain; they get over sixteen per cent of the funds spent on British schools, and have fourteen per cent of Britain’s teachers’. The schools’ ‘ample resources’ and networks help these students to become ‘well-paid leaders’, he said. Raising VAT for private schools would make little difference, certainly not to the top private schools, he later added, but making it easier for private schools in trouble to transfer into the state sector could help. It was suggested that some Quaker schools could act as a model for this.
The co-author of Engines of Privilege: Britain’s private school problem, with David Kynaston, Francis Green also showed figures revealing the percentage of privately-educated people in professions. This includes sixty-five per cent of judges, and over fifty per cent of junior ministers. It was asked: could there be free Quaker state schools?
In a report on the meeting, QSS said it was concerned that, over past decades, ‘differences in spending, resources and outcomes’ between state and private schools have continually increased. ‘Almost all British Quaker schools are private schools with fees of around £33,000 to £43,000 a year for senior boarders,’ said QSS. There was also ‘general concern about sending children away from their families to school, especially at younger ages, with the lack of daily loving family contact and local friends. Some of the best people have attended boarding school, but many others suffer from “boarding school syndrome”’.
Some participants described Quaker schools as having the freedom to promote Quaker values in ways state schools cannot, and claimed they did not suffer from the same bullying levels. Others disputed this, with one member of the Quaker Values in Education group, who had years of experience teaching in the state sector, saying that many state schools had values very similar to Quaker ones. Another state school teacher – sent to boarding school at the age of eight – said he thought comprehensives produced ‘far more rounded, kind, tolerant characters’ than most people he knows who went to private schools.
The report can be read on QSS’s website.
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