State pupils can be uncontrollable and are unlikely to achieve academically, says private schools chief

Chris Parry, speaking days ahead of his first address to the annual conference of the ISC, believes state schools are full of uncontrollable children and staff who do not want to be there.

When asked if he thought some of the children were unteachable he replied: "Yeah, I think there are contexts within which some children can't be controlled.

Some state school pupils are unteachable, says chief of the Independent Schools Council

"You've got this situation in state schools where vast numbers of very good teachers are working with variable quality pupils and variable social context as well.

"How can you expect to get an Oxford graduate out of that group when they are being bullied, they are being influenced ... by a group from perhaps a disadvantaged background who have got a different agenda?"

Mr Parry, whose organisation represents half of the 2,600 private schools in the UK, was speaking in the Guardian today (Saturday May 31).

He said there was a lack of leadership in the state system and while there were a lot of good teachers not enough in each school.

"There are too many leaders but not enough leadership," he explained. "There are a lot of managers and but not enough management.

"There aren't enough teachers, and aren't enough teachers in subjects we need. It's lacking human, material financial resources."

The former rear admiral also talked about being "shocked by the level of ignorance and criticism that came from the parents" when he sat in on a parents' evening.

He thought children might do better at a private school but would regress if they went back to the "anarchy and chaos" of a troubled home.

State schools were "fighting a losing battle", he said, when the "middle class bourgeois elements" were taken out and sent to private school leaving a "disadvantaged, deprived underprivileged critical mass".

The ISC chief will tell the conference next week private schools need to be more up to date and prepared for a time when teachers will be increasingly replaced by computers.

He envisages pupils will learn facts via Wikipedia-type programmes in class and teachers will help apply them.

Although, this message is likely to be overshadowed by his remarks on comprehensive schools.

John Banks, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said of Mr Parry's words: "It's that kind of ill-informed, snobbish idea of state schools which opens up the divide between the sectors that I don't think most private school heads would support."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: " a deeply misguided picture, frankly insulting to the hard-working and talented teachers and pupils in the state sector."

Mr Parry is a controversial figure who rose through Naval ranks to become the head of a strategy unit at the Ministry of Defence which forecast future threats.

In 2006 he talked at a seminar about the dangers of migration, suggesting there was a danger of "reverse colonisation" where indigenous populations would become a minority.