Tonight:
9°c
Lord Adonis is pitching up today at the conference for the 250 elite independent schools, flogging a new plan encouraging them to back Labour's much-trumpeted city academies. They can become a sponsor of an academy, or they can be a "partner", sharing teachers where the proles' school has insufficient. Alternatively, they can quit the private sector altogether, which means while they may still charge fees, they'll have to abandon selection.
The junior schools minister has been at pains to point out that an independent school's support for the academies programme will not determine whether it hangs on to its charitable status, but this is arrant nonsense. The 2006 Charities Act is slowly but inexorably being implemented, and includes measures to rectify the absurd loophole whereby private schools have charitable status, and therefore are exempt from tax on profits.
The exemption saves the independent sector an estimated £100 million or more annually. Now the patricians will, theoretically, have to prove what they should have all along - that they genuinely benefit the public - or else cough up to the Revenue.
Most independent schools pay mere lip-service to the notion of "public benefit", and should be treated as businesses that provide education, but I bet a fair few will hang on to their charitable status. The Etons and Harrows of this world run scholarship programmes and share their sports fields with some of the more presentable lower orders. This will probably allow them to pass the test.
Lord Adonis's plans are of assistance to neither side of the school system. The private schools can well look after themselves: there's plenty of demand for places in the independent sector. If the schools have to charge more, I'm sure there will be people willing to pay. As for the "academies" (failing inner-city comps to you and me), what they need is less tedious, centralised direction, better facilities, some streaming and loads more money, not Eton letting them join in the wall game.
It's usually invidious to point to a personal angle on government legislation, but Andrew Adonis's own education is instructive. He won a place at an independent boarding school and from there leapfrogged on to Oxford. However, his place was funded not by some "charitable" body but by his local education authority.
Adonis would do well to remember this before allowing independent schools to continue robbing Pete so they can put a dear little boater on Paul's fair brow. Even at its inception in the 1920s, no less an Old Harrovian than Churchill thought the public schools' tax exemption a manifest inequity. Sometimes I think a little Churchillian noblesse oblige would be preferable to these discount viscounts and their botched plans that'll benefit nobody but the rich.
For Will Self's full column, buy Tuesday's Evening Standard
