A superior education?

So far as the NHS is concerned, I was impressed by the facilities, the professional skills and the caring and kind people at Middlesbrough’s James Cook University Hospital who could not do enough for me.

But education proved to be more problematical as the perennial private versus state schooling debate was recently re-ignited by the suggestion by Labour that private schools should do more to help state schools or lose tax breaks.

If the progress of 19th century education was retarded by religious denomination, then subsequently education has been bedevilled by social class The issue ought to have been put to rest in the relative wartime unity of 1944.

As a former grammar school teacher, comprehensive school governor and headteacher, principal A level examiner and Durham University teacher-trainer ( retiring in 2012 with an “outstanding” Ofsted cachet ) I dare venture opinions on the schools and learning experienced by both the fee-paying seven per cent as well as by the 93 per cent of pupils funded primarily from direct taxation.

I do, however, concede superiority to the likes of former Education Secretary Michael Gove, his successor, Nicky Morgan, and Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, Tristram Hunt – all expensively educated – so far as making political capital out of education is concerned.

It seemed to me noteworthy that following hard on the Rochester/ white van gaffe, Mr Hunt ( University College School and son of the head of the Met Office ) in order to reassert Labour’s democratic credentials threatened to reduce tax advantages worth £165 million enjoyed by the 2,570 fee-paying schools unless they assisted local state schools.

Yet fee-paying schools have little to offer beyond smaller class sizes and their grounds, buildings and endowments. They do not, in general terms, employ better teachers with superior subject knowledge or better head teachers.

Leading,financing, staffing, pastorally supporting and timetabling such a complex organisation as a large school today is not for the amateur.

State school heads must have attended a managerial training college while many of their independent sector contemporaries would struggle outside their comfort zones. Nor are the latter subjected to the relatively objective scrutiny of Ofsted or to the comparative analysis of league tables, both of which have helped to improve standards in state schools.

More pertinent, I reflected, was what private schools can learn from state schools. The young teachers I helped to train from all backgrounds - yet mostly destined for state school employment - teach relevant and dynamic lessons which are pacey, inclusive and well matched to a range of pupil abilities. Their teaching is less formal than that of their more conservative counterparts and the product is an increasingly autonomous learner and an independent thinker.

Underlying such qualities and intrinsic to them is “order” and in such behaviour management terms the non-private state sector has so much to offer.

State school head teachers cannot, alas, simply show that rarity - the disaffected individual pupil - the door.

And all of this while discharging an increasingly clunky and less relevant National Curriculum (from which the private sector is exempt ) reflecting the eccentric Michael Gove’s attempt to replicate for 21st century state pupils what engaged his mode of learning a generation ago in cosy surroundings.

Further proof of the efficacy of state education is offered by higher education, now expanded from five per cent in 1965 to some 40 per cent of today’s year group, and increasingly recruited from state schools. On the whole they do well and stay the course while proportionately more of the over-drilled and spoon-fed fee-payers drop out of universities.

One point of my writing is to offer a corrective to the self-righteous indignation of private school heads which dominated recent correspondence in the quality press.

Another reason is to reassure the majority of parents that their children are being worked, stimulated and intellectually stretched in the stable, co-educational and morally wholesome environments of state schools.

However, they must exercise their right to choose schools and they must press hard for improvement if schools deteriorate or even “coast”. Nor are the sporting and extra-curricular activities of enormous variety notably inferior to those offered in private schools. And, Potterish twaddle notwithstanding, there is no need to be a boarder and away from home to enjoy school life.

Judged by value for money criteria alone, the majority clearly have the better of it ; unassisted, thank you.

*Mr Wales was a teacher at the former Ferryhill Grammar School and stayed on to become head of Ferryhill Comprehensive. In the late 1990s he moved to Durham University where he ran the postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) course. He remains an honorary fellow of Durham University.