Academy Of Ideas

Recorded on Saturday 19 October, 2013. as part of the School Fights strand at the Battle of Ideas festival  The place of independent schools in Britain’s education landscape has never been so intensely debated. According to Martin Stephen, former high master of St Paul’s School, two of the three main political parties hate independent schools ‘to the core of their being’, while the Conservatives are run by so many public schoolboys that they cannot afford to extend ‘the merest hand of friendship’ to such schools without being caricatured by the media. But do private schools protest too much about ‘posh prejudice’? The 7% of pupils who attend fee-paying schools go on to dominate Oxbridge places and elite professions such as law, the media and science. Are those who defend private schools prepared to defend the perpetuation of such inequality on the grounds of individual freedom? Or is it not true that independent schools are full of ‘toffs’ when a third of pupils in schools