Best Schools - Abolishing private schools could increase inequality rather than eliminate it, a report has claimed

Academics at the University of Stirling published an essay in response to calls last month from prominent Labour figures for independent schools to be brought into public ownership.

Paul Sweeney, the shadow Scottish minister, said in June: “Ongoing inequalities in education entrench disadvantage. All private schools should be brought en masse into the state sector.”

However, Dave Griffiths, a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy, and Jennifer Ferguson, a doctoral researcher, said the policy would widen the gap between rich and poor.

They wrote: “The proposal from Labour to integrate independent schools into the state system risks increasing, not decreasing, the inequalities that exist in the educational system. Integrating private schools into the state system is an ideological issue which offers few substantive or pragmatic benefits for helping socially disadvantaged young people thrive and it fails to tackle the problem of inherited privilege.”

They pointed out that most privately educated children would live in catchment areas of the most affluent state schools, so schools that were already advantaged would receive further benefit in terms of knowledge and finances. Writing on the website The Conversation, they said: “Those schools would benefit and some existing pupils would be displaced, perhaps towards less advantaged schools. Most of the pupils who get high grades and university places through private schools would achieve similarly through the top-end schools of the state system.”

They added that abolishing private education would not remove privilege. “We would continue to see prime ministers appointed who would otherwise have gone to schools like Eton. Those families would continue to network and cultivate the lifestyles and experiences that foster entitlement.”

The head teacher of a leading private school has hit out at Oxford and Cambridge universities, claiming they operate an “unofficial quota system” for pupils from state schools, even if they have inferior A-level results

Andrew Halls of King’s College School in Wimbledon, southwest London, said he had been told that an unofficial cap of 30% on private-school pupils had been introduced this summer. He said both universities were turning away “brilliant” privately educated teenagers.

In recent years the proportion of students from the private sector has dropped at both universities to just under 40%. Halls said he feared some Oxbridge tutors might like to see the cap drop to 7% — the proportion of children educated in the private sector.

Halls said: “I heard from two different sources that there were effectively quotas [of 70% state pupils] at Cambridge now. I would be very sorry if entry to the most scholarly institutions in the world was based on politically driven quotas . . . If you care about remaining one of the most scholarly institutions in the world, to be uncomfortable about taking pupils from our most selective private schools, is counter-productive.”

Halls said he believed Oxbridge was under pressure to satisfy the government and media but said it should not turn down “brilliant youngsters simply because they come from top private schools”.