The case for state boarding schools

My philosophy of education has always been simple and I believe it unites right and left: namely, what wise parents would wish for their child, so the community should wish for all children. It’s a paraphrase of R.H. Tawney, who — being a socialist — said ‘state’ rather than ‘community’. I much prefer ‘community’ since it is an injunction to us all, including to local government, charities and social organisations, as well as to the state and its servants.

I feel this intensely personally, since the community — in the form of a local authority, Camden council in London — was my legal parent for the whole of my childhood. It did a pretty good job, thanks to the wisdom of the manager of my council children’s home, Gladys Baron, who became my surrogate mother. Dispensing a combination of tough love and brilliant strategic judgment about my education and future, she gave me a decent start in life from a ‘home’ where more inmates ended up in prison than at university, and most of whom are now dead. I called her Aunty until the day she died aged 94 and visited her weekly — she was unmarried and had no close relations — in her own final years in a care home.

What changed my destiny was her persuading my social worker, who in turn persuaded the Camden social services committee chairman, that at the age of 11 I should be sent to a boarding school, with the fees paid by the council. She even chose the boarding school: Kingham Hill School, a small institution for 230 boys in the middle of the Cotswolds. The school had previously been a charity home for orphan boys out of London’s East End, founded in 1886 by an unmarried evangelical Christian and former Etonian Tory MP from the Baring family, who took up residence in the neighbouring country house of Daylesford. By 1974, when I arrived off the train from Paddington, dazed by the countryside, it had morphed into an unconventional boarding school, more than half of whose boys were from broken homes and had their fees paid by the Baring Trust or by local authorities. The rest mostly came from military or missionary families.

It worked, and much as Aunty hoped. Amid the bullying and authoritarianism then characteristic of such schools, there was the stability of living in the same community for seven years with firm friends and some dedicated teachers, one of whom taught me debating and to read the Times, another to act, another to play the school organ, another to visit Paris, and a headmaster who had been to Oxford himself and made me apply although I thought it ludicrously impossible. Underpinning it was a strong ethic of duty, expressed a bit crudely through evangelicalism, but valuable nonetheless.

This experience influenced my whole thinking about education, and in due course many of the reforms of the Blair government. A second-tier policy I promoted as minister and which, in retrospect, I wish I had pushed more boldly was the radical expansion and repurposing of state boarding schools. My inspiration for this was obvious.

There are about 40 state boarding schools in England, and a similar number of privately endowed secondary schools like Kingham Hill run on similar lines. But there should be far more, mixing pupils who want to board and those who need to board, including children drawn from the 60,000 in care at any one time, subject always to the professional judgment of school staff and social workers that this is suitable for each individual. New forms of foster care — covering the holidays and weekends — should be developed to match.

I am aware of only one entirely new state boarding school to have been established in recent years: Holyport in Berkshire, which has Eton as its governing sponsor. Why don’t far more of the historic private boarding schools, rich in assets and boarding expertise, follow suit? And why doesn’t the Charity Commission, which ought to be ensuring that private schools for the wealthy do more to justify their charitable status, encourage this strongly?

And boarding shouldn’t only take place in ‘boarding schools’. Many private schools are part day, part residential, and this should happen more widely in the state sector. I encouraged some new academies to set up boarding houses in the 2000s, but the idea didn’t spread and it needs a new champion.

Private boarding schools, where high fees and social exclusivity are the norm, should also be encouraged to play a bigger social role in terms of their own admissions. I would support a boarding partnership scheme whereby boarding fees for children in care or on the edge of care who would benefit from this residential education are paid by local authorities or the state, provided the private schools cover the cost of the education. I launched a pilot version of such a scheme when in government, and a ‘broadening educational pathways for looked-after children’ scheme has been started by the present government, but the funding involved, and the numbers benefitting, are pitifully small.

Across all UK state and private boarding schools, educating about 70,000 children, only about 600 are currently from a deprived ‘looked after’ background. Most of these are ‘SpringBoarders’ — supported through the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation, a charity to which the Education Department recently awarded a contract to seek to increase the number radically by developing a new funding, access and partnership model. I hope this now happens. It would be a fitting initiative for the newish Education Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, an Iraqi Kurdish immigrant who, like me, the son of a Cypriot immigrant, knows the transformational power of education for those starting in this country with few other assets.