Local entrepreneur Stephen Fern said that the King George VI School would be a fully independent school for Years 7 to 13, and located in the west of the Island.
Mr Fern has been working on the idea of a fully private, mixed-gender secondary school for over two years with his partner, Lucy Carro.
He has eight children – four with Ms Carro – and has first-hand knowledge of building and running a school, having founded OTC Professional Education in the 1990s, which was later sold to the BPP Professional Education Group.
He said there was strong demand for a private, co-educational senior school in Jersey but one of the biggest hurdles faced by those interested in setting up a new school was finding a site.
But now a suitable location has been found and Mr Fern and Ms Carro are in the process of purchasing it.
‘No site can ever be completely perfect,’ he said. ‘There are always hurdles but with this site, there was no hurdle which was insurmountable.’
While he could not divulge the exact location yet, it will be located outside town and central-west.
‘We did not want to add to the chaos of the town school run,’ Mr Fern said.
The backers plan to use modern, eco-friendly, prefabricated buildings on the site to create an environment where children are inspired to learn and feel part of nature.
While he expects it will draw heavily from students at Jersey’s private prep schools – St George’s and St Michael’s – Mr Fern is not interested in creating a grades factory.
‘The prime motivation is to offer an alternative to Jersey’s same-sex secondaries, while building a school focused on personal development across a child’s range of interests and talents,’ he said.
‘I suspect we will look back on single-sex schools in 20 years time and see them the way we view racially segregated schools now – as un-natural and outdated,’ Mr Fern said.
Momentum for the school has picked up over the last four weeks, and while things can always happen to cause delays, Mr Fern said the hope is that the first classes can enter Years 7, 8 and 9 at the new school in September 2020 and that it will have the ability to offer the International Baccalaureate by 2021.
The school will aim for class sizes of 20 and, when the full complement of year groups have been built up for Years 7 through to 13, will cater to over 200 students.
Fees will be in line with the Island’s private preparatories – currently around £5,000 each term for students in the upper years – but the hope is to offer scholarships in order to make it as inclusive as possible.
King George VI is currently registering interest through a private Facebook group, Jersey Private Co-educational School, and assembling a board.
The backers want to offer a learning environment where excellence is not measured by grades alone and children can ‘explore real life, friendships, fresh air and humanity’, the site says.
The school hopes to cater to ‘kind, caring and empathetic children motivated to do well and succeed by reaching for the sky rather than trampling on others’.
Mr Fern said he is committed to assembling a first-class group of teachers. ‘My father was a teacher and they are often greatly undervalued by society,’ he said. ‘We want to recruit the most inspiring teachers and the pay will reflect that we see them as being the best of the best.’
