By Lindsay Ash
I RECENTLY attended a conference on schools and someone asked me a very good question: “What should you be getting for your money if you are paying fees?”
The obvious and correct answer is of course “something better than you receive in the States system”, as it would be very odd to pay for a product if you felt you could obtain the identical one for nothing.
On the reasons for paying fees I’ll only touch on Jersey briefly and concentrate on the UK for two reasons, the main one being that in Jersey you pay (aside from the two prep schools) peanuts in comparison, so while this does not buy much of what you’d get from the UK private sector you really can’t expect it to.
In Jersey the fees at the Big Four are less than £10K a year, which when you compare them with day schools in South London such as Colfe’s, Eltham College or Dulwich you are looking at fees nearer £30K a year, and they appear a snip compared to the boarding schools such as Wellington, Radley or Charterhouse, which come in at around £60K per annum (I threw in a bit of Latin there, which you also get for your £60K). The reason that this is worth stressing is that obviously you are demanding and getting a lot more if you are splashing out £60K at Rugby School rather than the £8K at Victoria College.
Fortunately the education in the Island away from the fee-paying sector is in a considerably better state than many areas of education provided in the UK, making the drive to private education seem less essential for many, and we still have a grammar school to throw into the equation.
Different people will, of course, seek different outcomes from a school and what it should provide, especially if paying fees.
There was a wonderful series called Ripping Yarns with Michael Palin that did a brilliant spoof on a public school – Tompkinson’s Schooldays, in which the school bully held an official position complete with phone and office. In one episode he decides to leave and take up the bully role at another school and the headmaster begs him not to, as “parents send their children from miles around to be bullied by you”. I mention this to demonstrate that not everyone will want the same thing from a school.
What are you looking for then? Better standards educationally? Better facilities? Better teachers? Finished product? Prestige?
The better standards educationally, I would think, goes without saying. After all, you are hardly going to hand over a few bob on the basis of the head saying: “We all have a jolly good laugh here … No one gets into university, but that’s not everything, eh? …Want a spliff? … By the way, we take all the major cards.”
The last of these – prestige – will have many snorting with indignation that you’d possibly send a child to a school for the prestige but it is very definitely a fact that people do and for all it embodies: the old boy/girl/etc network, opening doors into better jobs – and on this score Jersey was very much guilty in the past.
It’s probably a fact that some of that has gone, as universities in particular now discriminate against privately educated pupils, and certainly jobs are far more awarded on merit than the colour of your tie. Someone asked me a long while back if the old school tie helped you get on in the futures market. I replied if it did, it was Bethnal Green Secondary School.
There are still the type of parents, however, that enjoy the kudos of sending their children to a certain school – I think you know the type, the same sort who will answer to a simple “How are you?” with “Excellent, we’ve just come back from Chamonix … Piers drove down in his new Range Rover SV.”
The finished product? It’s often said that the best advert for a school is the pupils. This is obviously a generalisation but schools do turn out a specific type of person. Winchester, for instance, was always academic; Etonians have a sense of owning the world; Millfield has turned out sportsmen. In Jersey, I have to say, that the women educated at Beaulieu that I worked with (and I may just have been lucky) were very decent likeable people – whether that was down to the ethos created by Sister Marie Louise, I don’t know, but they impressed me enough that if I had a daughter over here I’d have liked her to turn out like them.
A major difference in UK fee-paying schools is of course the facilities. If you’ve read this far I am obviously not boring you too much and you obviously have an interest, so please go into Google and key in Tonbridge School sports facilities. Not bad, eh? Probably better than we have as an entire island. Yes, but that’s sports, what about arts? Good point! Key in Harrow School Ryan Theatre…
There are, of course, other facilities that they are offering that are amazing and give your child a chance to learn things that the average school can only dream of teaching with the limited facilities at their disposal, but it should be remembered that these are purchased with £60Kpa plus extras; also they have the student 24/7, so can devote evenings to school plays, speakers, societies, sport etc.
Facilities are obviously a major selling point for a school to a parent, even sometimes above the results. I once spoke to a teacher at Colfe’s who explained to me that they went private after Labour purged the grammar schools and it took them at least ten years to catch up with suitable facilities, such as a sports centre, to tempt parents. I am sure Filip Nowacki, the brilliant young Jersey swimmer, will tell you how important Millfield School’s facilities are in helping him in his drive towards swimming excellence.
Better teachers? I am not sure on this at all; certainly when I was at school it was not the case. Strangely, all the teachers had to have come from Oxbridge, which meant that while they were intelligent, their teaching skills were often not great. We had one science teacher who just could not cope at all with pupils and his lessons would end in near riots. He left totally unable to cope but then worked for NASA. Being intelligent doesn’t guarantee being able to teach.
Do the results justify the cost? Like life in general, in some cases probably they do and in others they don’t. I was at school with Richard Curtis, who wrote, among other things, Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral. I am sure he benefited but I doubt he had a physics report like mine: “He is wasting both my time and your money.”
Lindsay Ash was Deputy for St Clement between 2018 and 2022, serving as Assistant Treasury and Home Affairs Minister under Chief Minister John Le Fondré. He worked in the City of London for 15 years as a futures broker before moving to Jersey and working in the Island’s finance industry from 2000. Feedback welcome on Twitter
@Getonthelash2.
