Middle classes are revolting over cost of UK’s elite fee-paying schools

Hammersmith Bridge has straddled the Thames for more than a century. It has a tendency to corrode, it was the target of IRA bomb attacks, and it struggles to deal with London’s heavy traffic.

More recently, the 700-foot trek over the bridge will live in the memories of pupils of St Paul’s School long after they have left the £22,000-a-year fee-paying school, which has existed since before the Reformation.

Dozens of students have been robbed of high-end mobile telephones and iPads by assailants, many of whom live locally. They wait patiently at the northern side of the bridge for those students who have little choice but to cross if they are travelling home by train.

For the past six months, the school has told its charges not to wear the school’s black blazer outside of its grounds. They’ve also been told to take off the school tie, hide the school scarf and replace the plain black leather shoes with trainers going to and from school. Parents, who would normally shy away from such advice, have been told to provide hoodies instead of school jackets.

Fee-paying privilege

The safety of public schoolboys is not the most pressing issue. Rather, the privileges enjoyed by those who go to fee-paying schools such as St Paul’s is topical again in the UK, a country that obsesses frequently about educational standards.

There are about 2,600 fee- paying schools in Britain, educating 625,000 pupils. This is 6.5 per cent of the total school population, according to their representative body, the Independent Schools Council.

Incredibly, however, one in five pupils 16 and older are educated at fee-paying schools, a choice that brings some families to the point of near penury, even if middle-class sensitivities mean that such sufferings are kept private.

The ability of the middle classes to send their children to public school is becoming more threatened with every passing year, warns Andrew Halls, head of King's College, Wimbledon. He says that school fees have risen twice as fast as inflation in the past decade.

“In the last 20 years, fees have quadrupled. A typical boarding school now requires a parent to have a spare £30,000 [€38,000] in taxed income to pay for just one child – every year,” he wrote in a newspaper last weekend.

The lure of easily afforded fees from the oligarchs who have located to London in large numbers offers rich pickings for the schools. Today, one in three children boarding in schools is foreign, which makes life increasingly more testing for those who run them, particularly when hugely privileged offspring bridle at being told to, for example, make up a bed.

In an era when time in Eton or Harrow is best hidden, rather than flaunted, by those who have to deal with the public, fee-paying schools are beginning to run out of friends, or least ones who are prepared to go to bat for them in public.

Labour MP Tristram Hunt, a product of such a schooling himself, has proposed that public schools should lose their charitable status and be forced to pay nearly £170 million (€215 million) in business rates, unless they share teachers and playing grounds with local state schools.

His plans provoked ridicule from political enemies, who have long been irritated by Labour's unwillingness to take on public schools as bastions of privilege. This was shown by former Labour minister Alan Milburn's Elitist Britain report in August.

Privileged numbers

The numbers Milburn found are revealing: 71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of civil service permanent secretaries, 53 per cent of senior diplomats, and 50 per cent of members of the House of Lords went to fee-paying schools.

In addition, 45 per cent of public body chairs, 44 per cent of the Sunday Times Rich List, 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, 36 per cent of the Cabinet, and over a third of the English rugby team had the same start.

Supporters of ending charitable status argue that the rich should pay the full cost of their children’s education if they want to have them taught privately, though all bar the most zealous are against actually banning them.

Instead, they say that the pool of support that exists for them in British society – widespread in leafier parts of England, far less so in Scotland and Wales – will be drained if the middle-classes are priced out of the market.

Given the inflation in schools fees, that is already happening, it seems. In the meantime, pupils from St Paul’s must remember to keep wearing their hoodies.

So far, the no-uniform rule has cut the number of muggings. Hammersmith Bridge is no longer quite so daunting.