Elite schooling

Published on 18/09/2012 00:00

Independent schools exist to purchase privilege, and their charitable status enables them to claim huge amounts of public money for this very private purpose (Letters, 17 September).

In addition, as long as they don’t pay rates they are getting all the local authority services that a business would receive, making the rest of us pay for them.

Finally, by their existence, they ensure that those who make decisions about the publicly funded school system are themselves, all too often, neither products nor stakeholders of that system.

Charitable status for fee-
paying schools is a blood 
transfusion for a parasite.

Paul S Braterman

Professor Emeritus

University of North Texas Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry

University of Glasgow

Nith Street

Glasgow

The latest contribution (Letters, 17 September) from the director of the Scottish Council of Independent Schools to the “charitable status” debate is somewhat misleading and possibly disingenuous.

John Edward states that “schools have charitable status because they are established 
for public benefit purposes… usually the advancement of 
education”

He adds that “public benefit is not a compliance issue”.

To clarify this, the first stage of the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator’s charity test requires charities to have only charitable purposes – in this instance advancement of education.

Next, after charitable purpose has been confirmed, the charity test requires provision of public benefit in Scotland or elsewhere – assessed in light of any restrictive conditions, private benefit or public disbenefit arising.

In this connection, experience from a stint as bursar and company secretary is that independent schools vary widely in terms of scale, fees, financing, admissions/sources of pupils, output, operations and indeed quality.

In recent years there has been a noticeable scramble throughout the sector to establish sometimes cosmetic and tenuous
arrangements to provide public benefit, which rather speaks 
for itself.

Ron Sutherland

Millwell Park

Innerleithen, Peeblesshire