A Norfolk headteacher reacts against the claim that UK education will be much better if private schools are banned. Jon Periss, the headmaster of Langley School, believes private schools help in keeping the social barriers down rather than making them.
According to the Labour party, if they succeed in the elections next year, private schools would be under attack, their charitable status revoked and their assets will be distributed to the government-funded schools.
A lot of students in the Langley private school are helped financially by scholarships and fellowships. Periss intends to increase the fellowships every year so that students can keep coming to the school without any financial burden on the family.
According to Periss, there’s a need to break down the socio-economic barriers and the walls created by them. Unlike Trump, diversity should be celebrated rather than seen as a weakness. There’s no denying that the state schools are doing a decent job, but so do private schools.
Private schools strike down the barrier
State-funded schools don’t have such fellowship programs as they have at private schools. Hence everyone can’t access them. Langley takes 850 students in their senior and prep schools where more than 75% of the students are in fellowship programs. Access to education for deprived backgrounds has been made possible with this.
In an online poll conducted by Eastern Daily Press, 73% of the voters believed that private education should continue if the parents are not satisfied with the state-funded school. However, the rest of the voters believe that private schools should be taken down as they bring inequality to the level of education.
Considering the whole UK, all private schools don’t have scholarship and fellowship programs like Langley Private School. Attacking private schools for creating a divide might just do the trick, but abolishing them completely will hit them back in the future.
