Lessons for less: affordable excellence
Neil Collins commends the business plan, and the educational ethos, of the New Model School Company Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might think — yet there’s another primary school in this street that the site doesn’t show, which is so oversubscribed that it has just registered its first pre-birth application from desperate parents.
Maple Walk is a fee-paying school, but quite unlike other prep schools in the capital. Where they boast of the quality of their facilities, Maple Walk has almost none. Its seemingly modest ambition of teaching small children to read, write and add up — something which seems to be beyond many state schools — is accomplished in a church hall and a couple of Portakabins. Its other ambition, to instil good manners and self-discipline, would be recognised by all those parents struggling to pay fees (as well as taxes) for the education of their offspring. What they wouldn’t recognise are the fees. Maple Walk charges less than £5,000 a year, less than half the market rate for a prep-school place in London. It’s non-selective, non-denominational and designed to be non-profit-making, a combination which is bound to cause fluttering in the educational dovecotes.
This experiment is the brainchild of Robert Whelan, the deputy director of Civitas, the right-wing think tank. He became so frustrated with think-tanking about education and finding nobody took any notice that he decided to do it instead. The result is the New Model School Company Limited, and Maple Walk.
Three years ago two pairs of brave parents sent their two children to a run-down church hall: today, the school has 59 pupils from Reception to Year 2, and a waiting list the same size. It has 104 registrations for 20 places in 2009, and 68 for 2010. More than 40 applicants had to be turned away from this year’s Reception class, and there are 48 on the waiting list for next year’s, even after raising the class size to 25 to accommodate siblings. In short, it’s bursting at its inadequate seams.
Whatever attracts the parents, it’s not a shiny new building. Hidden behind a small door at the side of a church, underneath, ironically enough, a School of Knowledge (not a religious cult, but where taxi drivers learn London’s road map), it’s easy to miss. Go up some steep stairs into the hall, and the enthusiasm hits you. Sarah Knollys, the headmistress, has a small, passionately committed team of young women working for her, for less than they would get in a state school.
Most private schools pay at least on the state scale, so it’s a measure of just how desperate some teachers are about the condition of London’s primary schools. They like the ability to teach rather than simply to try and keep order, as well as the freedom from the constant drizzle of paper falling on them from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. They want to teach, not to take dictation.
Teachers as well as parents are queuing up to get in, and Whelan argues that this shows his business model works. In its latest financial year, the school was just £8,000 short of breakeven. Next year’s fees will rise by 2.5 per cent, but they will still be below the £5,000 mark. The NMS now has a chairman, Justin Shaw, and a business plan to create more Maple Walks.
The key to the plan is that the schools are not expected to repay their capital costs. An educational charity has bought a £1.25 million site in the neighbouring borough of Brent, and benefactors are being sought to put up as much again to build the school a permanent home. These benefactors, if they can be found, lock in their capital (unsecured) but Shaw expects to pay them a maximum 5 per cent return on their contributions, along the lines pioneered over a century ago by the Peabody Trust. More commercial fundraising avenues are also being explored.
Compared to the much-trumpeted and highly politicised academies, which seem to need tens of millions of pounds merely to get to opening day, the NMS’s sums are tiny: £2.5 million for the site and buildings, £150,000 (repayable) in start-up costs and a few tens of thousands for equipment. All this for a primary-school education costing less than £100 a week, and producing children who are at least a year ahead of the state’s yardsticks. Why isn’t everyone doing it?
The answer lies with the local authorities. The Royal Borough is proud of its schools. It can produce statistics to show how well they’re doing, and quite a few have unfilled vacancies. Are more schools needed? No, say the planners, what we really need is more housing. They have a hard task, as property owners seek to maximise the value of their tiny slice of the country’s most valuable real estate, and other boroughs are worse. Brent’s planners have simply refused to respond to phone calls, letters or emails from NMS.
Many London councils oppose private education on principle. They really believe that forcing children into a bad state school will make it better. Besides, each child lost to the private sector shrinks their empire a little more.
This is the real reason why private education is so expensive in London. Maple Walk has proved that it takes little more than enthusiasm and determination to launch a primary school charging affordable fees once planning permission has been granted. But the process is interminable and the outcome uncertain. Without permission, there’s no school, and the housing shortage, like the poor, is always with us. Meanwhile, another generation of children is denied the chance of a decent education.
The way to cut this Gordian knot has been shown clearly enough in Sweden — as Fraser Nelson wrote here recently and as Rick Williams, chairman of Maple Walk’s governors, explains: ‘Planning is the key. In Sweden there’s an educational planning authority which is designed to cut through the delays and local vested interests.’ Sweden, the West’s most socialist country, introduced education vouchers and allows any small group of parents to set up a school. Says Whelan: ‘Studies in Sweden and where vouchers have been tried in the US show that a plurality of providers benefits those at the bottom just as much as those further up.’ This is only counterintuitive to those who believe the state is a better allocator of resources than the market. As any disinterested observer of state education can see, the combination of political grandstanding at the top, and preservation of the entrenched interests of the educational bureaucrats lower down, is a lethal one. The teacher at the chalk face is a distant third. Our Dear Leader likes to boast that his government now spends nearly £6,000 per pupil per year. Maple Walk has demonstrated that this is more than enough to fund a decent primary education for every child, if only the massed ranks of non-teachers on the state’s payroll would get out of the way. Unfortunately, they are far more likely to see this little school as a terrible threat, and to try to throttle such a precocious youngster before too many people notice what it can do.
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