THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—" A Headmaster " seems curiously to ignore the fallacy of supposing that his plan to reduce expenditure by a pro- blematical 5 per cent. (say £4,000 in £9o,000) can enable the Public Schools. to find boys who (owing to increasing child- shortage) will not exist.
It is surely clear that when there arc 30,000 fewer of such as feed these schools available, either too schools must have closed their doors or such schools generally must have suffered a great fall in numbers. No saving, resulting from the " Head- master's " plan, could stave off a crisis for more than a very few years.
The only way to save the Boarding Schools (for the true issue is Boarding versus Day School) is to increase the percentage of parents who find it possible to afford a Boarding School. To do this effectively it will be necessary to reduce costs (with no loss of efficiency) by 4o per cent. ; and such a reduction is not so impossible as it sounds ; it can be done by a combina- tion of two methods : 1. Agreement between parents and school-authorities to reduce " frills."
2. The non-sleeping boarder.
By " frills " I mean the wholly unproductive expenditure in which parents and schools are involved through yielding to the boy's and the boys' demand that he (they) should do and have what other boys (schools) have and do. I have found that the expenditure due to this fetish (and not even in the slump of 193o could parents or schools be induced to put up a real fight against it) adds about 20 per cent. to the cost of a first-rate education.
The non-sleeping boarder is rendered possible by the wide choice, which can now be exercised in the question of where to live. He has every privilege belonging to the boarder from breakfast to bed-time, but goes home to sleep. So heavy are the expenses and liabilities incurred by the school in the provision of a bed that I found it possible at St. George's, Harpenden, to reduce the fee for a non-sleeping boarder by 20 per cent.
The general adoption of these two methods, desirable in themselves, would enable our boarding schools to carry on in spite of .increasing boy-shortage. They would keep up their numbers at the expense of the day-schools ; for rightly or wrongly the majority of English parents will prefer the boarding school if they can afford it.—YoUrs, &c., Powder Copse, Boars Hill, Oxford. CECIL GRANT.
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