Education

Thomas von Braun's schooldays

Logie Bruce Lockhart

In spite of all the prophecies of doom, the most remarkable change in public school intake this year has not been any decline in home applicants, but a further sharp increase in the number of applicants from abroad.

There are many reasons for this. The public schools have always had their admirers abroad. They may appear still more desirable in the light of educational changes in other countries, while the declining value of the pound has made the fees relatively cheap.

Malaysia and Hong Kong need doctors, want a British medical degree and are convinced that the public schools offer the best chance of succeeding in the highly competitive struggle for medical places. They are also glad to be sure that their children will be working under conditions which offer supervision of spare time as well as of working hours. Many Americans have come to realise that an eighteen-year-old specialist in a good English school will be nearly two years ahead of his contemporaries in the United States in the sciences, and probably some way ahead in languages too. Some of them may feel that this represents a more solid asset than the more nebulous benefits of school sociology and psychology. The oil countries have the money and need the specialists. Since Britain has firmly committed itself to the Common Market, some of the other members are taking another look at the education she offers. Some Germans are even more uneasy than the British about their comprehensive schools. For them the

private sector in England offers a very cheap form of education: the cost of living in Germany is high, and they are refreshingly astonished that anyone can be housed, fed and educated for as little as £1,500 per annum.

The French have no high opinion of most of their own universities; they have a poor staffing ratio and a tiresome record of political unrest. A couple of years in a British school to prepare them for the technical language and teaching of a British university could have a wide appeal. An increasing number of foreigners seem to feel that the boarding system gives .great scope for sport and art and music. The British have a long experience of such a system, and to spend a couple of years abroad at one's most impressionable age is attractive when more and more people are learning to think internationally. The African countries, especially Nigeria, are anxious to enlist public school help in gaining entry to British universities for law, medicine and engineering. Even the Swedes appear to think there is something to be gained from a year or two in the public schools.

This presents some problems for the independent schools. Many of them feel that an influx of foreign students could benefit them greatly. It is often the most intelligent and enterprising who wish to come, and they bring most valuable standards and viewpoints. Some schools may want to go as far as the Atlantic colleges and may try to offer genuine experiments in international schooling, I suspect that the majority will probably aim at drawing rather less than 10 per cent of their intake from abroad: enough to give an international flavour to their sixth form without altering the essentially British cheracter of their schools. A few may hesitate because they are afraid that their British parents will remember the years when some rather shaky independent schools were glad to welcome foreign students of low academic standards, because they were short of applicants, and might conclude that their school was courting foreigners from necessity rather than choice.

Be that as it may, the demand is there, and most schools are happily certain that they will gain from it. There are problems of mechanism

with which the Independent Schools Information Service will have to get to grips. At the moment applications tend to come too late. in the year for the schools to be able to help: there is a flood of letters in the summer term for places in September.

Honoured Sir,

I humbly beg to submit my application to your esteemed school. My name

is and I was born in the fourth lunar month of the Year of the Horse.

May peace and prosperity attend your path.

The intake to public schools through normal British channels has to be settled in June. While such attractive letters of application may tempt headmasters to offer immediate places, by the time one has worked out the date of the fourth lunar month of the Year of the Horse, found out what the headmaster's report means in terms of 0 and A level potential and ensured that the candidate is not likely to be the spearhead of Maoist infiltration, the summer term is over, and all places gone. There is also the regrettable tendency for Africans and Malaysians to apply at the age of seventeen, which means that they may be twenty by the time they take their A levels. The dates of foreign examinations are often inconvenient. Individual schools will have to make up their minds whether they are going to allow for the fact that quite clever boys may be unable, because of their educational system, to reach 0 level until seventeen.

Are they also going to change their attitudes to worship and modify their games system? Africans and Americans enjoy sport hugely, Indians will benefit hockey teams. I suspect, however, that only rickshaw coolies run in Hong Kong, and western leisure activities outside chess and table tennis do not come easily to some Chinese students. Some foreign parents send their children to British public schools because they approve of corporal punishment, others resolutely hope that if this barbaric custom still persists, their children will be allowed to opt out.

Most schools have already been taking foreign students long enough to have reached their own solutions to these problems. It is one of the great strengths of the public school system that they are varied and unsystematic enough to offer radically different answers. The ISIS and HMC will have the problem of how to communicate these different solutions to the increasing number of customers who now come from outside the international `establishment' which already knows its way around. The chances of a generally accepted standard international examination arriving in the next decade are very slender. In the meantime the flexibility of our public schools will be most useful. The motives of those who appreciate them will always be as varied as the schools themselves. Those of us who have devoted hard-earned money to raising the standards of public school accommodation might have shared my mild surprise when a wealthy and distinguished oriental parent, after he had looked round the laboratories and playing fields, turned down my offer to show him round the dormitories, "Understand me, headmaster. In X my son is very spoiled and has a TV set in every room and a car ot his own. I am sending him to England so that he shall sleep in a cold and filthy public school dormitory like everyone else."

I hope he wasn't too disillusioned to find his son in a well-heated study bedroom of his own. His son was in any case a great success, and his successors should continue to be an equal asset.

Logie Bruce Lockhart is headmaster of Gresham's School.