of the students who enrol at private schools at the ages of 11 and 14 are so superior to that of state schools that private school students should have such a disproportionately higher chance of achieving success than their state school counterparts. Instead I and many educational experts, believe that it is the business links and superior quality of teaching that private schools possess which causes this disproportionate success. Therefore, one can conclude that attending a private school generally opens up doors and drastically increases the quality of a child’s prospects. However, I must make it clear that as a student at a private school, I do not resent nor hate private school institutions, it is not their fault that the British state sector is so inadequate and lacking of ambition that it is unable to compete with its private counterpart. Nor do I think that blame should be levied at the parents of private schools as they are honourably getting the best for their children. Private schools are extremely important to our economy and it is imperative that we maintain this high quality of schooling. Instead, I blame the admissions process of private schools for the social mobility they reduce and block. Admission to private schools is by no means meritocratic for students as their acceptance is heavily influenced by their parents’ ability to pay the school fees. This is because poorer applicants to private schools will need financial assistance through either a bursary or financial assistance. Scholarships are often intensely competitive and although bursaries are means tested, students that want to receive them have to perform better in admissions tests and interviews than their richer non-bursary counterparts to attend the school. This is shown by the facts that according to a study by The Independent in 2015, only a third of private school students receive financial assistance across Britain. Consequently, many richer students of inferior ability and potential are able to take the places of poorer but more able applicants simply because the parents of the poorer candidates are unable to afford the school fees. It is important to note that nowadays, it is not just working class parents who can’t afford to send their children to private school but also many middle class parents as due to the above inflation rise of private school fees, of which the average is now roughly £18,000 p.a., the average worker, on £27,000 p.a. according to ONS research, simply can’t find the money to cover the cost of the fees. Consequently, our country is in a position where more able candidates are not able to attend the best schools in our country not because they don’t have the ability, but instead because their parents can’t pay. This seems intrinsically wrong and unfair to me. Therefore, I propose that private schools make their school fees progressive. By this I mean that instead of having a flat rate of school fees, students of all incomes, high and low, have to pay varying sums of school fees depending on their parents’ income. This would mean that a student with unemployed parents would pay £0 a year whilst the child of a millionaire would pay the maximum rate of fees. The level of fees would progress incrementally with every £500 a year by the household until they reached a maximum cap, decided by the schools themselves, which the fees would not be able to exceed. The government would implement maximum fee charges for all students whose parents have a combined income of less than £50,000 per year and after this threshold it would be for the school to determine what their rates of fees would be. Each school would have an admissions test before they would make offers. The only information on the financial status of applicants that the school would possess would be that of a declaration of incomes after a stage of offers have been made. At this stage and before there was a declaration of incomes, schools would be able to offer scholarships to the candidates they want to have the most. The only government intervention I would propose in this system would be the creation of the Independent Schools Fund which would see excess fees created by schools due to intakes of disproportionately wealthy students pooled together. This would mean that if a
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