Stop bashing private schools - they make the UK millions |
This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
British independent schools are, of course, a hugely contentious political issue, yet in all the debate about them, three key features are hardly ever noted.
One is that the independent or private sector in the UK is relatively small by the standards of other developed countries. The second is that we are somewhat unusual in having a rigid boundary between the two sectors, whereas in some other countries, some state funding is available for parents who choose to have their children educated privately. And the third is that it is an extremely successful export industry with a unique global reach.
Size first. Private schools in Britain educate between six per cent and seven per cent of children, though the proportion is roughly double that at A-level (what in other countries would be classified as upper secondary level). This compares with 10 per cent in the US and Germany, where the proportion has been rising rapidly in recent years, and around 17 per cent in France. In Japan, it is around 30 per cent at the upper secondary level, and in Australia, it is even higher, having reached nearly 37 per cent.
That is probably the top end of the global range, though in Sweden, the proportion at the upper secondary level is also high at around one-third. At the other end of the scale is Finland, where only one per cent to three........