In Full: Not All Private School Kids are “King’s of the Universe”

“The game has moved on”. Now, the “grammar school boys” have taken over Cambridge. But, speaking to Per Capita, John Claughton –  former Master at Eton College from 1984 to 2011 and Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham from 2006 to 2016– suggests that a private education should, perhaps, not be condemned as a net negative for the British Education system. 

While public discourse has increasingly become focussed on the state-private gap in higher education, private education can “genuinely offer opportunities” to students “which their own circumstances would not have given”– particularly in the West Midlands or the North. 

An independent education in the West Midlands is a vehicle for social mobility. Claughton recounts his own parents “coming home from his older brother’s first parents evening” at King Edward’s School. His parents were “staggered that my brother’s teachers said he could get into Oxford”. His brother ultimately didn’t get in – although Claughton himself later did, reading Classics at Merton College, Oxford. But at that parent’s evening, the “family’s eyes had been raised to another level of aspiration”. 

They aren’t “King’s of the Universe”

Setting the Greek Scholarship papers at Eton  “was a bad idea […] It meant that candidates like Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng, whom I taught, arrived at Eton stuffed to the gills with an excess of Greek – and Latin – and that might not have been good for their future development.” 

“Lord Waldegrave, the Provost of Eton, wrote in his memoirs that, when he arrived at Oxford, it was no longer the world of Brideshead but the land of the pupils of the great northern grammar schools.” 

“Those schools were, for decades, as successful academically as Westminster or St Paul’s. The pupils of schools like King Edward’s, Manchester Grammar School, Bradford Grammar School, Leeds Grammar School, Nottingham High School, did not see a place at Oxford or Cambridge as their birthright, but the success of these schools did change the very nature of those universities” 

“Even today, as fee-paying schools they are very successful and ambitious” and, as Claughton insists, it’s important not to imagine that all independent schools are big, rich, boarding schools charging £50k a year. They come in many shapes, sizes and costs.”

John Claughton has travelled for most of his life in the much-disputed territory of independent – or private – and selective education. As a boy, he was a beneficiary of the Direct Grant system, so that he attended for free two of the great grammar schools of England, Bradford Grammar School for a year and King Edward’s School, Birmingham for seven years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Under that system, which operated from 1944 to 1976, the government gave funding directly to those schools, nearly 200 in number, so that they could provide a very high proportion of free places to pupils on the basis of academic merit. 

That system gave him the chance to read Classics at Merton College, once again all for free and thereafter, after a “brief and hopeless career in merchant banking”, he became a teacher, at Eton from 1984 to 2001, and then a head of two independent schools, Solihull School (2001-2005) and then his old school, King Edward’s (2006-2016): ‘In my beginning is my end.’ And that end included winning the Times Educational Supplement Independent School Lifetime Achievement Award, the Tatler Independent Head of the Year in 2016 and an international award from CASE for fund-raising.

It’s a prevailing sentiment Claughton has himself experienced not once, but twice – as a student and later as a parent at KES.  Speaking of his own children, who would have gone to Eton if Claughton remained in his role as House Master, he tells us “I can’t tell you how glad I am”. 

His son, Tom Claughton, is working to defuse  “cluster bombs in Laos dropped in the Vietnam War– he wouldn’t have been doing this if they went to Eton, where he would have most likely been investment bankers”. 

Access is an important Legacy of the Direct Grant System in Regional Independent Schools

“The great debate now is whether independent schools can really justify their charitable status, even their existence, when they are, in many cases, mightily expensive and, in every case, open only to those who can afford the fees,” as Claughton previously told Per Capita. 

“After all, it is still only 1% of independent school pupils who are receiving a free education on the basis of means testing. However, that was not the case in the years of the Direct Grant system.” 

“In my time at King Edward’s, 90% of boys were there for free and I don’t think that we had any notion of anyone paying fees. That meant that we were a bunch of boys from ordinary backgrounds, from families with no history of university education, a world which Jonathan Coe describes so vividly in The Rotters Club. So, we were proud to be there and thought we were very lucky. The school did raise our aspirations and change our lives. I remember vividly my parents’ coming home from my brother’s first Sixth Form parents’ evening, somewhat taken aback by his teachers’ suggestion that he should apply to Oxford. In my case, the thought of being an Oxbridge classicist was planted in my mind very early in my time there.”

“That scale of opportunity was massively reduced with the end of the Direct Grant system in 1976, a decision ironically taken by a Labour government, so that for the last forty years independent schools have become more remote from the mainstream and more expensive. However, on his return to King Edward’s, Claughton did what he could to restore some level of accessibility: other former Direct Grant Schools, especially Manchester Grammar School, have done the same. From 2008 to 2016, the school raised over £10m from former pupils to fund 100 free places in the school and, with the same purpose, created the largest Outreach programme, working on a great range of projects with over 200 state primary schools.” 

“Of course,” Claughton says, “that this is nothing like the accessibility of the past, but at least we were trying to give bright boys from all backgrounds the chance to come. And that meant that the school had a sense of being open and diverse, with boys from all over Birmingham. Two of my sons attended the school and they loved that diversity and the values at the heart of the school. I am glad they went to King Edward’s, not Eton, which might have been their fate. One of them is now a teacher, the other works for Halo Trust in Laos, clearing up the bombs dropped by the Americans in the Vietnam War. I am not sure they would be doing these jobs if they had been to Eton. And they go to do the International Baccalaureate Diploma, too.”

Acing the 11+ creates more problems in our primary language education

The “grammar school and independent system is feeding into a massive tutoring system”, Claughton tells Per Capita.  There are “kids on Harborne high-street, practising online tests”. We are “distorting the education market at eleven, allowing certain parents to game the system by tutoring or sending their students to private primary schools”. 

Across the UK, we need to “prevent students narrowing down so precipitously early”, Claughton tells us. The pressure of narrowing-down extends beyond sixth-form education, tailored to the demands of university admissions tutors, but also to the state of primary language education– too often getting tossed aside to enable teachers in selective areas to ‘teach to the test’.  

In the last “two to three months, I tutored the son whose father worked at the local Lidl in Winson Green”, an inner-city area in Birmingham. 

The student “unfortunately failed” the 11+. He “didn’t get the score” he needed to get into any selective school in the West Midlands.  “It was more mortifying than anything I had experienced in the last seventeen years”.

Claughton suggests it partly came down to the fact that he “spoke Punjabi at home and only spoke English at school– the 11+ test was beyond the sophistication of English”.

Now retired, Claughton dedicates much of his time advocating for reform in primary and secondary language education. “We take a bilingual kid, and make them monolingual, and then teach them a language that is no good for them”. Alongside his work an Honorary Research Fellow in Classics Ancient History and Egyptology within the School of Arts Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester, he is the co-Founder of WoLLoW, an initiative for immersive language and linguistic education that hopes to reform language policy from the earliest stages of education. 

And, when school kids get to secondary school, Claughton notes that years of primary language learning– when they are most cognitively attuned for language acquisition, normally gets supplanted within weeks at secondary school. It’s worlds apart from his experience teaching Classics at Eton. Claughton himself set the Greek Scholarship papers at Eton. He was very familiar with his former Etonian students, like Kwarsi Kwarteng, arriving at the age of thirteen “stuffed to the gills” with classical languages. 

“The world has changed and yet we’re still teaching a language curriculum that might have been right in the 1970s”.  We “live in a multilingual society”, but the “teaching of languages in our primary schools is a mess. There’s no curriculum, Ofsted don’t pay any attention to it. You can teach any language you want and spend four years mucking around, learning colours and hearing the days of the week”. Learning to speak a home language is “neurologically and culturally good for them, fostering a sense of belonging, identity and family unity where grandparents and children can talk to each other”. 

Just as our language policy is stuck in the 1970s, perhaps as is our lack of nuance of Independent schools. The access initiatives of Independent Schools, like KES in the West Midlands, are rooted in their shared history with other selective grammar schools under the Direct Grant System that was similarly abolished in the seventies.

Claughton believes– as a headmaster, teacher, parent and a former student– that we continue to overlook how much more an Independent Schools in the West Midlands offer far more to families and local communities than the ‘Great Public Schools’, like Eton where “family-generated wealth” meant that education, in his experience, did not necessarily open more opportunities to their students. Fom teaching Greek at Eton College to tutoring English in Winson Green, John Claughton is as driven as ever, perhaps due to an overwhelming exasperation with  every single stage of our education system, to deploy his accumulated wisdom to stick his head above the parapet and challenge the status quo.

 From learning Greek in the school of Tolkien and Enoch Powell, and teaching Greek at Eton College to tutoring English in Winson Green, from being a pupil at King Edward’s to being a head of that school with his son as pupils, he has seen a lot. And, since his third son, Sam, has autism, he has also seen the need for the education of such pupils to be given much more care and attention. He remains energetic and driven, even exasperated. 

Cover Image from Flickr