{"id":323,"date":"2015-07-08T16:23:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T15:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hilarymoriarty.com\/blog\/?p=323"},"modified":"2015-07-08T16:23:50","modified_gmt":"2015-07-08T15:23:50","slug":"blooming-marvellous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"Blooming Marvellous"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hilary Moriarty looks at the reasons behind the successes in the independent sector reported in this year’s ISC census.
\n
\nSo how\u2019s it going? If you were remotely connected to independent schools this summer when the latest ISC census came out, your answer must have been: \u201cBlooming marvellous, thank you!\u201d
\nWe have long proclaimed the value of independent education: long days and many inspirational teachers \u2013 only 13% of ISC schools\u2019 classroom staff are teaching assistants, who make up 35% of state school staff. Fantastic facilities for sport and drama and music, as well as classrooms, laboratories and libraries. Many pools and pitches for many sports \u2013 how many of our Olympians were products of independent schools, where those sporting talents were nurtured? Lots of activities outside the classroom \u2013 clubs and societies for debating and astronomy and model airplanes and computer coding: you name it and if three of you want it, we\u2019ll lay it on, which I think is a mantra at Eton and probably many others beside.
\nAll of this is a marketing man\u2019s dream and will feature in the brochure and the ads and in recruiting trips to China. But the primary draw, the big gun in any school\u2019s marketing armoury, will be the grades. These schools, with their rich environments and their wide-sweeping provision in both curricular and extracurricular terms, produce the goods. Children educated in these schools really do attain the best exam grades in the country. Only grammar schools, wholly selective on entry, come close. If you can afford a house in the right catchment area, if you can tutor a child for entry, they too are wonderful schools, so good and so desirable it\u2019s a disgrace there are fewer than 170 in the country, with almost a third of them in Kent.
\nBut I digress: the grades. There was a time when you could actually celebrate a mixed bag of GCE O and A levels, which usually gave a fair reflection of your academic strengths and weaknesses, often suggesting a broadly arts or science bias, polymaths with uniform As being fairly rare. And that was OK. I know very senior doctors who attended top universities having \u201cscraped in with a couple of Cs\u201d at A level. Those days are, of course, gone. Whatever else exams do, they no longer display your strengths and weaknesses. If you\u2019re even reasonably bright, the expectation is straight As, preferably with stars, across the board. Exams which used to be deeply mysterious affairs have been made formulaic and passable, as in a GCSE English lit paper requiring study of a dozen poems, clean copies provided in the exam room, instead of a hundred to learn and no comfort-blanket text book in the exam itself. (Sorry \u2013 a personal hobby-horse still causing me apoplexy.) So exams are now constructed to offer no old-fashioned evidence of difference in interest or application. Straight A*s are possible and therefore expected, and it will be surely hard to turn the clock back \u2013 viz new maths GCSEs recently proposed but returned to sender because considered too hard.
\nIndependent schools have our present exams completely taped. If exams have been made do-able for the least able, the most able or the best taught or both will harvest the stars. Short-term destination: the best universities. Long-term destination: the top of a professional tree. Independent education is a ladder to giddy heights.
\nIt is, of course, also more than that: the things you do and the people you meet are also vital. The extent of the extracurricular programme, the rubbing shoulders with people going generally in your direction \u2013 up \u2013 but in different, sometimes related fields \u2013 these are the icing on the examination cake, to mix a few metaphors.
\nResearch indicates that being connected matters for success in this world. Check out the \u2018small world\u2019 experiments, the \u2018pass the parcel\u2019 tests measuring degrees of connectivity, with participants asked to forward a parcel to someone whom they did not know and with very few details, starting \u2013 obviously \u2013 with people whom they did know. In some cases it was only a couple of stops from first sender to addressee. The more connected people were, the more people they knew in disparate fields, the faster the parcels\u2019 progress. There has long been a derogatory name for it in Britain: the old school tie.
\nBut it\u2019s exactly what today\u2019s discerning parent wants: contacts. Friends who will ultimately be in high or faraway places, possibly both. You get posted to Hong Kong? Great to have someone there with whom you went to school \u2013 doors will open, entry is comfortable. There is more to education than the grades.
\nIf all of the above is a truth universally acknowledged, then no wonder independent schools have had such a stunning year. Recession? What recession? Total numbers at ISC schools this year: 517,113. Brilliant. Up from 511,928 last year. Even more impressive, boarding numbers up to 70,642, their highest since 2003. After years of fairly \u2018steady state\u2019, boarding is growing again and is a vibrant, attractive and viable part of what the independent sector offers the world.
\nWe have grown accustomed to the growth in numbers in the sixth forms of independent schools: understandably parents fund two years of fees more easily than five or seven, and the \u2018small classes, expert teaching\u2019 recipe for exam success at A level is priceless. But if you are new to a school in the sixth form, you are more likely to be a boarder \u2013 6,870 of them \u2013 than a day pupil, of whom there were 5,003. Students and parents alike are seeing boarding as a valuable stepping stone to the full independence of university. Boarding, you might say, is not just about the grades, it\u2019s about the whole life.
\nFor some years, international students have been seen as the life-blood of boarding. British parents were increasingly deterred by climbing prices, yes, but also by a growing perception that boarding was a bizarre and alien practice. What British parents debated about, Chinese parents grabbed as soon as they were free to do so, equipped with an important cultural difference pointed out to me by the director of the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office: \u201cYou British \u2013 you hold on to your children! I do not understand it! In China, if it is a good thing for the child to go three thousand miles away at the age of seven to get the best education which will transform his life chances, a Chinese parent will move heaven and earth to make it possible \u2013 and a good prep school will get my child a scholarship to a top senior school \u2013 perhaps even Eton! It will save me money in the long run!\u201d
\nThere is no doubt that independent schools have taken the 21st century by storm: academically, they are out on their own; boarding schools, with statutory standards, regular inspection and CPD for boarding staff, professionals not amateurs, where the emotional and psychological welfare of students is as important as their physical health, have never been so good.
\nAnd as my Chinese friend declared: \u201cYes, an independent education looks expensive, but consider your child\u2019s future earning capacity \u2013 from which he or she will support your old age \u2013 and it\u2019s not a luxury at all, it\u2019s a bargain.\u201d
\n 
\nThis post originally appeared at http:\/\/ie-today.co.uk\/Article\/blooming-marvellous on 8 July 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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