Sir, Christine Blower is right to point out that the expectation of a good education, giving rise to a good start in life, is an aspiration the majority would support (“Should private schools remain charities?”, Oct 10). However, the argument she follows is unbalanced and, dare I say, political.

The success of private education in this country is not achieved at the expense of the state educational system. Quite the contrary, the failure of the latter is probably the single most important factor in the decision many parents make, at a considerable sacrifice to themselves, to educate their children privately.

Perhaps Ms Blower should concentrate her attention on trying to persuade our appointed politicians that the “one size fits all” approach to education cannot produce anything but mediocre results. Failure to endow teachers with sensible and appropriate statutory disciplinary powers, and the absurdity of the political correctness practised in many parts of the system, condemns our children to a future for which they are not properly trained.

John Evans

Marlborough, Wilts

Sir, Thanks to the abolition of selective education the state system is not the system of choice for those who wish their children to get the best education possible. Leading figures such as Diane Abbott have sent their children to independent fee-paying schools.

English parents who send their children to fee-paying schools are, in the majority of cases, higher-rate taxpayers who already pay significant levels of taxes. By choosing to pay for their child’s education out of after-tax income they are saving the State money that would otherwise pay to educate that child.

Based on a rough number of 400,000 UK children in independent schools, and an average state expenditure of £9,000 per pupil, the saving to the Exchequer is £3.6 billion a year.

Keith Morris

Stroud, Glos

Sir, I wholeheartedly agree with Christine Blower’s comments when she said that “a good education should be available to all”. It is exactly for this reason that I took my daughter out of the state sector and sent her to a local independent grammar school.

The fact was that the State could not offer the said good level of education. My daughter’s school has pupils from a cross-section of the local community — some from affluent backgrounds and some from single-parent families living on council estates.

Unlike many of the local state schools, it is ethnically and religiously diverse and therefore not “socially divisive”, as Ms Blower suggests.

My daughter comes from a professional middle-income family (I am a nurse manager in the NHS), as do many of her fellow pupils, whose parents have made significant sacrifices to ensure that their children receive a rounded, high-quality education. This hardly typifies the “children of the rich”, that Ms Blower describes.

While I exercised my choice to educate my daughter independently, I am still expected to help to fund a state-school system that fails to provide a good education. Instead of criticising the independent schools we should be learning from them and understanding why they succeed.

Michael Kirk

Rochdale

Explore Letters

• Feedback