Letter to The Independent 2 July 2007 presciently forecasting the credit crunch not that it got published of course. The occasion was another letter by a bunch of lamebrain private school heads (coincidentally including an ex-headmistress of mine who did not reciprocate the deep love and intense respect I secretly harboured for her as it happens).
Incidentally I contribute the occasional blog to 'The Telegraph' on their financial crunch stories under my own name 'William Boyd' or monniker 'GC' (for example here). Basically I blame it all on the hedge funds and predict a 30% drop in house prices over the next year or so. Usual stuff thus but do bear in mind I've got serious form here.
Added 31n January 2009: Today it is widely reported in newspapers that the government plans to offer failing independent schools status as academies i.e. effectively fund them in return for certain commitments such as teaching the core National Curriculum and doing away with selection.
Thus schools designed for motivated and achieving children from high-income families are to be saved by a system designed for the poorest underprivileged children.
It is easy to predict these new schools will fail to reach the basic educational standards of their state counterparts. Even if their staff are capable of responding to their new intake, and there is every reason to suppose they will in general not, they will not in general be committed to their new tasks. Schools that have in recent years essentially funtioned as kindergartens for the banking elite will not rise well to the challenge of educating and socialising children from low-income families. Inevitably discipline standards will be poor in these new acadamies and standards will plummet.
We bailed out the banks because we had no choice other than to do so. We should not be bailing out failed independent schools and they should be allowed to fail without what will inevitably be a massive influx of taxpayers' money desperately needed elsewhere and not least to support low-income families whose basic educational standards were in any case guaranteed in most areas by successful state education.
Not difficult to detect the real agenda behind proposals so far put forward to weather and cope with the financial crisis and that is to preserve and protect our prosperous few in the pious hope of a return to more or less normality and without proper regard to the hardships of the many who will have to pay for it and for at least an entire generation (ten to twenty years or more) in the future.
It is shameful and short-sighted because whatever happens there will be no return, both metaphorically and literally, to business as usual
Notice that the government is now finally committed to providing broadband access for every household in the UK by 2012. Taken in conjunction with another commitment to provide all schoolchildren with computers we finally reach what is suggested in my letter but as I write this program should have been put in place at least five years ago if we were to remain competitive in the global market.
Letters Editor
The Independent
191 Marsh Wall
London
E14 9RS
2 July 2007
In gyro non veritas
Dear Madam or Sir,
As good as any an early indicator of the expected economic downturn is perhaps to be discovered in the new found enthusiasm of some part of the independent schools sector to throw open its portals to the more socially mobile sort of punter (Wider access to the best schools, Letters 30 June). The housing market is not the only game in town to sense a chill wind blowing in when interest rates intrepidly head out again for the frozen North.
The best independent schools will indeed survive but this time round let’s hope that the not-so-good ones are constrained to take their fair chance in the market and are not as before artificially sustained by some re-spun version of the Assisted Places Scheme or whatever innovative idea it is that your correspondents have in mind.
Their notion that independent schools somehow of themselves selflessly save the global sum of things for us by securing and sustaining the standard of science, engineering, maths and languages in our schools and universities is obviously self-serving drivel as well as not a little doolally and very much in the grand Brit tradition of independent schooling but further not worth our notice.
However a measure that might well indeed do much for our future competitiveness in the coming global reckoning would be to ensure that each of our schoolchildren has a take-back-home laptop with broadband access. A little plausible calculation suggests this might cost the Exchequer some one half billion pounds annually or the equivalent of about 25 Eton College’s worth of assisted places.
Now that really would be to the public benefit and money well spent.
Yours sincerely,
William Reid Boyd
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