6/1/2008 10:44:00 AM
The Sunday Times 1 June
The head teachers of Britain’s independent schools, gathering for their annual conference in central London this week, might be forgiven for feeling a little apprehensive. After years of doing as little as possible to provoke old Labour war cries, they have appointed a newly retired rear admiral as the public face of the Independent Schools Council, who has spent his first month loosing off broadsides. First, Chris Parry told the Commons schools select committee that the education world was beset by “cold war” thinking that had split the private and state sectors and that he found the poor quality of state schools near his Portsmouth home “offensive”. Then he tore into Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, as if she were a junior officer on his war-ship, attacking the “clumsy intrusion” of the government into nursery education and “discrimination” against independent providers. He has no regrets – indeed, he is more than happy to compound the ill feeling by denouncing the unsatisfactory response he received from Hughes’s officials as “petty and petulant”. So far, so good: according to one head teacher, Parry, 54, was chosen because schools realised they had failed to justify themselves and had been “totally outwitted” when the Charity Commission decreed they would have to do far more to help pupils from less affluent backgrounds. Parry’s role will be to promote loudly what he calls the independent sector’s “progressive, world-class” qualities and take on “residual chippi-ness” about independent education. The more confrontational tone will, many heads accept, be a gamble – one that could easily backfire. Sun Times
Lead Story | Independent/ Private Sector
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