Dubai-based firm plans to make high-class private schooling affordable for ‘huge swaths’ of the British middle classes

A for-profit company is setting up private schools that claim to offer the same quality education as top public schools but for half the price.

GEMS Education, based in Dubai, intends to open six fee-paying day schools for boys and girls aged three to 18 in towns and cities across England over the next two years.

The company plans to charge parents between £8,000 and £12,000 a year – about half or a third of the price of some of the country’s leading public schools.

Sending a non-boarding teenager to Millfield in Somerset costs £19,500 a year, while King’s College School in south-west London charges £17,520.

Mark Labovitch, chief executive officer of GEMS for the UK, Europe and Africa, said “huge swaths” of the British middle classes were keen for the opportunity to send their children to private schools, but could not afford what was on offer. Private school fees had risen well ahead of inflation, he said.

Fees for non-boarding pupils shot up by 27% in UK private schools between 2007 and 2011, according to data from the Independent Schools Council (ISC). Fees for boarders rose by 25%. Last year, average boarding fees were £25,152 a year, while day fees were £11,208.

Labovitch said fees had financed a race to upgrade facilities at private schools.

Dulwich College, in south London, has its own boat house on the Thames, while Millfield has two 18-hole golf courses.

Dr Martin Stephen, GEMS’ director of education for the UK and a former high master of St Paul’s School, said independent schools were “obsessed with doing things themselves”. “Do you, as a school, buy your own boat house or do you go to the local rowing club and do a deal with them? It obviously makes sense to do a deal with the local rowing club,” he said.

The company’s new private schools will be designed to suit couples who both have busy careers. Parents will be able to drop their children at school before breakfast and pick them up after rush-hour.

The schools will also have a doctor’s surgery on site.

Their location has not yet been finalised, but Labovitch said there were parts of the country that were “under-served” by the number of private schools they had. In some areas, parents either had to give up on the idea of sending their children to private schools or take them on “very complex daily commutes”, he said. “This causes great inconvenience to working parents.”

Some 45% of the UK’s fee-paying schools are based in London or the south-east, data from the ISC shows. Wales and the East Midlands have just 18 and 63 private schools respectively, while the south-east has 361 and Greater London 191.

However, the headteacher of Brighton College, which charges up to £18,675 a year for non-boarders, warned against what he said was a “cut-price education”.

Richard Cairns said independent schools managed to attract “outstanding teachers … by offering enhanced terms and conditions and smaller class sizes”. “These cost money and, inevitably, this is reflected in higher fees. Any school that thinks it can stint on teachers’ salaries and class sizes while still offering a first-class education is kidding itself,” he said.

He also questioned the wisdom of launching “cut-price” private schools in the current economic climate. “All the evidence suggests parents are tending to send their children to well-established schools with a strong academic track record and firm financial foundations. They don’t want to enrol their children in a school only to find it going bust a term later,” he said.

Kenneth Durham, the headteacher of University College School in Hampstead, north London, said many existing private schools allowed pupils to turn up early and stay late and provided regular “medicals”.

Labovitch said his company, which runs 100 schools worldwide, was still considering how it might devise entrance requirements for the new schools.

GEMS already runs 10 schools in the UK, but these were mainly acquired by the company, rather than purpose built by it.

What the new private schools promise to offer

• The schools will cost between £8,000 and £12,000 a year.

• Each will have a doctor’s surgery on site.

• Parents will be able to drop their children off before breakfast and pick them up after the evening rush-hour.

• The schools will have an international perspective, and emphasise team sports and traditional subjects.

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Last year’s riots proved that the schools in our most deprived areas need leaders with drive and high expectations

Those who took part in the riots last August were overwhelmingly young and from disadvantaged backgrounds. Half of those who appeared in court were under 21, and three times more likely to be entitled to free meals when they were at school.

The sad truth is that these are the very young people most likely to attend a weak school and receive a substandard education. This is not acceptable any more. If we don’t give more of our young people a good education, then more will end up in jail, and more communities will fracture. If we don’t give our young people the skills they need for employment, their communities can’t thrive.

Let’s be honest. We don’t have a good enough schools system yet. Almost a third of the schools in England were not judged to be good by Ofsted at their last inspection. Three thousand schools, educating a million children, were judged “satisfactory” at both their last two inspections. Previous chief inspectors have identified the same problem of too much stubbornly satisfactory, mediocre provision, yet we haven’t made enough progress.

So what about some solutions? We need to do something different, which is brave and radical. That’s why I have made clear my intention to do away with the false label of “satisfactory” and replace it with a clear statement that a school “requires improvement”. There will be greater clarity about what the school needs to do to improve, and faster re-inspection to check on progress. I want to set a clear expectation that a school requiring improvement will do so rapidly, or find itself in special measures.

We know it can be done in the most difficult circumstances. My former school, Mossbourne Academy, has four in 10 children on free school meals; 30% on the special educational needs register; and 38% of children with English as a second language. It now achieves results much better than the national average and sends pupils to Oxbridge – not because of a bright new building, but because of good systems and structures, good teaching, and staff who work hard and make no excuses for failure. The school often acts as a surrogate parent, providing wraparound care, enrichment and support for pupils who don’t get enough of this at home. And I’m proud to say no pupil at Mossbourne, as far as I am aware, was caught up in last summer’s problems.

Of course, there are many schools like Mossbourne. But they all share some crucial features: a rigorous approach to improving the quality of teaching, and a relentlessness in the pursuit of improvement. They have leaders who drive up the performance of staff. They make no excuses, and they have high expectations of every single pupil. So shouldn’t we have high expectations of every single school? We know what works, for schools as well as pupils.

Last year alone 85 schools serving the most deprived communities in our society were judged to be providing outstanding education. If they can do it in these challenging circumstances there is absolutely no reason why other schools in more prosperous areas cannot. And before someone writes in to argue that supposedly “it’s all very well if you have the extra focus or resources of academy status”, let me be clear: the vast majority of these schools are not academies. They are simply schools with heads and staff focused on the right things, striving every day to provide the best possible education for their young people.

This is not about being provocative: it’s about doing the right thing for pupils. Every time heads and others make excuses for failure, it makes it harder to sustain the drive for improvement in the most challenging schools. Every time a substandard teacher is left unchallenged, the most vulnerable pupils have their life chances diminished.

Teaching and headship is now a much better paid profession that needs to remind itself of its core mission and sense of moral purpose. Unless we have this sense of vocation – a word we don’t hear enough of these days – we won’t drive up standards in the most difficult circumstances.

I’m really clear about my mission as chief inspector. I’m also aware that some of what we need to do to transform our education system will be uncomfortable. So be it: we need a step change. The prize is a significantly better education system: one that gives more young people the start they need and deserve, and ultimately creates stronger communities for all of us.

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Two-shift day and use of empty Woolworths stores among ideas to cope with surge in primary age pupils

A council in east London is drawing up plans to convert an empty Woolworths store into a classroom and teach children in two shifts, in emergency measures across Britain to cope with a dramatic increase in primary school age children.

More than 450,000 places in schools in England are needed by 2015, government figures show – partly the result of a baby boom in the past decade.

Schools have begun using every available space, including converting a caretaker’s hut into a classroom and a broom cupboard into an office, and moving into council-owned office space.

The problem is most acute in London. In Barking, the number of primary age children is predicted to rise from 19,000 to more than 27,000 by 2015. In addition to the empty Woolworths, the council is looking into leasing a vacant MFI building.

It is also looking at “split shift sessions”, where schools would take one group of pupils from 8am until 2pm and then a second from 2pm until 7pm. The shifts would double capacity although the council concedes parents would have great difficulty accomodating the shift patterns.

Rocky Gill, Barking and Dagenham council’s cabinet member for finance and education, said “detailed plans” for shifts were being drawn up. “In two years’ time we will have expanded all our primary schools. So we’re going to have no choice but to move into split shift education at both primary and secondary level.”

Gill feared the impact on families with children in different shifts could be “disastrous”.

The demographic pressure is particularly acute in London, due to inward migration and increasing numbers of people no longer leaving the capital when they have children.

Ripple primary school in Barkinghad 4.5 applications per place last year, and is growing from three forms to five in each year after expanding into a nearby council-owned office site. By 2015 it expects to have 1,200 pupils, making it one of the biggest primaries in the country.

Initially, the school shared the new space with office workers. The headteacher, Roger Mitchell, said: “It was interesting sharing the building – we were working in the very best way we possibly could.

“It didn’t really become my school until the end of February, beginning of March last year, when those people finally moved out to new accommodation. It’s nice just to have my school now.”

The school’s expansion originally has a budget of £4.4m, but this was halved when the coalition came to power. Mitchell is also seeking an extra £3.2m to fund a permanent solution for the original school site, so 120 reception-aged children will not have to be taught in outdoor huts.

“It’s not nice to have some of your youngest children taught in outside classrooms, they need a proper learning environment – one that’s not too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer,” he said.

While the council’s strategy has been to expand school building where possible, the authority has also been exploring the possibility of commercial space.

“We’ve got an empty MFI building and an empty Woolworths; we’re looking at speaking to those freeholders and purchasing that space or leasing it,” Gill said.

Focusing on the needs of individual children becomes a sharper challenge as schools get bigger. Thelma McGorrighan, headteacher of Manor infants’ school, which in September set up another three entry classes at a different site, Manor Longbridge, said: “You have to make your presence felt. Parents have to see you.

“First thing in the morning and at the end of the day, you’re out there with the children – greeting the children, dealing with issues outside, keeping the parents well informed.”

Parental campaigns are springing up against the expansion of existing primaries, driven by concern that standards will slip if schools become too big.

In Haringey, proposals to expand two schools, Belmont infants and Belmont junior, face resistance. School governors at the infants’ school argue that the plans are “likely to jeopardise a successful school”.

Victoria Harwood, a writer whose four-year-old son is a pupil at Belmont infants, said: “It’s a grade 1 Ofsted school. It does well because it’s so small. It’s a small, intimate community school. That would change if it expands. If they try and jam-pack more kids in, I’m convinced that standards would drop.”

The shortage of primary school places is a sore point for the government. Last November the education secretary, Michael Gove, confirmed that an extra £500m would be allocated to more than 100 local authorities experiencing “the most severe need”, while in the autumn statement the chancellor, George Osborne, announced a further £600m for local authorities with the greatest pressure on school places. He also announced an extra £600m for free schools.

This prompted Labour to accuse Gove of lavishing money on a “pet project” rather than spending the entire £1.2bn easing the pressure on primaries.

While London faces the greatest challenge, schools elsewhere are feeling the strain. In Manchester, which will see a predicted rise from just over 37,000 primary school pupils to more than 46,000 by 2015, a headteacher said her schools were “bursting at the seams”.

Lisa Vyas, headteacher of Ladybarn primary school and executive headteacher of Green End primary school, said: “Every single little space is used. We’ve even had to transform a little storage cupboard into the business manager’s office.

“At the moment, because of the knock on effect of the dinners taking longer to serve, I now can’t provide every child a gym and dance lesson because there’s not enough time in the hall.

“I can’t meet the PE curriculum needs because there’s not enough hours in the day.”

An education department spokesman said: “We’re creating thousands more places to deal with the impact of soaring birth rates on primary schools. We’re more than doubling targeted investment at areas facing the greatest pressure on numbers , more than £4bn in the next four years.”

“We are building free schools, and letting what are the most popular schools expand so they can meet demand from parents. We are intervening to drive up standards in the weakest schools, those with thousands of empty places nationally, so they can become places where parents actually want to send their children.”

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In east London, the best jobs aren’t going to local people. A new school aims to solve that.

Youth unemployment, over a million now, is the most painful feature of the recession; a breach of the promise one generation makes to the next. But it’s not new – unemployment among the young was rising even in the tail end of the boom years.

There’s a deeper change going on here. The brutal truth is that in the 21st century, Britain has no jobs for young people without qualifications.

There’s a real shortage of first jobs for young people with all levels of education. Only 6% of employers offer jobs to 16 year old school leavers and only around 10% offer jobs to 17 and 18-year-olds fresh from school or college, according to 2009 data held by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. Increasingly, the jobs which are on offer to young people are not particularly good ones – they are more likely to be temporary or part-time, and they are less likely to receive training than older people.

But what about the future? Two of the most successful sectors of the economy – professional and scientific jobs, and IT – employ a below average proportion of young workers. Both of these sectors are significant in employment terms – employing around 1.9m and 1m people respectively. If we’re going to get more young people into work, here’s where the growth could come from.

Here’s a puzzle: the employment rate in Hackney, east London, has been rising over the past three years to nearly 71%, which is above the national average. But Hackney’s unemployment rate has barely been whittled away. Meanwhile, the percentage of the borough’s population with degrees rose dramatically in the past decade, from 33% to 46%. (Nationally, the figure is 25%).

In other words, the jobs aren’t going to local people. There’s been an influx of graduates which has transformed Hackney but left untouched a layer of young people without a future.

Even after years of investment, thousands of teenagers across the country are leaving school without the basics. School league tables published by the government last week highlighted the fact that just under 60% of 16-year-olds achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE including English and maths, in last summer’s exams.

Just 34% of those in care or on free school meals achieve this benchmark.

For those who fail to get these qualifications, the prospects are bleaker than ever.

How do we fix this? Improving school standards is part of the answer, but it’s obvious that there are thousands of young people who fail to be switched on by a traditional academic education.

One solution can be found in a new generation of vocational schools, backed by firms such as BlackBerry and Toshiba, which will open across England from September. The first of these schools, the JCB academy, opened in Staffordshire in 2010.

The first in the capital will open in Hackney this autumn. And while the University Technical College scheme is the brainchild of the former Tory education secretary Lord Baker, the chairman of the Hackney project is a prominent figure on the left, Anthony Painter.

Education secretary Michael Gove has announced today that 13 more UTCs have been approved to open from September.

Hackney UTC is sponsored by Hackney community college, whose principal Ian Ashman sketched out to me how a “radical strategy of closing down schools” had transformed the borough’s GCSE results. But he believes this will now have diminishing returns.

“The strategy of doing more of the same has been successful but is not going to carry on being successful,” Ashman says.

“There are young people capable of being successful at 16, but who don’t at the moment because they’re not motivated by the academic programme.”

The problem in Hackney is not necessarily one of a lack of jobs, but a mismatch of skills. On the doorstep of the new UTC is Tech City, the cluster of tech and digital companies that began at ‘Silicon Roundabout’.

Health, and the way that technology is going to change healthcare is another source of potential growth. There are three hospitals in the vicinity; Barts, the Royal London, and Homerton.

Austerity means these workforces are unlikely to expand, but they will change shape as the way that health services are delivered changes – making greater use of remote diagnostics, for example.

But even in a bleak economic climate, employers say that they can’t recruit young people with the necessary hi-tech skills.

Annie Blackmore, who will be headteacher of the Hackney UTC, says: “What the UTC is doing is sitting down with these employers and saying: ‘what are your skills needs?’”

Partners including BT and Homerton hospital will help draw up specifications for the curriculum – and the the children’s schoolwork will include employer-led projects. The school day will be based on the working day, all part of channelling young people into work.

But equipping them with skills for work doesn’t mean that they should be pigeonholed, Blackmore says. After all, children will be 14 when they start.

Instead, they’ll be encouraged to do the core curriculum – GCSEs in English, maths, science, a humanity and a language – alongside a vocational qualification in either health, or information and creative technology.

There will be a strong “bias towards” the use of technology in class, and students will be expected to blog on what they’re doing in the curriculum.

That will be an essential preparation for the future.

“They’re going to be working freelance,” Ashman says. “The way in which they’ll find work is through Linked In, Twitter.”

The new school’s immediate challenge is to find 100 pupils, to start in September – all of whom are currently at other schools.

The UTCs won’t be selective. To start with, Blackmore is working with schools to identify students who might, as she puts it “benefit from a change of curriculum”.

Though based in Hackney, its catchment area extends across a swath of east London. It is wide because its envisaged that the UTC won’t recruit large numbers of students from any one school.

But how will the new school ensure that it isn’t seen simply as a second choice – a second class education fit for someone else’s children?

Blackmore says: “I don’t want schools to think this is a programme for students they don’t want, don’t necessarily want to keep in their schools – the curriculum will be challenging.” The aim is to rercuit children “who are capable of succeeding but are switched off by what’s on offer.”

Painter advocates a “hybrid and high-quality academic, technical, personal and work-linked curriculum” that should exist alongside the traditional academic route.

He says: “Student strengths are varied and so should the education system be: status and quality however must be universal.”

The question, Painter says, is whether its children from Hackney who benefit from the new opportunities on their doorstep.

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A rose-tinted view of the past is gaining currency, but my 80s comprehensive didn’t leave me the victim of a failed experiment

Grammar school nostalgics are having a moment. On a BBC documentary this month, Michael Portillo described the decision to turn his old school, Harrow County, into a comprehensive as “vandalism”. A forthcoming book of grammar school memoirs, School Songs and Gymslips, includes a piece by the home secretary, Theresa May.

Meanwhile, unless Labour persuades the Liberal Democrats to oppose changes to the admissions code, England’s 164 state grammars will soon be free to expand at will.

Everyone enjoys reminiscing about their school days, and it seems plenty of those who went to grammars had a splendid time. But a rose-tinted view of the past is gaining currency, its glory days of achievement invariably contrasted with the swamp of comprehensive mediocrity that supposedly came next.

I went to Hampstead comprehensive in the 1980s, its very name encapsulating what many on the right of the education debate most despise. The education secretary, Michael Gove, used a speech this month to denounce the “bigoted backward bankrupt ideology of a leftwing establishment”, blaming it for a culture of failure in some schools. Teacher Katharine Birbalsingh, who wrote a book satirising the comprehensive she once taught in and now leads a free school project in Lambeth, has made middle-class liberals her particular bugbear, blaming them for propping up a system she believes failed everyone else.

Nowadays, the reality of Alastair Campbell’s infamous “bog-standard” comprehensive is taken as read. None of the major parties believes we should return to a one-size-fits-all model of schooling in England (Wales and Scotland are different). The argument is all about how we should vary the formula: academies, free schools, more selection?

Even those community schools that have hung on to comprehensive status and stuck with their local authority rather than striking out as independents, have mostly reintroduced uniforms, streaming and head boys and girls. Grammar, prefects, prizes and speech days are all back in vogue. Pre-comprehensive methods are seen as better. The 1960s generation are supposed to have got it wrong.

Governed by the inner London education authority and Greater London council until Margaret Thatcher abolished them both, Hampstead in the 1980s epitomised this discredited system. There were no streams for English or science. Classes were mixed-ability except in maths, while the GCSEs we were the first year to take did away with most exams. In history we learned about apartheid South Africa, and when I did a project on the Spanish civil war a teacher rumoured to belong to the Communist party arranged for me to interview two veterans of the International Brigades.

Competitive sports were deeply unfashionable, though a games teacher badgered a friend to join a running club. There were no school teams and very little extra-curricular activity of any sort except concerts, mainly because the teachers (though not the head of music) were often on strike. Once or twice we joined in and walked out.

The atmosphere of informality, of a generalised rebelliousness, spilled beyond the classroom walls. Teachers snogged sixth-formers on ski trips and teenagers bunked off. At weekends there were drinking, smoking and soft drugs – although all these, along with some underage sex, were probably no less frequent among pupils of nearby private schools.

That I, and others from similarly fortunate backgrounds who filled up to a third of the school’s places, did not all flunk out, is grist to the mill: You see! Leftie hypocrites! You worked the system and looked after yourselves but look what happened to the rest!

Comprehensives lacked rigour, did not care enough about standards, let working-class children down. This is the new orthodoxy, and there is some truth in it. Comprehensive campaigners are sometimes hamstrung by an unwillingness to admit past mistakes. GCSE results at Hampstead were not that good, though A-levels were better (today the school manages 83% with five A*-C grades at GCSE). Discipline was often feeble. Bright children from less well-off families probably needed extra help. My own best teacher then, now a deputy head, thinks mixed-ability teaching across the board was over the top.

But she believes the new system, whereby children in many schools are sorted by ability the moment they arrive, is equally mistaken: some of them take a year to adapt to the move. Education has become incredibly ideological, and having swung too far in one direction we are now lurching violently the other way.

The fuss made about Latin and the history syllabus by Gove and his supporters is ridiculous. Four-year-olds do not need to wear ties.

Nobody needs to be told they are top or bottom of the class. More physics, chemistry and modern languages would be great, but the lack of British engineering expertise and the insular mindset that makes us poor linguists have deeper causes than the preference for media studies of a bunch of leftwing teachers.

At least one of the teachers at my school was an obstinate ideologue. A handful were not good enough and should have been retrained or replaced. But many were excellent, better than some who taught the privately educated friends I have made since.

Writer Zadie Smith is the star of a handful of Hampstead alumni who have done extremely well. Others were undoubtedly failed by the school. When I went looking last year for my old classmates, curious to know what they thought about Hampstead on its 50th anniversary, I discovered the most vulnerable boy in my form died tragically young, while another who was always in trouble ended up in jail.

Could a different school have rescued these two? Maybe. But the contemporaries I did track down did not sound like the victims of a failed experiment. I spoke to a carpenter, a doctor, a taxi driver, a policewoman, a full-time mother, a charity worker, a lecturer and a telephone operator among others. A couple complained of a lack of motivation. Several described their education as hit-and-miss. But all, even those who did not excel academically, spoke warmly of the school. All felt the essence of the comprehensive experience – all sorts of children going to school together – was of lasting benefit.

They may not be typical. But talking to them reminded me that schools do not only turn out grades. They turn out people.

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The Swedish company given the go-ahead last week to run a Suffolk school is expecting to make £5m profits this year. It is set to open the floodgates to an unprecedented level of commercial involvement in British learning under the education reforms spearheaded by Michael Gove

Giving a key speech last September at a community college in south London on the future of free schools, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, was clear. “Let me reassure you: yes to greater diversity; yes to more choice for parents. But no to running schools for profit, not in our state-funded education sector.”

The announcement was trumpeted as a Liberal Democrat victory over the Tory “obsession” with market mechanisms. This weekend, that reassurance looks a little hollow.

Last week the education secretary, Michael Gove, gave the green light to Breckland Middle School in Suffolk to be renamed IES Breckland and run under a £21m, 10-year contract by Swedish for-profit firm Internationella Engelska Skolan (IES). The introduction of a profit-seeking company into the management of the school is allowed because of a technicality: the founder of the school is a charitable trust that has decided to outsource the entirety of the management to a fee-charging company – whose global business has a turnover of £60m a year, earning profits of £5m, according to analysis by the Adam Smith Institute.

The development is set to open the floodgates. Today the Observer can reveal that for-profit firms, encouraged by what is happening at Breckland, now plan to run more schools in what promises to be a watershed in British education. The Observer has learned that:

■ Two Swedish companies, IES and Kunskapsskolan – a similarly sized Swedish firm that already runs three academies on a not-for-profit basis – now aspire to manage chains of between five and 10 free schools on a fee-earning basis to create economies of scale.

■ Wey Education, one of the unsuccessful bidders for the Breckland contract, told the stock exchange in December that a market opportunity brought about by “the deconstruction of the education function within local authorities” offers a clear potential to “make a substantial return to investors and improve education in the UK”.

■ The same firm, run by Zenna Atkins, the former chair of Ofsted, hopes to make an “impact in a positive way” on the lives of 250,000 children over the next five years, while Wey’s broker forecasts a turnover of £17.5m by 2014 and a £9.9m “bottom line”, through providing services in the UK and abroad.

■ A shares prospectus for that firm spells out that “current teaching methods, allocation of resources, wastage and inefficiencies create [an] opportunity” to deliver education at a lower cost and provide a financial return.

A senior Lib Dem source has admitted to the Observer: “We didn’t foresee this.” But while it is clear that profit-making companies are now set to play a key role in the UK’s education system – via the back door, critics claim – the question is whether that is a bad thing.

It is undoubtedly true that the private sector has long been a part of the fabric of the state school system. Under Labour, the rationale – largely borrowed from America and its philanthropic culture – was that private money could revitalise a cash-starved system. The private sector invested in schools, took over the provision of local authority services and built and managed buildings through the controversial private finance initiative. The charitable sector was even allowed to manage state-funded academy schools, a limited programme at that stage designed to help failing schools or those in underprivileged areas to raise their standards.

In a handful of cases – for example, Turin Grove school in Edmonton, north London, and the Priory school in Taunton, Somerset, a school for pupils with special educational needs – profit-making companies Edison Learning and Lilac Sky Schools were given short-term £1m contracts and permission to take a profit if they managed to lift the failing institutions. The results were impressive and the schools improved.

However, this time there is a difference in scale thanks to the extent of Gove’s reforms: 45% of all state maintained secondary schools are now academies or about to convert, and there are now 1,529 academies in England, compared with 200 when the coalition came to power. In these changed circumstances, the involvement of the for-profit sector – taking advantage of the breaking down of local authority control, supervision and services – is set to explode.

And despite Clegg’s rhetoric, there is ample evidence that Gove is supporting such a revolution, not least by establishing a new government “framework” of companies pre-authorised to offer project management and educational services for a fee.

James Grew from Policy Exchange, the thinktank at which Gove was formerly chairman, says he will publish research next month that challenges the opposition to profit-making in the schools sector, citing efficiencies and results enjoyed abroad.

Those involved certainly insist they have philanthropic aims and that the money they may make is an irrelevance when measured against the benefits they hope to bring.

Atkins, who earns £100,000 a year in her role at Wey Education, says she is working with seven potential founders of free schools and hopes to help them to manage their establishments once they are set up – at least in part because of the daunting nature of the task. Parents and governors, she says, having created an academy, “may realise they don’t have the capacity and they don’t have the risk appetite, because you have to have a big one to take everything on their shoulders and they want to contract that out – that’s my business”.

She is aware of the resentment in some quarters against the for-profit sector’s involvement in schools, but believes that the issue of money-making is a “red herring” because any profit is only taken when efficiencies are made. The only judgment, she insists, should be whether the model works.

“Profit becomes a real issue if you control price,” she said. “If you don’t control price, as you don’t in this instance, profit is irrelevant because the price is fixed.

“The only thing that is relevant is quality. You need to judge schools on how they operate, not on whether the operator is making 5% profit, because you don’t care.

“If that 5% profit is making a far better school than one that is not making a profit or is making a bloody loss, you are interested in quality.”

She added: “There are real risks with the private sector getting involved in state school education and there are real opportunities. And I think the trick is backing the right private sector organisation.”

Steve Bolingbroke, managing director of Kunskapsskolan, added: “I have a problem with the phrase ‘for-profit’ that is used. I don’t think we or anyone else in the market is interested in slicing 10% of the cost of a school. That is just a cost cut. We are interested in investing in schools and if we get good results and get lots of people to come to them then we might leverage a return on our investment.

“And the way to make that return is to make sure the schools are full, popular and run a number of them to ensure you make efficiencies across the schools.”

Jodie King, the UK manager at IES, says her company will be scrupulously fair in assessing the fees it will charge for Breckland, and that IES is in talks with a further two free school groups over running their institutions for fees – but the firm has greater ambitions.

“It would be nice to go to one trust who, if they had 10 schools across the UK, we could go through procurement to have those 10 schools,” she said. “It is what we are exploring.”

But, while being insistent that her company is in the sector for the right reasons, she hints at the dangers of the new model, which sets up autonomous schools run by for-profit companies competing for pupils through results.

“It is awful, but we kind of have to accept failure more than we do at the moment. So if a school does fail because of its results, then that is right that it should fail – it should not be kept going at all costs. Yes, it is awful at that time for that year group, but surely the next year will be better for them rather than saying we are going to forsake the next five years of that child’s education. So if there is an awful company out there, then they should be allowed to fail and then someone else can take over.”

It is the consequences of failure on a child’s education that concern critics of the for-profit sector. Christine Keates from the teachers’ union NASUWT says she is so suspicious of the government’s agenda that she believes detailed figures released last week on the revenues of state schools in England were merely designed to tempt private companies looking for investments.

She said: “They are publishing financial information about schools which is supposed to give parents choice, but actually all of this is about getting the public sector, and education in particular, in a position where it is an attractive option to private companies in terms of taking over and running schools, or in terms of providing services.

“Our concern is that a lot of the private companies coming in, particularly now the secretary of state has said they can be profit-making, are completely changing the ethos of why people get involved in education. If you are in the private sector, you are looking for a contract that is going to maximise your profits. When it is no longer financially lucrative, who picks up the fallout from that?”

The Department for Education disputes Keates’s claims over the statistics. Of Breckland School, a spokesman said that “the free school’s charitable trust has decided that it wants to draw on the expertise of an established education company, with a proven track record of running good schools. This is not the same as the free-school proposers making a profit themselves.”

He added: “The charitable trust will manage the contract and hold the contractor to account, and will be fully responsible and in control over what happens in the school.”

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UK Green Building Council and Aldersgate Group urge Education Secretary not to scrap BREEAM requirement for new schools

Businesses have made a last-ditch attempt to prevent the Education Secretary scrapping a rule requiring new schools to meet the globally recognised BRE Environmental Assesment Method (BREEAM) green building standard, after a spending review report argued the scheme was too bureaucratic.

The Aldersgate Group and UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) this week penned a joint letter to Education Secretary Michael Gove, warning they were “deeply concerned” by a document that said schools should no longer be required to adhere to BREEAM standards.

The recommendation formed part of a review into capital spending by the Department for Education (DfE) by Sebastian James, which minister are expected to decide the results of shortly.

Under the previous government’s Building Schools for the Future programme, new schools must meet or exceed the BREEAM ‘very good’ standard, covering areas such as energy management and use, health and well-being, pollution, transport, land use, materials, and water.

But James’ review said DfE should drop this rule because BREEAM had become too bureaucratic for schools and local authorities.

Instead of helping schools to become more energy efficient, James warned the standard may actually be hindering local authorities from choosing the right tools to build sustainable schools.

“BREEAM has been criticised for being very prescriptive, providing incredibly detailed guidance on matters such as cycling facilities (eight pages long) or of the ecology allowed on site (25 pages long),” said James.

A DfE spokesman told BusinessGreen that it had not consulted on the recommendation to scrap the BREEAM requirement as it had already been “broadly accepted”.

“We consulted on the overall recommendations from the Capital Review in July [but] some of the specific recommendations, such as the one for BREEAM, were not specifically covered by the consultation as we broadly accepted them and indicated that we would work with stakeholders over the coming months with a view to practical implementation,” he said.

“We are currently considering the outstanding recommendations in the Capital Review, including the recommendation on BREEAM, and will respond shortly.”

But on Monday, Paul King, chief executive of the UKGBC, and Peter Young, chairman of the Aldersgate Group, wrote to Gove, making a last-ditch attempt to save the BREEAM requirement before a decision is announced.

“It’s a rather rearguard action to desperately try and prevent Michael Gove doing something which would be anti-sustainability, anti-good design and anti-industry,” a UKGBC spokesman told BusinessGreen. “It’s last-minute intervention on something that hasn’t had any consultation.”

The groups argued that the cost of a school achieving an “excellent” BREEAM standard would be far outweighed by the resulting savings on energy bills. They also suggested that efforts should be made to adapt BREEAM to suit schools, rather than just drop it altogether.

“Clearly, there are improvements that could be made, but we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” they said.

King and Young also argued that scrapping the rule could increase confusion rather than reduce it because BREEAM is widely recognised in the construction industry and scrapping it would require firms to develop new sustainable building methods.

“Reneging on the commitment would also send a terrible message to UK industry, which frequently builds to BREEAM Excellent standards in commercial developments so they can be occupied by a public sector anchor-tenant,” they added.

The letter, which was also sent to the Prime Minister and other members of the Cabinet, warned that scrapping BREEAM would undermine the government’s pledge to become “the greenest ever”.

• Get the Guardian’s environment news on your iPhone with our new app. You can also join us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

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Michael Wilshaw, the new Ofsted chief, comes with a reputation as a ‘heroic’ head, but is he now just an instrument of government, unsympathetic to schools more challenging than his?

Walking through Mossbourne academy’s long, high, glass atrium you have to speak in whispers, for every classroom door is left open to reveal rows of neatly uniformed children, heads-down in concentration. You could literally hear a pen drop.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Hackney-based academy’s first principal and now England’s new chief inspector of schools, believes every school could be like this.

“There’s a ‘no excuses culture’ here,” he says. “We tell the youngsters and we tell the parents we don’t care really what background you’re from; it’s where you’re going that’s the most important issue.”

Six miles away, on the Isle of Dogs, Kenny Frederick, principal of George Green’s school, visibly bristles at Wilshaw’s name. This week’s league tables will show her school to be well behind Mossbourne on raw results – but they won’t show what she’s up against: the “contextual value-added” measure, which used to measure a school’s performance against social factors such as the numbers of pupils on free school meals, has been dropped.

Sometimes, Frederick says, her staff have to pick the nits from their pupils’ hair before they even try to teach them. She recently handed out dozens of alarm clocks to children who often need to leave for school before their unemployed parents have woken up. It’s not about excuses, she says. When ministers visit Mossbourne they talk as if it’s in a tough, tough area, but compared with the Isle of Dogs, Hackney’s actually pretty well-heeled. A third of the pupils at Mossbourne take free school meals – twice the national average – but that’s half the number at George Green’s.

“We want the best for our youngsters, but there are excuses,” Frederick says. “I have large numbers who would otherwise be in a special school – other schools won’t take them, and I think that’s morally wrong. I’m not going to refer to Mr Wilshaw’s school, though I used to work in that area …” she hesitates, clearly holding back. “Some areas, the children could be left out on the lawn and they’d do equally well because the parents will bring in tutors and so on.”

The new chief inspector of schools, who took up his post this month, certainly inspires strong emotions. The education secretary, Michael Gove, has described him as a “hero”, and the shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, has declared himself equally happy with the appointment.

Wilshaw has not set out to endear himself to teachers. Even before officially taking up his Ofsted post, he made a speech in which he said that in future a “satisfactory” rating by inspectors should be viewed as unsatisfactory, and that Ofsted should look at whether heads were being too generous to failing teachers when allocating performance-related pay.

A good head would never be loved by his or her staff, he added: “If anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you know you are doing something right.”

The reaction from teachers has been predictable: one internet poster compared Wilshaw to a South American dictator. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum,” remarked another.

Wilshaw’s appointment certainly signals interesting times ahead for schools, in particular, because his record as a headteacher appears impressive. His first headship was at St Bonaventure’s Roman Catholic school in Newham, which he transformed from a struggling school into an outstanding one. Mossbourne, too, has been held up as a shining example of excellence in an inner-city area.

Touring the academy, which opened in 2004, in a brand new building designed by Richard Rogers, Wilshaw carries himself with a gait that expresses ownership, that he’s the embodiment of the school – focused, rigorous. Rules matter here.

“Little things like insistence on uniform, pupils standing up when the teacher walks into the room are all important in giving structure to children’s lives,” he says. “We have a very long teaching day for some children – if they are falling behind we keep them back at the end of the day so that they can improve their qualifications.”

There’s no disputing that the strategy has paid off in terms of exam results. Eight out of 10 gained five or more A*-C grades at GCSE including English and maths last year –well above average. This year, 10 have been offered places at Cambridge.

Yet suspicions abound – could Mossbourne be attracting brighter pupils than other local schools? Certainly the academy has a wide catchment area, so it is likely to gain applicants from motivated families – currently 60% of its pupils come from within a kilometre of the school and 40% from further away. Its proposed admissions policy for 2013 entry reveals plans to increase the number from outside its immediate area to 50%, and to test and “band” pupils so its entrants reflect the national average spread of abilities. In an area where pupils’ test scores at age 11 are below that, this could give the school an advantage.

A visit to George Green’s highlights just how difficult it would be to create a system in which every school was a Mossbourne academy. In a London docklands area that’s been plagued by unemployment since the 1970s, George Green’s feels peripheral. Its buildings have been waiting for a facelift for years, and although it’s orderly, there’s a look about its large quotient of white, working-class pupils – a greyness of skin, shadows under the eyes – that says they’re not thriving. Frederick laughs when this is pointed out: “We joke about it when we go to sports matches in Hackney, because the boys there are so huge.”

Despite having nearly twice as many pupils on free school meals as Mossbourne, George Green’s GCSE results are close to the national average, with half gaining five A*-C grades including English and maths. And it, too, sometimes sends pupils to Oxbridge.

While Mossbourne may look like a school with a tough pupil population, five minutes in George Green’s says it isn’t. A small batallion of helpers in red jumpers nurtures and cajoles the pupils here.

“I feel very intimidated by this government, and I’m not a woman who’s easily intimidated,” she says. “I don’t think they understand what we’re up against, and I don’t think they want to. I don’t mind being challenged, all of us want to do really well, but I don’t want to be hit over the head all the time. If all I had to worry about was raising levels of attainment I’d be laughing.”

Conversations with leaders in the world of education about the new chief inspector of schools are revealing. A real sense of anger is mounting, yet most aren’t quite ready to express it publicly yet.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, couches her remarks in broad political terms – she’s due to have her first official meeting with Wilshaw later this week. After all, she says, chief inspectors never have easy relations with the teaching profession, nor should they. But she adds that last week’s announcement of an immediate inspection of Downhills, a Haringey primary school the government wants to force into academy status, leads to suspicion that Ofsted is now a political weapon.

“I think the domain we’re moving into now is of Ofsted being viewed by nobody as independent from the secretary of state. It’s now being seen by teachers not as an inspection system, but as an arm of government,” she says.

“Many of the pronouncements coming out of Ofsted seem to be absolutely equal to things Michael Gove has said. I think it’s bad for the chief inspector and I think it’s bad for public accountability.”

Yet Wilshaw is unrepentant – and it seems unlikely he’ll be gathering garlands from teachers any time soon. The government was right to drop the “contextual value-added” measure, introduced by Labour five years ago, from this week’s league tables, he says. Talk about social factors simply “entrenches mediocrity”.

“If you take into account ethnicity, free school meals and a whole range of other indicators, it can give the impression that you’re making excuses,” he says.

“The essential truths are that a poor leader runs a poor school; a good leader runs a good school. A good teacher can make a difference in a classroom; a poor teacher makes little or no difference. I think we know what makes a good school. We just need to make sure it happens on the ground now.”

• Fran Abrams will ask what difference schools really make to the lives of children from poor backgrounds on BBC Radio 4′s Analysis at 8.30pm on Monday 30 January

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Schools minister to remove incentive for secondary schools to ‘game’ league tables by focusing solely on achieving C grades

Secondary schools that fail to push bright children will be named and shamed in a bid to prevent comprehensives from manipulating the league table rankings, the schools minister has said.

Nick Gibb said he wanted to remove the incentive for schools to play the system by focusing only on pupils whose grades will affect their league table ranking.

Gibb said the tables would include additional information to expose schools who fail to push bright students who were capable of performing even better if they had better teaching.

In the reformed league tables, which will be published for the first time next week, parents will be able to compare schools based on the amount of progress made by the top pupils between 11 and 16.

“The way school league tables have evolved over the past two decades can encourage a degree of ‘gaming’ by some weaker schools, desperate to keep above the standard that would trigger intervention by Ofsted or the Department for Education,” Gibb writes in Saturday’s Telelgraph.

“But the purpose of performance tables must be to incentivise schools to raise standards and to enable parents to make informed decisions when choosing a school.”

Gibb said that since 1997 there had been a significant increase in the proportion of C grades awarded because weaker schools had been incentivised to focus on them. He said this meant students who might have been capable of getting As getting Bs, or E students who might be able to get Ds had been neglected.

The minister added: “We are determined to stamp out any incentives to ‘game’ the system whereby some schools focus just on those pupils who will affect their league table position. It is vital that all schools give every pupil the best chance to maximise their potential.

“We intend to make available data formerly kept secret in the Department for Education. For example, we want to show how well secondary schools educate those children who left primary school still struggling in the 3Rs. The new tables will have a column showing the proportion of such children who went on to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. We can then compare schools to see which are better at helping children who started from this low base.”

The figures will also highlight how well a secondary school educates pupils who joined them as high achievers and will show how well schools transform the chances of children from poorer backgrounds, Gibb said.

The data will also show how each school performs in the EBacc, the core academic subjects, and only the highest quality non-GCSE and vocational courses will be included in performance tables to remove any incentive for schools to put students on to courses which do little to help them progress, he added.

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Boarding Concern has been campaigning for several years about the psychosocial problems facing young children caused by early boarding. It has been an uphill struggle, because as George Monbiot points up (The British boarding school remains a bastion of cruelty, 16 January), the trauma of the privileged has little political purchase. We strongly welcome Monbiot’s call for the issue to get the public policy attention it deserves.

With the publication of Professor Schaverien’s paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy last year, and subsequent wide media coverage, there is a growing consensus that “boarding school syndrome” is a real consequence for many of those sent away to board at a primary school age. Our members, and others, can give testimony to the developmental harm done by premature separation from the security and intimate relationships of family life, which no institution can emulate.

In his final comments Monbiot points out what Boarding Concern has long known: that there are no official guidelines on an appropriate age to be sent off to boarding school. It is high time an expert panel comprising educationalists, psychotherapists, developmental psychologists and other relevant professionals was convened by the education secretary to examine the developmental implications of boarding.
Allison Ujejski
Director, Boarding Concern

• Parents wanting to place a very young child into the institutional care of a boarding school should have to apply to social services and be subject to some kind of scrutinising process. How we remain blind to this emotional abuse, as George Monbiot points out, is a curious quirk of culture. Perhaps we tolerate it because the schools have become extremely adept at advertising themselves in the modern market. The picture they paint in their glossy brochures is so soft and fluffy – very different from the boarding school of old. However, duvets on beds, teddy bears on pillows and Harry Potter fantasies easily conceal the harsh truth – that love is absent. And for the young child, love is the oxygen that enables the natural development of their emotional, social and spiritual selves. As adults they may be successful in many ways, but with their unnatural degree of independence they will always struggle in the arena of love, commitment and relationships. Yes, this is abuse. Yes, social services must be involved.
Piers Partridge
Wraxall, Somerset

• Boarding schools have indeed changed in the past 40 years. Usually, and unless parents live overseas, younger boarders are not being “sent away” but go to a boarding school near their homes because both parents work longer hours than the school day and prefer their children to be with their friends having fun in the evenings rather than being looked after by a childminder or being ferried across town to an extracurricular activity until a parent gets home. Parents appreciate that boarding schools work closely with them to provide security for their children, green spaces, excellent pastoral care, plenty of contact with home, and the flexibility to allow them to spend as few or as many nights at school as they wish. That is why boarding numbers have risen in recent years. Parents do their best for their children dependent on their circumstances and the needs of their children. They don’t need an inquiry, a committee, a board, an ethics council to reach these decisions. Parental choice matters.
Richard Harman
Head of Uppingham and chair of the Boarding Schools’ Association

• George Monbiot isn’t keen on boarding schools, and that’s fine. But perhaps he’d like to come and talk to some of our choristers who board in our cathedral school from the age of seven or eight, working long hours as young musicians and absolutely loving it. I am sorry he wasn’t here on Saturday: he could have warned the families of the 53 boys who came to try being a chorister for a day that the boarding to which they were drawn was, in fact, an unspeakable horror. Of course, one is aware of all the pastoral and educational implications of a lifestyle now considered rather odd, but a blanket dismissal of it, supported by no matter how much impressive-looking research, does not echo the reality experienced by real boys and their families.
Canon Wealands Bell
Lichfield Cathedral

• George Monbiot’s campaign to highlight the damage done by sending young children to boarding school is so needed. I was sent to one aged five at the start of the second world war. I did not understand why I was suddenly sent from a secure home to complete strangers, bleak surroundings and complete misery. My main memory is of keeping my mother’s photo near and praying to her to save me. I was mocked for working and, unsurprisingly, had an unhappy childhood and adulthood. I was in various boarding schools until aged 12, but the damage had been done. I could not keep friends, underachieved and later developed physical symptoms. Years later, after six years of four-times-weekly psychoanalysis, I was able to understand and manage most of the unsavoury sides of the legacy. Now, in old age and even with a warm family life, I still feel echoes of the pain of separation.
Alison Watson
London

• George Monbiot is right to deplore the sending of seven- and eight-year-olds to boarding schools. From my own experience I learned that the only way to succeed was to accept the domination of the outsiders by the conformists. I did not accept this, but our current cabinet apparently mastered the lesson. All that matters to them is to preserve the domination of the poor by the wealthy. The Making of Them, by Nick Duffell, gives more evidence of the damaging effect of early boarding. It was published in 2000 by Lone Arrow Press, and seems to have been conveniently ignored.
David Gribble
South Brent, Devon

• Mr Monbiot refers to the British boarding school remaining a “bastion of cruelty”. I was sent, aged four and half, to a boarding school in the 1950s in India where my family lived. Terms were nine months long. The next year I was sent to a UK boarding school. I saw my parents for a couple of weeks over the next three years. The school regimes were physically harsh by current standards, but then life in general was. I adapted to the system but I do remember my years in boarding school as happy years.

The system does demand independence, resilience, resourcefulness and a degree of emotional toughness. However, with the exception of the convent in India, I was never in any way brutalised and in fact was generally respected and encouraged as an individual. I do concede that, potentially, the early separation from home must foster some anxiety towards intimacy and it is important to become aware of this. However, I think lasting psychological problems occur when a young person experiences a bullying parent.

Bullying can take many subtle, often socially acceptable, forms and it can cause feelings of rejection that blight and poison future relationships. Bullying occurs independently of any family lifestyles, separations and losses – and boarding school. It is this that is the real cause of emotional repression and anxiety problems in children and creates a “bastion of cruelty”.
David Carnegie
Bath

• George Monbiot undermines his otherwise thoughtful article about the cruelty inflicted on children by a failure to examine the statistical evidence that is available abouton boarding numbers in this country. Boarding at the age of 7 has long ceased to be significant. The Independent Schools Council census for 1999 shows that out of 71,252 boarders only 378 or 0.5% were under 8. The 2011 census shows that out of 68,102 boarders only 198 or 0.3% were under the age of 8. These figures completely belie George Monbiot’s description of boarding as a bastion of cruelty. Most of these children come from expatriate families seeking educational stability for their children. Boarding has changed immeasurably over the past few decades, and the outdated caricature that Monbiot seeks to perpetuate bears little or no relation to the current realities.
Philip Cottam
Headmaster, Halliford School, Shepperton, Middlesex

• We can only conclude that the boarding school system in the UK is the rich man’s social care system. Given the backgrounds of so many MPs, it is most unlikely the system will ever be subjected to such regular and stringent checks and research as undertaken for those children in local authority care. They are not bothered about the potential psychological damage these young people may experience.
Keith Cox
Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire

• George Monbiot deplores the impact on seven-year-old children of being sent to boarding school. But what is wrong with my “attachment patterns”? Sent to boarding school at seven myself in 1959, I have been attached to the Guardian all my life – although I do usually “shut myself off” from George Monbiot.
Anthony Lawton
Leicester

• The current members of the cabinet must have been early boarders.
Karen Fletcher
North Anston, South Yorkshire

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