Spectator Life

Harry Potter, the poor little orphan, can’t afford Hogwarts these days, now he has to pay VAT. James Bond, another orphan, can’t manage Eton’s £65,000 school fees. And he won’t join MI6, either – no civil servant, licensed to kill or not, can afford to live in central London any more. Now only the super-rich can afford them, private schools have become little more than gilt-edged finishing schools, with parents determined for their children to become their mini-clones as hedge-funders and private-equity tycoons.   In the last 30 years, as school fees have rocketed, so the nature of private schools and their pupils has changed for good.

On 31 August, one of England’s oldest schools closed its doors forever, after almost 14th centuries. A thread connecting modern Britain to its past has been quietly severed.  Thetford Grammar’s origins can be traced back to ad 631 when King Sigebert of East Anglia founded a monastery on the site. Two of its classrooms are named after Dean Bund and Bishop Herbert De Losinga, who wrote about the school in c. 1114. Despite a hiatus in 1496, education continued in 1566 with the re-founding by Sir Richard Fulmerston.  The main school site holds within it a great deal of history too. The ruins of the old Blackfriars monastery are woven into the later buildings, and an 11th-century depiction of the tree of life sits over the doors to Old School.

We longstanding residents of Oxfordshire have had a lot to put up with in recent years. First, there were the Beckhams with their faux flat-cap invasion of honey stone Great Tew and queasy talk of 'Golden Beez' honey. Then came Hollywood proper in the form of Ellen de Generes in her quest for ‘Engerland’: a Frankenstein vision of romcom The Holiday and indeterminate fantasies about the Old World. Last, came Maga as American Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade howled through the village lanes of Dean last summer. But frankly, we ‘aint seen nothing yet.

There is, says Colin Hughes, who is the head of the exam board AQA, no downside to switching pupils from written exams into a gleaming modern utopia of computerised tests. Students, he says, are baffled by the fact that exams don’t take place on screens. He also seems to think the poor dears won’t be able to type if they don’t take exams on computers, as if they weren’t competent enough to learn how to use a keyboard without them. What’s more, boring old exam papers, it seems, have been causing delays in providing results for schools: doing them on a screen would solve that problem instantly, and, shazaam, Johnny and Jemima can get their C minuses in Raffia Work almost instantly. Sometimes I do wonder why certain people are so bedazzled by technology.

Surprise, surprise! The study of classics at Oxford is dominated by the privately educated. The latest figures from the university show that just 41.9 per cent of those studying Latin and ancient Greek are state-educated. Meanwhile, psychology is the Oxford subject most dominated by comprehensive school pupils. Of the students admitted to these degrees, 84.8 per cent were from the state sector.  The classics numbers are sad – but inevitable. Greek and Latin A-Level have almost entirely disappeared from comprehensives. Grammar schools – cruelly cut by Conservative and Labour governments – are the last redoubt of state classical education. Even there, though, the subjects are in their death throes.

There is something particularly poignant about the closure of a school. The sound of instruments being played, the cheerful pictures on classroom walls, the life given to a street by children milling about, all that can suddenly disappear.   Unfortunately, for many independent schools, the possibility of closure is edging ever nearer, and in some cases has already happened. This is a result of wider pressures facing such schools, including declining birth rates and increases in the cost of living.

After three years of theatrical um-ing and ah-ing, the Prince and Princess of Wales have seemingly acceded to the obvious: Prince George is apparently going to Eton. Despite their perennial posturing at being a ‘modern’ royal family (is there such a thing?) there was really only one option. Eton is after all – somewhat paradoxically – the only place capable of offering any semblance of a normal adolescence for George, as well as mentally preparing him for kingship. To an outsider, this sounds ridiculous. How can prancing around in tailcoats while speaking unique slang (teachers are ‘beaks’; Year 9 is ‘F Block’) have any bearing on normalcy? Yet normal is relative. One of the first things you realise at Eton is that the exceptional is unexceptional.

The recent ‘school wars’ farrago was an act of madness – or, more accurately, Madness. ‘All the kids have gone away/Gone to fight with next door’s school/Every term that is the rule’. So the Camden ska band sang on ‘Baggy Trousers’, their 1980 classic about their school days. Schoolchildren organising to duff up their contemporaries is not new; social media has made it easier for pupils to connect, parents to panic.   For the uninitiated, a TikTok trend thought to have begun in Hackney last month has seen posts pop up across the country – from Nottingham to Watford – encouraging children to meet for clashes between different schools organised into ‘red’ and ‘blue’ teams.

I can still just about recall the exact angle of rotation required of the metal hymn-book casings in the Tonbridge School chapel to produce a piercing scraping sound – perfect for putting any preacher off his stride. God, as St Paul tells us, is not mocked, and as I ascended the pulpit when I returned 12 years later as the school’s assistant chaplain, I heard the old familiar scrape once more, now deployed to distract me. Chapel was the central experience of our school years, the place we remember most clearly In many ways it was comforting. Generations of pupils praying and singing in the same space and inevitably learning the same techniques to distract or annoy. They are teenagers after all.