Frank Young

Westminster School, one of Britain’s oldest public schools, has announced it will go fully ‘co-ed’ from 2030. Having first admitted girls to the sixth form in the 1970s, the school will now admit girls from the age of 13. This decision means that soon there will only be four remaining boys’ boarding schools left in the UK: Radley, Eton, Harrow and Tonbridge. Westminster says the decision is ‘based on a desire fully to reflect the community we serve, and to shape that community by educating brilliant young men and women with a commitment to making a difference.’ But the decline and fall of boys’ schools is not something to celebrate.  There are roughly 800 single sex schools left in England, but most of these are for girls.

Parenting – and indeed any talk of family life – has long been taboo in government. Nothing highlighted this more starkly than the civil service’s practice of referring to parents and children as ‘service users’. This has recently been the subject of a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, who has urged Whitehall to get to grips with parenting and scrap the phrase, along with any other ‘technocratic’ jargon. This is all well and good, but Dame Rachel de Souza should start by pushing the Chancellor to do something about the grossly anti-family tax system. The UK tax system unfairly judges parents – mostly mothers – who want to stay at home and look after children rather than spend their life as a workhorse in an office.

Some rare cheer: millennials are divorcing less than their parents. This might be cause for celebration if the long-term prognosis for marriage wasn’t so poor. Last year, divorces spiked by ten per cent: 113,505 couples broke up in 2021, compared to 103,592 divorces in 2020, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Divorce laws allowing couples to avoid pinning the blame on each other and backlogs caused by the pandemic are likely to be to blame for the rise in breakups.  Tucked away inside these numbers, however, is a graph that contains a glimmer of good news: millennials are divorcing a lot less after ten years of marriage than their parents and their grandparents.

The Duchess of Cambridge has been out and about hosting roundtables with very important people, discussing what can be done to support the nation’s pre-school children. Royal aides tell us she consulted ‘the sector’ to find out what should be done about the children who turn up for the first day of school barely able to speak or hold a pencil. What ‘the sector’ inevitably wants is more funding.  Kate Middleton has become the first royal to set up a think-tank, the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. This week she summoned ministers, civil servants and academics to discuss the findings of a poll: it seems most Britons want a bigger focus on early childhood.

Britain is on a slow descent to oblivion. Scotland is even closer to the abyss, with a birth rate of just 1.29, well below the UK’s sub-replacement level of 1.65. It turns out the answer to the West Lothian question is that West Lothian will disappear. Doomsday demography should matter, but Whitehall is in no way prepared to deal with it. New research published this week found that mental illness in early adulthood could account for up to 60 per cent of future childlessness. A generation too worried to have children spells disaster for countries that need to support ageing societies. Researchers looking at the populations of Sweden and Finland have drawn a link between dozens of mental health disorders and later childlessness.

Earlier this week, academics at Oxford and Cambridge were likely to be cock-a-hoop that their universities top international leagues tables taking both gold and silver spots. Britain leads the world when it comes to getting top places in international league tables of higher education. As a country, we sell TV shows across the globe and are cultural leaders pushing our soft cultural power; the Premier League is the most watched football league in the world; the City of London is the money capital of the world. Unfortunately, there are things we are less good at. In another league table published recently, Britain sits pretty much rock bottom when it comes to families breaking up. The UK leads the world in the number of families we have falling apart.