Private school head 'would rather close down' than become a state school

The head of a private school has said he would rather close down than see it become part of the state system.

Magnus Bashaarat, of the £37,000-a-year Bedales in Hampshire, made the claim in the wake of the Labour Party conference voting to "integrate" private schools with the public sector.

He said: “Were I to be given the ultimatum, tomorrow, that Bedales be made a state school, and that it should follow the national curriculum and policymakers’ preoccupations with the transfer of knowledge and disregard for humanities and the arts, I would decline. I would rather we shut our doors.”

At last month’s party conference, Labour voted to scrap private schools, redistribute their assets among state schools and end their charitable status and tax privileges.

But Mr Bashaarat condemned the state system’s focus on “the stultifying effects of competitive examinations and the importance of social background to academic achievement”.

Writing in The Times, he said he liked the idea of a national education system without the dichotomy between state and independent schools but that the UK had an “awfully long way to go” before it was ready to integrate the two systems “without sacrificing everything good that we do”.

School should be “a preparation for life”, rather than a job, Mr Bashaarat insisted.

Bedales, which counts Daniel Day-Lewis, the star of There Will Be Blood, and Kirstie Allsopp, the Channel 4 property presenter, as former pupils, had stuck “pretty faithfully” to the idea that school should be a preparation for life rather than simply work, he said.

“The same cannot be said of the state system, however,” he said. “Disingenuously, ministers have dismissed this history as a progressive aberration.”

Mr Bashaarat also said the “unholy triumvirate” of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Jacob Rees-Mogg had made the Eton brand “toxic” and that the number of prime ministers coming from the same school was a “legitimate concern”.