Dr Martin Stephen: 'There is a big potential for independents to boost the mainstream'

The Charity Commission dogs of war appear to have been called off their hunt after independent schools, which is good news for some not very wealthy parents. There are a large number of small independent schools with no endowment at all which, instead of offering a token number of free places, choose instead to pare their fees down to an absolute minimum so that they are affordable to the widest range of parents: offering outstanding value for money, and real choice for parents who otherwise would not be able to afford it.

Schools which can afford it should give significant bursaries so as to open up their places, but to focus on bursaries as the only qualifier for charitable status is the equivalent of saying someone can only qualify as a doctor if they cure one illness. All the ways in which independent schools pay back to the wider community – free community use of their facilities, academic outreach and enrichment schemes, support for sports teams and a host of others – can be put on the balance sheet.

Yet the inquiry into charitable status raced off down a cul-de-sac. Bursaries and community schemes are fine as far as they go, but the potential for independent schools to boost the mainstream is hugely greater. A government whose structure is unique in modern times ought to be more capable than its predecessors of producing unique initiatives. There are literally hundreds of ways in which independent schools might productively be brought back in to the mainstream of UK education. As an example, we desperately need to recruit more graduate maths, physics, chemistry and modern language teachers into our schools.

The Teach First scheme, though not without its problems, does a fantastic job in asking top, young undergraduates to do a taster experience in a disadvantaged school. The problem is that some of the schools are so challenging as to put off the young graduates. Independent schools have a proven track record off luring such young people in to teaching. No wonder: they pay more, often have all-graduate staff and offer the teaching of high-ability pupils.

Yet based on a pilot scheme at St Paul's, it is possible to use the soft-landing of the independent sector to attract in a top graduate, and give him or her half a timetable to teach at the independent school. That same teacher can then be released to one or more local maintained schools which do not have graduate teachers for the other half of their timetable, and take sessions with the children that school has identified as gifted in the subject. Each school pays according to the pay scale it uses. Such access to a top graduate in a state school does not attack or challenge the non-selective, comprehensive ethos; it merely provides a little extra provision for those identified as having special gifts, no different in principle to the extra help given to those deemed to have special educational needs.

A second scheme would be for independent schools to offer to teach their own and local pupils one of the proposed diplomas that was any good, namely engineering. We have a chronic shortage of engineers in the UK, and no specialist career path for them in British schools. Few state schools could afford to teach just one diploma, but, if selected independent schools were asked to act as a hub for an area, it could be done, and something genuinely useful salvaged from the wreck of the diplomas.

With some radical thinking, independent schools in the UK could be a major benefit to far more than the 7 per cent of pupils who attend them.