STATE SCHOOLS

My soul mate Juvenile seems to have some trouble with the term “state schools”. I’m puzzled. Why not call a spade a spade? The state, our state, has run schools for a long time in pursuing two of its key tasks, defence of the realm and maintaining law and order.

The state has been running its own schools for 300 years or more, from the Royal Hospital School in 1694, to Welbeck, the Defence Sixth Form College, reborn in Leicestershire in  2006. When the armed forces need highly qualified people the state founds a specialist school. The Royal Naval Dockyards had their apprentice schools from the 1840s, the RAF its Halton from 1917 and the Army its Harrogate from 1947. The Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne [1903] and Dartmouth [1905] took boys at 13 to make officers of them.

And the state very properly made sure there were schools for servicemen’s children. The Duke of York’s Military School was founded in 1803 for the children of serving soldiers, like the 45 schools run today by the Service Children’s Education Service. In mid nineteenth century government paid the Home and Colonial Schools Society to “train” some of the unlettered women who followed the troops and taught army children.

Ever since Lord Palmerston began accrediting reformatories the state has also accepted some responsibility for educating young prisoners. Arms length bodies like local authorities, voluntary bodies and even private contractors run most of the secure homes, training centres and young offender institutions which corral prisoners of school age. But for 80 years [1902-1982] the state was directly responsible for Borstals and their programmes of education and training. Borstal was perhaps the archetypical English “state school”.

And, by one of those quirks which make English government an unending pleasure, what few state schools we had were run by the Home Secretary or the Defence Secretary, not by Secretary Balls or any of his ministerial predecessors.

“State schools” have an honoured place in history. Let’s not debase the term. Or does its casual use reflect the people’s intuitive grasp that our state now strides jackbooted into every classroom?

DIOGENES