Anyone who has been to an expensive private school with an energetic “alumni outreach officer” will know the deal. The letters and the glossy brochures come regularly – one of them dropped on my door mat only the other day. Nick Clegg will have got the same letter and so will Chris Huhne, or Christopher Paul-Huhne, as he was known as a boy at Westminster School. So, too, will the singer Dido, the actress Imogen Stubbs and Martha Lane Fox.
All of these distinguished people will have benefited enormously from their great good fortune to have been educated at one of the finest schools in the country. The attraction of our private schools has traditionally been in the excellence of the teaching, but no more, it seems. For the past 20 years or so, the great private schools of Britain, and some of the not so great ones, have been engaged in a demented arms race to outdo each other in facilities.
In 1984, average yearly boarding fees in private schools were about £4,000. Today, many of them charge more than £30,000, roughly a threefold increase in real terms according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator. Private schools once offered a slightly superior version of a grammar school education. Many of them occupied lovely sites, but there was no special emphasis on lavish facilities.