No. 139 JUNE 2025
Vox Custodis
The Warden, Sir Richard Stagg( G, 69-73), reflects on some of the challenges facing the education sector as a whole and Winchester College in particular:
In the run-up to the 1997 General Election, Tony Blair was asked to name his three top priorities and famously replied:“ Education, education, education”. In his decade in power, he indeed increased the resources devoted to education and introduced Academies. These enjoyed greater autonomy than mainstream schools( in particular from Local Authorities) and flourished under the subsequent Coalition and Conservative Governments. He also set a target of 50 % of young people going to university, which led to polytechnics being rebranded and a proliferation of low-quality courses, which offered neither intellectual stretch nor vocational benefits. Result: today 40 % of Higher Education institutions are believed to be in deficit and most are heavily dependent on foreign students.
Whatever the merits of some of his prescriptions, Tony Blair was surely right to argue that nothing is more important for our country’ s future than education. But he was obviously far from the first political leader to grasp this point( from Gladstone’ s 1870 Elementary Education Act to the 1944 Education Act, which introduced free secondary education for the first time). As this history suggests, getting education policy right is a long haul – requiring, as Winchester knows well, patience and consistency. These rarely sit comfortably with the demands of modern electoral politics.
In our case, taking the long view, reform began with the 1861 Clarendon Commission. This investigated the running of nine major schools( Winchester included) and led to the Public Schools Act of 1868. In modern jargon, this aimed to modernise and improve the governance of the nine schools. Dissatisfied with Winchester’ s response, in 1871 the government
Warden Lee( Coll, 1830-34; Warden, 1861-1903) imposed changes on the school, including the appointment of a new group of Fellows( although existing Fellows were allowed to carry on – my predecessor, Warden Lee, somehow managed to remain in his role and in the Lodgings until his death in 1903). Although in some ways ancient history, the Clarendon Commission radically changed the governance of Winchester( and of the other schools it investigated) and laid the foundations for our current arrangements.
Today we face the likelihood of similarly major change – at Winchester and more widely – flowing from the new financial burdens imposed by the government; combined with a move towards more homogenised learning across the maintained and independent sectors.
On the former, taxing education makes the UK a global outlier. No EU country, for example, taxes education and the only one to try( Greece) quickly reversed its decision. The damaging changes being imposed on independent schools have, incidentally, been pushed through by a government which won 33.7 % of the vote share last July( a smaller share than Neil Kinnock’ s in 1992, when he lost the election).
On the latter, it is not yet clear where the process of reducing variety and choice in schools will end. But the Secretary of State’ s approach to Academies suggests a desire to revert
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