Introduction

In June 2021 it was announced that Eton College had signed an agreement with the Star Academies MAT to open three selective sixth forms in the Midlands and North of England, with the aim from 2024 to ‘fast-track young people, often from deprived communities, to the UK’s most academic universities’ (Dennett 2021: NP). The plan is that:

There is nothing in this list of activities that Sixth Forms in schools and colleges in the public sector do not do and cannot do, but what is different is that both organisations in this scheme are beneficiaries of privatised independence from democratic accountability, but at the same time are dependent on public funding from the taxpayer. For example, Eton charges annual fees of £44,000 generating an income of £51 million, plus £8.1 million in donations in 2020, and has charitable status which means it receives 80 per cent discount on its rates bill (cutting from £831,600 to £166,320 in 2020, Rushton 2020: NP). In addition, while reports show that private schools give bursaries, they ‘are spending millions more on giving affluent middle-class families fee discounts than on children from disadvantaged backgrounds’ (Henry 2018: NP). A change in the law in 2006 required charitable status for private schools to be linked to sharing facilities with local state schools through to formal partnerships facilitated by the System Partnership Unit (Fairburn 2019), and so the price of hefty tax exemptions and other privileges means that private schools undertake civic philanthropy in the public interest as missionary work with those less fortunate.