Harry Potter, the poor little orphan, can’t afford Hogwarts these days, now he has to pay VAT. James Bond, another orphan, can’t manage Eton’s £65,000 school fees. And he won’t join MI6, either – no civil servant, licensed to kill or not, can afford to live in central London any more. Now only the super-rich can afford them, private schools have become little more than gilt-edged finishing schools, with parents determined for their children to become their mini-clones as hedge-funders and private-equity tycoons.  

Burnham’s brand of patronising tweeslop reigns supreme

We need the SAS to be nasty

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In the last 30 years, as school fees have rocketed, so the nature of private schools and their pupils has changed for good. In the days of cheap school fees – that lasted into the early 1990s – those schools turned out selfless, decent, unflashy figures: lieutenant colonels, doctors, local solicitors and magistrates, the reliable, ancient infrastructure of local life. 

Ancient schools – like Eton (founded 1440) and Westminster (1560) – were expressly set up to educate poor scholars. Winchester was partly founded in 1382 to train priests after so many died in the Black Death. The Royal School, Wolverhampton, was set up for orphans.........

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