“The advancement ofeducation”

The clue is in the ​title. It is the reason independent schools are registered charities. That is their sole purpose, and when they fulfil that purpose so their charitable status is confirmed. That status is not a “problem”, any more than the young people in the schools or their families are, or indeed the many other educational bodies in a similar situation.

Only the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) is responsible for deciding what is or is not a Scottish charity, through a test that was designed, legislated for and voted on in the Scottish Parliament. All independent schools, unlike the vast majority of charities, have had their status reviewed and tested for the past nine years and are almost half of all the charities reviewed in Scotland. That charity test is also tougher than any equivalent in the world.

The full reports on each school’s activities produced by OSCR, and available on its website, merit much wider reading, certainly by those who claim the right to comment on the sector. The outcome has been a widening access programme of means-tested fee-assistance that amounts to £29 million each year and a wider programme of community engagement and shared facilities and staff.

Another inconvenient truth is that that every penny spent on bursaries, teacher salaries, facilities, etc. is met from fee income from parents and occasional fund-raising, not from the state, local government or any other public purse. Charitable status also requires schools to provide facilities and services at free or reduced rates. One medium-size independent school alone calculated that the value of supervised facilities, and coaching or teaching staff, provided free of charge was £38,610 per year; another small school provided facilities for free for 426 hours last year.

Any attempt to shift the goalposts at this stage and to hanker after a change for which could only narrow access again, and be to the detriment of assisted pupils attending those schools by choice, is retrograde and poorly-informed. It would contribute nothing to the other 95% of Scottish schools, or to the “advancement of education” or, indeed, help anyone “to get involved with their communities” – as the Scottish Council for Voluntary

Organisations wishes – more than they do already. As the facts have changed, so should opinions. It is time for us all to move on.

John Edward is directorof Scottish Council of Independent Schools.

For me, as for many others, among them the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, a charity test that allows elitist private schools, which serve the richest and most privileged, to qualify as charities is clearly unfit for purpose.

Just because something conforms to current legislation does not mean that it is right, and the discussion about private schools’ charitable status raises wider questions about what we understand by charity and its purpose in society.

The very notion of charity can be dangerous, distracting attention from the injustice which creates the need for charity in the first place and perpetuating the provision of charity as an alternative to tackling the root injustices - that is, charity is used as a substitute for justice, to borrow the words of Alistair McIntosh.

As the internationally acclaimed philosopher and educationalist, Paulo Freire, wrote in his landmark 1972 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“In order to have the continued opportunity to express their 'generosity' , the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this 'generosity', which is nourished by death, despair and poverty...True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and the subdued, the 'rejects of life', to extend their trembling hands.”

To apply this to private schools, in order to express their ‘generosity’ (in the form of bursaries or community services), the oppressors (private schools) must perpetuate injustice as well’ (unduly restrictive fees and unfair advantages over state schools in terms of money and resources) and 'an unjust social order is the permanent fount of this 'generosity'.

Oscar Wilde makes a similar point in his celebrated critique of charity, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), when he writes that:

“But this [charity] is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

For any government truly committed to creating a fairer and more equal society, private schools have no place. Whilst they still exist, however, the removal of their charitable status is a moral necessity. Anything else is the perpetuation and condoning of profound social injustice.

Charity cannot be a substitute for, or a distraction from, justice.

AshleyHusband Powton is a campaigner who submitted theRemove CharitableStatus from Private Schools petition to the Scottish Parliament.