Public Benefit

Independent schools will need to demonstrate that they provide public benefit, and we support the change to the law which removes the presumption that educational and other charities provide public benefit.

Charitable status underpins the social purpose of charitable schools. New and well-funded commercial providers have entered the education sector, and the largest and best-funded, Cognita, is on record as saying that independent schools should not co-operate with the maintained sector. That approach is entirely rejected by the Independent Schools Council: our mission is to work in partnership with Government and the maintained sector as part of the educational provision for the United Kingdom. There are many hundreds of successful existing partnerships, not only through the ISSP (Independent/State Schools Partnership) but also

operating through individual co-operation at local level. Charitable status encourages and safeguards partnership with the maintained sector. This is particularly important in reversing the decline in the number of pupils gaining qualifications in mathematics, the hard sciences, and modern languages: reversing this decline is socially and economically essential . We believe that the public would prefer a socially engaged independent sector, committed to partnership with the maintained sector, to the alternative of a non-charitable independent sector, disengaged from society. The choice was well put in the House of Lords by the Cross-bench peer, Lord Best:

"There are now private companies promoting purely profit-making, fee-charging independent schools. ... Such schools will take their fees and do not accept a responsibility toward the wider community-no bursaries for those from less affluent households, no support from specialist teachers for the comprehensive school down the road, no opening up of facilities for pupils of state schools, no underlying tradition and ethos of educational service to the educational community"