Stamford Scholarship Scheme: 13 July 2006

The decision by the executive of the county council to phase out the scholarships for Stamford children at the Stamford Endowed Schools from 2008 threatens disaster for future generations of the town’s bright children.

There is nowhere else for them to go in Stamford which offers a full academic secondary education if their parents cannot afford to pay fees.

I have written to the leader of the council, Coun Martin Hill, asking him to reconsider this decision, and I hope all Stamfordians who care about this will do the same.

Let me take the various arguments in turn. It is said that it is unfair that the county should be paying more for children to go to the endowed schools at public expense than it costs to send them to a maintained school.

Actually, if fair comparisons are made, allowing for the capital cost of a school, I don’t think that the cost to the taxpayer at the county council’s very discounted price is greater than would be the cost of sending these children to one of Lincolnshire’s grammar schools.

Even if the cost were slightly higher the argument would be hypocritical in the extreme.
The taxpayer already pays a much higher price to teach statemented children (quite reasonably and rightly in my view). It costs a mind-boggling £30,000 of public money a year each to educate children at Grantham’s Phoenix School.

What would be wrong with paying vastly less than that for well-behaved but very bright children to have access to additional subjects and to an academic sixth form?

It is said that the Queen Eleanor is now a much better school and that any child who cannot pay fees can happily go there.

It is true that the Queen Eleanor has been wonderfully transformed after very difficult beginnings. Whether it achieves the criteria to be classified as a comprehensive is a technical educational question on which I am not qualified to pronounce. I certainly want to do everything I can do to support the Queen Eleanor.

The main problem for the Queen Eleanor in this context however is that it doesn’t have a sixth form. And there are no plans to create one.

And why would anyone want to incur the risks and costs of costs of doing that, when a tried and superb alternative exists down the road?

The standard response here is that Queen Eleanor pupils can always go on to Stamford College. I could write many paragraphs, indeed pages, in praise of Stamford Further Education College.

Under the very vigorous leadership of its retiring principal, Andrew Middleton, it has done brilliantly. And it certainly provides first-rate vocational courses.

But the college does not offer the same range of academic subjects at A-level which a serious comprehensive or grammar school (or independent school like the two Stamford Endowed Schools) can do, such as Latin.

Against my vociferous protests a few years ago, it gave up teaching modern languages altogether.

And even it if did offer these subjects a college of further education is not a school. It cannot provide the same disciplined environment, pastoral support, range of outside activities or culture of learning that a good academic school can. Some adolescents thrive in the more adult worldly atmosphere of a college of further education – some do not.

The final argument is the most recent one: “Let them go to other Lincolnshire grammar schools where there are now free places”.
This is insulting to anyone’s intelligence. Boston, where there are certainly places available, is a very long way away.

Bourne could never offer more than a handful of places, and Stamford children would be at a severe disadvantage on their geographical admission criteria. Some years there might be no places at all.

If the county council’s hasty resolution is implemented the prospects of 50 bright Stamford children a year who have the misfortune to reach 11 after 2008 will be blighted. I can think of few things so cruel, so educationally destructive and so misconceived.