User 149 there have been numerous studies into private schools over the years over the years in the UK and overseas. For example:
In 2011, the OECD analysed the results from PISA and found that while students who attend private schools tend to perform better than students who attend public ones, this was primarily because these students tend to come from higher socio-economic status families. It concluded that “students in public schools in a similar socio-economic context as private schools tend to do equally well” and that “there is no evidence to suggest that private schools help to raise the level of performance of the school system, as a whole.”
In 2014, a very large survey in the US by two researchers from the University of Illinois (contained in a well known book called The Public[i.e. state] School Advantage) also concluded that the higher scores found at U.S. private schools occur largely because their students tend to come from privileged backgrounds, and once those backgrounds are taken into account, state schools perform at least as well and often better than private ones.
After that survey the Canadian government’s national statistical agency Statistics Canada reported that the same trend also applied to Canadian schools. Looking at over 7,000 students from close to 1,200 schools across Canada, it found that those who attended private schools had better academic outcomes, but that this was primarily because “students who attended private high schools were more likely to have socio-economic characteristics positively associated with academic success and to have school peers with university-educated parents. There was little evidence that the success of these students was the result of attending schools with better resources or higher quality instruction.”
I seem to recall that there was a UK study of middle class children at rough inner city comps a while ago that found a surprising percentage of them (15%) got into Oxbridge although I don’t know whether this was because of contextual offers (i.e. where they are compared by Oxford/Cambridge with other pupils in their schools) . I couldn’t find the study but it is also referred to in the below article from the Guardian a few years ago.
GUARDIAN ARTICLE
Comprehensive education tends to get scapegoated for all the ills of society, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by today's intervention by Richard Walden, the chairman of the Independent Schools Association. This champion of the privately educated – and Britain's new moral arbiter – suggests that state education is responsible for the country "turning out too many amoral children".
The cynic will look around the cabinet table and query whether private schools are all equipping their students "with the moral compass they need for life", as he puts it.
But his phraseology taps into a long-established fear shared by some of the parents of the 7% of British children sent to private schools. Many of them splash out on their children's education to keep them away from those they regard as less desirable children of other parents. Comps are the domain of feral kids with flickknives on a ceaseless war against anybody who wants to learn, or so the myth goes.
It's a shame, because children from well-off backgrounds who do go to comps thrive: one study looking at a sample of middle-class kids at inner-city comps found they "performed brilliantly", and 15% of them went to Oxbridge. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), there is little difference in the performance of state schools and private schools when you take into account the child's background. "Much of the advantage that comes from private schooling is confirmed by the social-economic context, not necessarily in value added," as the OECD put it.
That said, there are some sensible points in Walden's speech at the ISA conference, even if his focus on "traditional" values (whatever they mean in practice) is a distraction. He says there is a lack of extracurricular activities in state schools, and the relentless obsession with exams and league tables was damaging students' wellbeing. He's right: schools shouldn't be factory farms, where children are driven from exam to exam, and where the curriculum is narrow and taught unimaginatively. Education should be geared to ensure our schools build well-rounded children. Michael Gove's "neo-Victorian" approach to education will not achieve that. Our children are among the most over-examined in the western world, and yet it is not reflected in our results.
Indeed, what politicians really need to address is the fact British children lag other countries in wellbeing; that there is an 18-month gap in vocabulary between affluent and poor 5-year-olds, requiring far more resources for early-years education; that poverty, poor diet, and low-quality and overcrowded housing all damage children's ability to thrive academically as well as socially.
We should learn from the success of the London Challenge, which encouraged collaborative working with London schools. Instead, we have a relentless, obsessive tinkering with structures, not least the resource-hogging failure that are free schools. As ever, it's our children who suffer.