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The term public school is commonly used in the United Kingdom to refer to a select group of about 10% of the independent schools in the country, which are in general older, traditional and members of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.

H. Tawney called it 'the hereditary curse upon English education', Anthony Crosland 'the strongest remaining bastion of class privilege', Neil Kinnock 'the very cement in the wall that divides British society'. No other country has anything quite like the British public school system, just as no other country has anything like the House of Lords or the House of Windsor. Elsewhere, people opt out of the state system—often in greater numbers than they do in Britain—in search of a particular type or philosophy of education, such as a Catholic school. Here, the dominant reason for going private is quite different: the pursuit, for one's children, of academic, social and career advantage. In effect, the public schools are the training grounds for the ruling classes: the top echelons of the civil service, the law, politics, the City. - Peter Wilby

Such schools were originally termed "public" in the sense that they were open to anyone who could pass entrance examinations and afford the fees, without religious or other restrictions. Until the late medieval period most schools were controlled by the church and had specific entrance criteria; others were restricted to the sons of members of guilds, trades or livery companies, for example the Merchant Taylors' School.

The need for professional trades in an increasingly secularised society, particularly from advancements in philosophy, medicine and law, required schools for the sons of the gentry which were independent from ecclesiastical authority and open to all. From the 16th century onward, boys' boarding schools were founded or endowed for public use—schools which were subsequently reformed by the Public Schools Acts.

Amongst the most famous public schools in England are the 'Clarendon Schools' which were the subject of the Public Schools Act 1868: Charterhouse School, Eton College, Harrow School, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, St Paul's School, Westminster School and Winchester College.

Associations with the ruling class

The role of public schools in preparing pupils for the gentlemanly elite in the period before World War II meant that such education, particularly in its classical focus and social mannerism, became a mark of the ruling class. For three hundred years, the officers and senior administrators of the British Empire invariably sent their sons back home to boarding schools for education as gentlemen, often for uninterrupted periods of a year or more at a time.

The 19th century public school ethos promoted ideas of service to Crown and Empire, understood by the broader public in familiar sentiments such as "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game" and "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". Ex-pupils often had a nostalgic affection for their old schools and a public school tie could be useful in a career, so an "old boy network" of former pupils became important.

The English public school model influenced the nineteenth century development of Scottish private schools, but a tradition of the gentry sharing primary education with their tenants kept Scotland comparatively egalitarian.

Acceptance of social elitism was set back by the two World Wars, but despite portrayals of the products of public schools as "silly asses" and "toffs" the old "system" at its most pervasive continued well into the 1960s, reflected in contemporary popular fiction such as Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File, with its sub-text of supposed tension between the grammar school educated protagonist and the public school background of his more senior but inept colleague. Postwar social change has however gradually been reflected across Britain's educational system, while at the same time fears of problems with state education have pushed some parents who can afford the fees or qualify for bursaries towards public schools, which are now often referred to as independent schools.

Labour Party leaders Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Foot and Tony Blair were educated at independent schools, but the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and current Labour party leader Ed Miliband, attended a state school.

Whilst the current Conservative leader and Prime Minister, David Cameron was educated at Eton (and the Conservatives' Chancellor George Osborne attended St Paul's School), all Conservative leaders from 1965 to 2005 were educated at selective state grammar schools, including former prime ministers Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major.

As of 2012 all leaders of the Liberal Democrats except Charles Kennedy (David Steel, Paddy Ashdown, Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg) had been educated at fee-paying schools.

In 2003, 84% of senior Judges in England and Wales had been educated at independent schools, as surveyed in 2003 by law firm SJ Berwin.

Definition

The term 'public' was adopted from the Public Schools Act 1868 and refers to the fact that the school is open to the paying public from anywhere in the country, as opposed to, for example, a local school only open for local residents, or a religious school open only to those part of a certain church, or private education at home (usually only practical for the very wealthy, such as the nobility, who could afford tutors).

Prior to the Clarendon Commission, a Royal Commission that investigated the public school system in England between 1861 and 1864, there was no clear definition of a public school. The commission investigated nine of the more established schools: the day schools St Paul's and the Merchant Taylors', and seven boarding schools: Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester. A report published by the commission formed the basis of the Public Schools Act 1868.

List of public schools

The Public Schools Yearbook, published in 1889, named the following 25 boarding schools:

However, it omitted the St Paul's and the Merchant Taylors' day schools. The head teachers of British independent schools usually belong to the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC) as distinct from the Association of School and College Leaders.

Slang

The following list includes some commonly used slang terms used at public schools in the UK:

See also

• Education in the United Kingdom
• Schools Class locomotives for a class of Southern Railway locomotives that were named after Public Schools in the early 1930s

Notes

1. They are neither administered nor financed by the state (that is, central or local government) or from taxpayer contributions, and are instead funded by a combination of endowments, tuition fees and charitable contributions, usually existing as a non profit-making charitable trust. (For the US usage of the term, see Publicly Funded Schools.) Public schools were defined in the report of the Fleming Committee in 1942 as "schools which are in membership of the Governing Bodies' Association or Headmasters' Conference".
2. Vivian Ogilvie (1957). The English public school. Batsford. p. 1. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
3. Peter Wilby, "Tribalism in British Education," New Left Review 222 (1997) 139
4. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter01.html#04
5. Oxford English Dictionary, June 2010.
6. "Backgrounds of the Senior Judiciary in 2003" (PDF). SJ Berwin LLP. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 January 2005. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 17 October 2005 suggested (help)

• Education in the United Kingdom
• Independent schools in the United Kingdom
• School types