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Introduction
Policy debates about the role of private schools in the UK education system have pursued three directions, regarding fairness, charitable status and public benefit. The Charities Act 2006 and 2011, which put some aspects of common law into statutory form, has brought these streams together and set the parameters within which the mainstream policy discussion is now pursued. It has confirmed that advancement of education is a charitable purpose but also re-affirmed private schools' requirement to provide a 'public benefit' that is unrestricted by the ability to pay for it.1The trustees of private schools with charitable status are given considerable autonomy in deciding what activities they will undertake to fulfil their public benefit obligations. While the public benefit criterion remains under the purview of the courts, private schools' autonomy to deliver public benefit in their own ways is manifest in the revised Charity Commission guidelines (2013a, 2013b). This context makes it important to understand schools' objectives in the provision of public benefit. This paper sets out a simple framework for analysing the value of charitable activities to the schools, and investigates how headteachers in a range of private schools and other informed stakeholders interpret public benefit objectives and obligations. It provides a valuable case-study of the problems associated with the pursuit of welfare state policies through charities which are legally independent.
Since the 1980s elements of competition and quasi-market forces have been introduced into English educational policy, including in the recent decade the conversion of many schools into 'academies' and the foundation of 'free schools', whose systems of governance placed them largely beyond the control of local government. Yet, while providing state schools with some independence, this movement afforded only a limited convergence with the private (that is, fee-paying) schools. Over the same period private schools, which had evolved over centuries into an exclusive system across the UK which was quite separate from central or local government (Gathorne-Hardy, 1977; Walford, 2002), have enjoyed a resurgence in their prosperity, largely free from the potential political threats to their continued existence that had sometimes characterised earlier postwar decades. Bolstered by the increased resources of wealthy parents and an increased demand for education, private schools still educate only seven per cent of all...