View from the top

David Lyscom’s former career as a diplomat must have been seen as a very useful asset when he was recruited to the position of chief executive of the Independent Schools Association (ISC). The sector is going through turbulent times and his appointment was no doubt intended to ensure a calming leadership. The ISC’s remit is to represent the views of the independent sector as a whole. This includes the five heads’ associations (IAPS, HMC, GSA, SHMIS, ISA) plus the overseas schools association (COBIS), the bursars’ (ISBA) and governors’ (AGBIS) associations. ISC has to tread a careful line when trying to represent an overall view of the entire sector — independence runs deep, at all levels. There is a need to lobby government and ISC clearly see this as an area where a unified voice is vital. They have their own research department and are well placed to generate the evidence needed to put issues across in an effective way. With a prolonged recession likely, individual schools need the support of their associations — and the ISC — more than ever. I started by asking David Lyscom what he felt the biggest challenges were facing schools: “There is so much going on in the independent sector that it is very easy to get distracted by smaller concerns,” he said.

“I think that what I want to do is to focus on those which are really important to our member associations and to tackle those problems head on. What I don’t want to do is to duplicate the activities of the associations. “Clearly, the recession is a general challenge to everybody, not just to independent schools; it is an economy-wide issue. All businesses are affected by the recession and our schools are running, in effect, small businesses. “Another main issue is the question of regulation. The education sector in particular is bombarded with new regulation all the time. I think that every government believes it needs to control and monitor and one of the key factors about independent schools — one of the key reasons for their success —– is that they are independent. “I see that one of my roles is to try and maintain that independence. The experience over the last few years is that gradually the independent sector is being tied down, one rope at a time. I think that this is a dangerous development. “Each individual regulation may not seem to be that difficult, but when you add it all up, at the end of the day, you are gradually eroding the independence and the freedom of schools to make the sort of decisions which are for the benefit of the pupils going to their schools.”

The ISC is invariably at odds with today’s government, and Mr Lyscom is right to highlight the almost suffocating level of bureaucracy in which the maintained sector has to work. With the independent sector widely regarded as offering the best education in the world — and this claim backed up by the OECD PISA study — surely there are lessons to be learnt for the Government? “In my view, the key to that success is the fact that they are independent and that they can look at education in a very broad way, without being tied down by all the different regulations and rules which govern the maintained sector,” Mr Lyscome said.

“I think it would be great for UK education as a whole to recognise that this sort of freedom is one of the reasons why we are so successful as a sector. “And surely those lessons could be applied more widely across the education sector in the UK as a whole? But that would be a very brave decision for a government to take.”

With the prospect of a change in government a real possibility, surely the Conservatives should be adopting the UK independent sector as the model of best practice? “Well, that’s something you would have to ask the Conservatives,” Mr Lyscom said. “I am not here to tell them what their policy should be.

“I think that the message that I would have is that the key to our success is our independence, and that independence is being threatened by a swathe of legislation and regulation. “The best thing that they can do for education in the UK is to remove that, and let schools be more independent. Let them make their own choices based on what their particular students need.”

There has been considerable media coverage of the possible effects of the recession on independent schools. Articles have ranged from profiles of parents allegedly up-rooting children from independent schools, through to assessments on the number of schools which will close. David Lyscom does not share the gloom-and-doom scenarios. ‘It is quite interesting that in the last recession in the 1990s, there was a gradual decline between 1992 and 1996 in the number of pupils going to independent schools, but in that five year period it only went down by 2.4 per cent. We are talking at the moment about car industry demand falling by 30 per cent in the matter of six months! We are not looking at that sort of picture for the independent sector. Parents recognise the value of independent education and it is the last thing that they cut back on when it comes to making choices about expenditure.’ But what about the talk of school closures, and even recent mergers between schools? ‘There is always churn at the margins of the independent schools sector. Every year we always lose a few schools; I think it was six in 2007, six in 2008. Even in the good years, schools go out of business or merge, but then new schools are created at the other end of the margin. We expect this to happen – it is not about the recession.’ But what about the prospect for parents, especially those finding it increasingly difficult to find the cost of fees? What advice can ISC offer? ‘Our advice to parents is that if you are having problems with your finances then do go and talk to your school and there is a range of measures that can be taken to help with payments. For example, you could do it on a monthly direct debit, rather than up-front termly fees. At the end of the day it is about the child, and schools do not want to disrupt a child’s education. Schools will try and work with parents to try and find a way through this.’ But school fees are certainly not inexpensive and have seen considerable price rises in recent years. I put it to David Lyscom that if we walked out of his office and onto Piccadilly, we would be hard-pressed to find a shop which was not having a cut-price sale. Yet, we are going to almost certainly see more school fees increasing. ‘I don’t know - are we? Inflation is moving into negative territory – I don’t think there is any inflationary wage pressure at the moment. I haven’t seen any news yet from schools on what their fees will be for next year but maybe you have got better information than me!’ Sadly my information sources are not better than the Chief Executive’s but I suggest that really the issue is one of overall cost – are fees, perhaps, too high at the moment? ‘All of our schools in ISC are non-profit making and that means that they set their fees to meet their costs. They are not out there to make a profit like the Cognita-type schools...’ There is a clear polarisation in the sector between the charitable independent schools and those run on a commercial basis. Their emphasis is on ‘no frills’ and Chris Woodhead (Chair of the Cognita group of schools) was last year widely quoted for his remarks attacking the charitable independent sector for its expensive ‘frills and frippery’. The message was not well-received by the ISC. ‘Chris Woodhead is representing an industry, and of course he is going to make his product sound as positive as possible. I have nothing against the Cognita-type schools – they are meeting a particular demand in a particular sector of the market. But our schools don’t have good facilities and low teacher/pupil ratios for the sake of it. They do it because they believe that is what the children need for their broad education and that is what the parents want from them. I think one of the issues that schools will be looking at in order to reduce costs is whether they can postpone, or phase-out over a longer period, their capital expenditure and that would be one way of meeting this, but parents do demand a certain standard from their schools, and those schools have to respond to the needs of the parents. They are not doing it just for the greater glory of their school – we have a bigger Olympic swimming pool than you have! – that’s not the way it is done.’ But has there not been an ever-growing ‘facilities competition’ between schools? If you browse through the prospectus of most senior schools, you are hard-pressed to find one which is not extolling the virtues of their new performing arts centre, new sports complex or new science block. I put this point to David Lyscom: ‘I visited three schools this week and none of them have got new performing arts blocks, or new facilities of that sort. This is a very broad church and you have got the schools at the top end of the market who believe that is important and they attract the parents who also believe that this is important. But you have also got schools who are offering a much more basic education. They have specialities that they deal with, for example special needs education, dyslexia etc. There is not one single independent schools market; it is a whole series of niches. It would be wrong to brand the whole sector on the basis of a handful of schools at the top end of the market. Schools know what their parents expect and that is what they deliver and they know that it comes at a price, and they will tailor their price to meet the demand. And that is one of the great things about independent education – it can offer everything from one end of the spectrum to the other.’ But do some parents, who would otherwise consider the independent sector for their child, perceive it to be too expensive? ‘Well, what is expensive? We are doing some work at the moment on what it costs per child in the state sector. The problem is that education is paid for by all different parts of the Government budget and also by local authorities. So you have to go all over the place to find answers to these questions. Now at the moment we have managed to establish that the cost is over £6,000 a year – we think that there may be some other bits of expenditure which we haven’t captured yet, and we are looking for that. But £6,000 a year – those are the fees of some of our schools. Manchester Grammar School charges about £9,000 a year; that is not a huge difference when you look at the sort of education that a school like that offers. Independent education is expensive in that you pay nothing to send your child to a state school, but when you look at the actual cost of educating a child, I think that we are not over-charging for what our schools offer.’ We had managed to get to almost the end of our interview and two words had failed to be mentioned – ‘Charity’ and ‘Commission’. I asked David Lyscom which he felt was the bigger threat now, the Commission or the recession? ‘The problem with the Charity Commission is that we don’t know where they are coming from yet. We know what their guidelines are because they have published those but essentially what they are saying is that schools will pass the public benefit test if the Charity Commission say they have passed the public benefit test. So until we see a final decision we are not quite sure where they will put the goal posts. So it may, or may not be, the case that the Charity Commission represents a threat to the sector. I think that most schools would argue that they meet the public benefit test and most will sail through it very easily. But we don’t know whether that will be the view of the Commission. And I think that one slight concern that we have is that the Charity Commission seems to be taking a very narrow legalistic view. Quite rightly, they are there to regulate charities and so they are looking at the legal side of things, the specific aims and objectives of a charity. So, if your school is set up to educate boys in a particular area – and that is written into your charitable aims – that will be the focus that the Charity Commission will be looking at. If a school with those aims also allows a girls school to use its facilities, as far as we understand it, the Charity Commission will not take that into account.’ As I got up to leave, I suggested that David Lyscom’s past role as a diplomat might prove rather useful. ‘Certainly, I think it helps. I have eight members with different interests and I need to determine a policy for ISC which takes into account the interests of all of my stakeholders, and that is very much a thing which you do in diplomacy. So I feel very much at home here.’ David Lyscom was talking to the Editor of Attain, Matthew Smith.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Attain - the magazine for the parents of children attending IAPS prep schools across the UK - www.attainmagazine.co.uk