The Assisted Places Scheme was established in the UK by the Conservative government in 1980. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located The Conservative Party (officially the Conservative and Unionist Party) is a Political party in the United Kingdom. Children who could not afford to go to fee-paying independent schools were provided with free or subsidised places - if they were able to score within the top 10-15% of applicants in the school's entrance examination. An independent school is a school which is not dependent upon national or local Government for financing its operation and is instead operated by tuition charges gifts and By 1985, the scheme catered for some 6,000 students per year.
Claiming the practice to be elitist and wasteful of public funds, the Labour government of Tony Blair, upon its election in 1997, abolished the Assisted Places Scheme. The Labour Party is a Political party in the United Kingdom. Founded at the start of the 20th century it has been since the 1920s the principal party of the Anthony Charles Lynton "Tony" Blair (born 6 May 1953 is a British Politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to The funds were instead used to reduce class sizes in state nursery schools. However, children already in receipt of an assisted place were allowed to complete the remainder of that phase of their education.
Some believe the result of abolition has been to reduce the social range of pupils educated at independent schools. Some schools have taken steps to provide their own funding for pupils from poorer backgrounds.
Surveys of the scheme indicated that relatively few (e. g. 7% of) assisted-place students actually came from working-class backgrounds. Around half the fathers of assisted-place students had professional or managerial jobs. In most cases, a parent of an assisted-place pupil had themselves been to an independent school. Another noted feature of the scheme was that around a third of assisted-place students came from single-parent families, again with the majority of parents having been educated privately themselves. [1]
A successor to the Assisted Places Scheme, known as the Open Access Scheme, has been established and financed by the Girls' Day School Trust in partnership with the Sutton Trust. The Girls' Day School Trust (GDST is a group of 29 Independent schools in England and Wales, catering for pupils aged 3 to 18 The Sutton Trust is an educational charity in the United Kingdom which aims to provide educational opportunities to young people from non-privileged backgrounds The Conservative party has advanced some policy ideas for revised versions of the Assisted Places Scheme, with support from private-sector organizations.
See also
Assisted places information on TeacherNet
References
- ^ John Fitz; Tony Edwards; Geoff Whitty (1989) The Assisted Places Scheme: An Ambiguous Case of Privatization British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 37, No. 3, The Privatisation of Education. (Aug. , 1989), pp. 222-234.
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