[Music] before recklessly I'll speak I just wanted to thank her for stepping in william rag the conservative backbench MP was meant to be speaking this here tonight and when i open my emails this morning after sifting through her copious amounts of both hate mail and supportive mail i saw that he's busy writing some letters so i also assigned her to speak little moment was her birthday today so happy birthday Alexandra I feel I'm Alexander Galloway more than college ex returning officer to continue the case of the opposition [Applause] Thank You mr. president ladies and gentlemen
tonight's debate is personal it speaks to both our educational backgrounds and to the choices that many of us will make in the future for our own children but by making this debate about the failures of private schools to solve the larger issues of inequality in society the proposition have tried to play on your emotions tonight they have focused on charitable status on suggesting that private schools mostly do not affect educational outcomes but for them to win this evening they must show not merely that they have been so that private schools have been socially divisive or
that they offer greater opportunities to their pupils they must show that they have been a public disaster and they have failed to properly examine the motion at hand we must look at whether private schools can truly be held to blame for the real public disasters of a lack of social mobility and the lack of quality education available for every child in the United Kingdom today the motion tonight is this house believes private schools are a public disaster I ask you what is a public disaster I would suggest that something as catastrophic as a disaster implies
both the government and the public have a collective responsibility to take action and yes we have some of the highest rates of income inequality compared to wealthy countries social mobility in this country is so poor that it would take five generations of progress from a child for a poor you from you poor UK family compared to only two generations in Scandinavian countries to reach the national average wage no one doubts that this is a national shame but do we condemn private schools for this the proposition have talked a lot about the issue of the huge
inequalities facing British society and of course a more equal society or everyone and I mean everyone has the ability and opportunity to reach their full potential is something you should all support and strive for however they failed on two counts firstly they have not properly shown their assumption that private schools do in fact further inequality to be true most private schools are currently undertaking extensive programs aimed in fact improving social mobility the creation of free schools has been mentioned earlier linked with independent schools allows the sharing of teachers attempts to raise standards and even more
crucially attempts to raise aspirations for those in those schools similarly the provision of bursaries and scholarships admittedly only helping a select few but still they encourage those from less privileged backgrounds to seek out the benefits available at these schools the proposition has not addressed the fact that private schools serve merely as a symptom of the disease of inequality facing us today we cannot choose to blame private schools for the failures of our society as a whole but that's not to say that private schools cannot as I've shown at least try as they have done to
address these problems every one private schools included should have a moral motivation to help tackle tackle the larger issues of society we should be incentivizing private schools to continue this work to take further steps and to widen those who gain direct benefit from their existence secondly if we side with the propositions an argument tonight and agree that private schools are a public disaster then the onus must be on you and on the government to make drastic changes on the government to consider provision of private schools can we really say this would be an improvement to
our society aside from the obvious logistical and financial issues it would cause do we really want to condemn the educational excellence these organizations strive for and achieve attacking private schools doesn't serve to raise standards at the schools where pupils are not given the same opportunities finally I suggest you just look around you this evening your members of one of the foremost universities in the world you were sat in a debating chamber which has nearly two centuries of history we should be celebrating this excellence all excellence in its many forms but more importantly we should be
striving to bring the spot the opportunity and potential for excellence to as many young people as we can but tonight the real question the underlying question of this motion we must ask ourselves is what does a modern society require from its education system in an ideal world we want school pupils to have the opportunity to study a wide range of subjects become well-educated individuals able to follow their interests able to follow their intellectual curiosity we want school leavers to be politically engaged members of society who are able to understand current issues and able to contribute
substantively to the economic growth of the country to gain a higher standard of living for everyone this is not the situation in Britain today while there are indeed many state excellent state schools and in fact many poor independent schools on average there is a huge huge difference in the quality of education provided yes as we've heard tonight we have excellent excellent state schools we have grammar schools which send far more pupils to Oxford for example than some of the poorest independent schools but the important thing is that at any high achieving school but at the
best private schools in particular there's an environment created where students can achieve that full potential and leave as highly educated individuals society as a whole benefits from this promotion of excellence and from the positive contributions that these individuals are able to go on to make to society and this doesn't just have to be in an economic sense or even in any particularly measurable sense that can be broken down into figures in fact we see that private schools are often the main promoters of subjects like classics or even Modern Languages you're being studied less and less
at state schools for example 60% of pupils in state schools study no foreign language at all compared with only 16% in private schools continuing to teach these subjects from a young age and thus maintaining star strong culture traditions is imperative to our understanding of history and of our society and its culture it makes us richer society as a whole to value this level of excellence and to give our school pupils the chance to take these up to study these subjects however was of course missing from these are all the pupils who are stuck in mediocre
subpar poorer schools without the opportunities and benefits of a high quality education available to them which brings us to this the real public disaster facing us today is the failure of the government to provide a high-quality education to every school pupil the obligation should be on the government to improve the quality of all schools to make them a more attractive proposition and ultimately to ensure that every single child in this country benefits from a quality education in the United Kingdom today we see that the entrenched cultural divisions as we've seen tonight between those who view
state schools is providing a lesser quality education somehow and those who view independent schools as elitist perhaps we do better looking to countries like Switzerland which by all accounts highly educated prosperous nation in a nation which manages to operate a dual system without disadvantaging those who go to state schools or to schools in areas that may not be as well-off it balances the needs of the majority in state schools with the minority of those who are privately educated without falling back onto the same easy cliches or preconceptions we have here the key though to this
system is it is federally organised by making moving decision making power close to the pupils themselves schools are better able to select a more interesting curriculum to make the decisions which have the most benefit for their students similar to the greater autonomy enjoyed by private schools here ladies and gentlemen to vote with the proposition tonight means you're allowing yourself and more importantly allowing the government to abdicate responsibility for the real public disasters facing us the systemic inequality and lack of social mobility facing us today are shameful frankly and our government is not doing enough to
tackle these but to put that blame on private schools and to suggest that they are a public disaster it's wrong it fails to recognize the excellent education that many of them strive to achieve undermines their attempts at dressing the issues of wider social mobility which is a cause that they themselves cannot seek to solve but are at least making steps and to hopefully different diversify their own social make to give all children the high quality education they deserve for those reasons I beg you to oppose emotion tonight you
