Taxpayers spend £250m sending army officers’ children to elite public schools including Eton and Harrow

TAXPAYERS spent £246 million in the last three years subsidising the private education of officers’ children attending elite schools such as Eton, Harrow and Gordonstoun. In the last year alone just eight leading public schools received nearly £2 million under the Ministry of Defence scheme which helps servicemen and women pay school fees. Tony Blair‘s old school Fettes was paid £441,027 and Eton, which has educated nineteen prime ministers including David Cameron, was given nearly £270,000. While the overall annual figure of £80 million remains almost unchanged, Eton, Harrow (£183,000), Marlborough College (£346,000) and Shrewsbury School (£231,000) all enjoyed bumper years, seeing increased MoD payments.

LIST OF TOP SCHOOLS AND FEES PAID BY MOD (from my Freedom of Information Request).

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Author: robertverkaik1

I'm a journalist and author writing about security, law and education. My first book, Jihadi John, the Making of a Terrorist, was published in 2016 by Oneworld. My second book is on private education and public schools and will be published in 2018. View all posts by robertverkaik1

11 thoughts on “Taxpayers spend £250m sending army officers’ children to elite public schools including Eton and Harrow”

Estel Eforgan says:

April 17, 2018 at 5:07 pm

Mr Verkaik, can you say if you went to a public school yourself? You’re damned if you did or if you didn’t, so might as well tell. Looking forward to your book.

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1. robertverkaik1 says:
  
  April 17, 2018 at 8:03 pm
  
  Hi Estel. It’s a question I’m sure I am going to be asked quite a lot. So I may as well get used to answering it! And of course you are right, people will draw conclusions that suit their own prejudices about private education. I was hoping to try to get people to focus on the topic rather than individual education backgrounds. But having said all that, the answer is in the book!
  
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  1. Estel Eforgan says:
    
    April 18, 2018 at 2:47 pm
    
    That’s very kind of you Mr Verkaik. It’s just the author’s background is bound to affect the view of the subject. It’s difficult to remain objective. I just finished reading The History of Harrow School by Tyerman, an Oxford don who did an authorised history. Most books on the subject are apologias for the schools, but Tyerman seems genuinely appalled by what he found!
    
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  2. robertverkaik1 says:
    
    April 19, 2018 at 10:06 am
    
    I was very conscious of how my own background would influence the book and so went out of my way to interview as many public school headmasters as possible as well as those in government who have been privately educated. I too found Tyerman’s book very good, especially on Charles Merivale and the Harrow’s woeful interpretation of its charitable purpose in the 1800s and treatment of its ‘charity boys’.
    
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  3. Estel says:
    
    April 19, 2018 at 12:31 pm
    
    I went through the Harrow Registers, and the snobbery was appalling, in the descriptions of father’s trade and social position. There is a great video on the net of a debate on the subject of Public schools, with David Aaronovitch and Francis Wheen – and awful, smug Harrow HM Barnaby Lenon. From him, doesn’t look as though attitudes there (or abuse for that matter) have changed much. Just the rationalisations for these things. Hope your book has an effect!
    
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  4. robertverkaik1 says:
    
    April 19, 2018 at 12:39 pm
    
    Thanks. Are you doing something on this subject yourself? Mr Lenon gets a good run-out in my book.
    
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Estel says:

April 19, 2018 at 4:22 pm

Sorry if he is a close friend! Mine is a long-term project, part fascination part horror as I am from a very poor background. I hope to quote your book!

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1. robertverkaik1 says:
  
  April 20, 2018 at 10:00 am
  
  I interviewed him for the book and I have to say he was very open and helpful. Good luck with your project and I’d be flattered if you get round to quoting from the book. There’s plenty in it you should like!
  
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Estel says:

July 25, 2018 at 12:46 pm

Your book’s out! The excitement! I’ve been going through old copies of Cherwell in the Bod, this is 1979-81. Awful stuff! Unversity and public school students from the stone age. Plus there are some public schools with direct connections to Oxford colleges, who get a certain number of their own pupils into these colleges every year, no questions asked! Apparently it’s well known. Ian Hislop’s school, Ardingly is one, they have a connection with Magdalen. Naughty old Ian said the reason why he went to Magdalen was because he liked the buildings!

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1. robertverkaik1 says:
  
  July 25, 2018 at 1:15 pm
  
  Thanks Estel. It would be interesting to know how much this still goes on. So while Eton and Winchester may say that their ancient connections to respectively Kings College, Cambridge and New College, Oxford, hold no advantage today I wonder how many of their pupils still win places there? Be interesting to see what you’ve come up with.
  Best, Robert.
  
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  1. Estel says:
    
    July 27, 2018 at 11:35 am
    
    Here’s what a long-time librarian at the Bodleian told me,
    ‘There were similar tie-ups between King’s Cambridge and Eton and New College and Winchester. I was told that in the 18th or 19th centuries when students graduated from King’s, the Provost would get in his coach, drive down to Eton and come back with replacements – no exams, of course. AND in those days King’s would present students for degrees .without them having to sit exams’
    Should be easy to find out if these connections are still there. Personally I am getting angrier the more I find out about how these things work….. Feel free to use my email direct on esteleforgan@gmail.com
    
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SECURITY AND TERRORISM

By Robert Verkaik

Sunday Telegraph. July 29th 2018

RICH RUSSIAN oligarchs are deserting Britain’s public schools, as the economic reality of the new cold war starts to bite.
Figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,300 private schools in the UK, reveal a steep decline in numbers of Russian pupils being taught in the UK over the last three years.
The trend is believed to have been exacerbated by the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March this year.
Relations between Russia and Britain soured after Sergei and his daughter Yulia were targetted by the Russian state using a soviet-made poison called novichok.
A number of Russian diplomats and their families, including children at leading public schools, were expelled from the UK as Theresa May had no hesitation in blaming the Kremlin for master-minding the attack.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/29/russian-oligarchs-deserting-britains-public-schools-economic/

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YULIA SKRIPAL and the ‘art of disappearing’: Assuming a new identity in the internet age. By Robert Verkaik. The i June 25th.

The lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia will never be the same again. After surviving a murder attempt alleged to be by the Russian state, they must now prepare to disappear, take on new identities and say goodbye to family and friends for ever. Yulia Skripal left hospital this week and will have already entered a shadow state of safe houses, false passports and Government-issued credit cards. She still needs medical care and may have begun her secret new life in the safety of a private medical clinic, away from the attention of the media, including unscrupulous members of the Russian press who found their way into Salisbury hospital where the Skripals were being treated.

Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/yulia-skripal-disappearing-new-identity/

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Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

6 JANUARY 2018 • 9:30PM

FORMER SPIES who received six-figure redundancy pay-offs have been re-employed by MI6 as part of a massive £1.2 billion spend by Britain’s security services on hundreds of agents and outside contractors.
Three MI6 officers who received compensation packages are among 73 spies to be rehired by the service in a scramble to reverse staff cuts in the wake of the heightened terror threat facing the UK.
The Government’s top secret listening station, GCHQ, has rehired 200 former employees while MI5 has taken on just seven former officers.
But MPs have criticised the recruitment policy as “very poor value for money” which “highlight a lack of adequate skills planning.”
Members of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in their annual report: “Whilst it may always be necessary to re-hire some former staff in exceptional circumstances, this should be kept to a minimum given the potentially significant costs involved.”
The overall cost of hiring consultants and contractors for last year reached £1.2 billion, a third of the combined budget of MI6, GCHQ and MI5. The report found that on average these temporary contractors were being paid up to £144,000 – twice the annual salary of their in-house staff.
In 2011 it was reported that twelve senior MI6 officers had won generous pay and pension packages as part of a secret deal struck with Ministers, ahead of a clampdown on civil servant pay in 2010.
The new report said “This Committee previously criticised an expensive redundancy exercise run by SIS in 2011/12, when it made payments to 111 staff to take early retirement. Given that a few years later it is looking to increase staff numbers by considerably more than this, it does not appear to have been well planned.”
The head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, refused to justify the policy, telling MPs: “I make it a rule not to comment on decisions made by my predecessors… I was not in the leadership then… It was an extraordinary time, do you remember? It was just after the banking crisis and all of that”.
MI6 is in the process of boosting its staff numbers from 2,368 full-time equivalent staff at March 2014 to 3,231 staff by March 2020 – a 36% increase in headcount over six years.
Questioned on whether it would be possible to bring in so many new staff so quickly, MI6 said: “So we are very aware that it is a challenge. If I focus on the absorption as opposed to the recruitment for the moment, a lot of the investment that we have been doing this year is in the things that will enable that, recruitment included, and up powering our learning and development effort, and we are looking really hard at what sort of people we bring in and where we are going to put them and then making sure they are going to be alongside people who are more experienced.”
MI6 was also asked to justify a £800,000 cost for employing outside business consultants to reorganise the structure of the service.
The report, pubished last month, found that GCHQ was facing competition from private tech and internet companies who could offer bigger pay-packets to attract its staff to the private sector.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

A British Muslim man who claimed he was discriminated against after being stopped and questioned by police under terrorism laws has won the right to challenge the secret intelligence used against him.

The case could have far-reaching implications for the security services who use undisclosed intelligence to conduct tens of thousands of random stops at airports each year.

Shayab Miah, from Southampton, was stopped and detained for an hour by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport after returning from India in August 2009.

Later Mr Miah, who was released without further action, complained to the Metropolitan Police that his detention was not based on a random stop but motivated by religious discrimination.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik
18 NOVEMBER 2017 • 10:00PM

British spies have been citing a controversial security company, which is run by a former KGB-trained intelligence expert, to help warn the public about cyber and hacking attacks.
GCHQ, the UK’s frontline in cyber defence, has five times in the last year published “threat alerts” based on Moscow-headquartered agency, Kaspersky Lab.
Last week Kaspersky Lab faced claims that its software maybe being used by the Kremlin to spy on British banking customers.
Yet, as recently as November 10th, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, issued a threat alert citing Kaspersky research about the dangers of using dating apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/18/british-spies-using-controversial-security-company-run-former/

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Author: robertverkaik1

11 thoughts on “Taxpayers spend £250m sending army officers’ children to elite public schools including Eton and Harrow”

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