My Old School Bites the Dust

…and it wasn't Labour wot done it

Peter Barr / Playing Fields /

It would be something of an understatement to say that I don’t hold my schooldays in much esteem, yet I couldn’t help but notice that my old boarding school Mount St Mary’s college went into administration last week, after 183 years in existence. This is a school with a lot of history. It was established by the Jesuits in the village of Spinkhill, just outside Sheffield, in 1842. Gerard Manley Hopkins taught there briefly, and complained that smoke from Sheffield factories was making him ill. When I was there from 1968-1972, it was surrounded by collieries and slagheaps - a little microcosm of middle-class Englishness in one of the most intensely-mined regions in Derbyshire.

Today, all that has gone; if you drive out to Spinkhill towards Staveley, you pass through a featureless conglomeration of former mining villages where car showrooms, building yards, fast food restaurants and identikit housing estates have largely swallowed up the old industrial core of Victorian terraced houses, workingmen’s clubs and nineteenth century chapels.

Just beyond Killamarsh and Renishaw, the houses give way to gentle hills and cultivated fields, and you can see the cupola of the 1924 Memorial Chapel, modelled on the Duomo in Florence, rising up from the playing fields of Mount St Mary’s. Today the slag heaps and colliery towers that once dominated the landscape have all disappeared, the old school buildings have been modernised, and newer annexes have been built. Since the late 70s, the school has been co-educational, and the Jesuits have relinquished direct control to a charitable trusteeship, which offered an education in the Jesuit tradition rather than a Jesuit education per se.

I arrived there in September 1968, with my fees paid for by Cambridge City Council, because my mother did not want to follow a psychiatrist’s advice to send me to what was then known as a school for ‘maladjusted children’. As an emotional casualty of my parents’ catastrophic marriage in the West Indies, I certainly did not meet late sixties standards of an ‘adjusted’ boy, but I can say with some certainty that the school did not transform me into a faithful soldier of Christ.

In Guyana, I had gone to a Jesuit day school, where corporal punishment did not exist, and Jesuits and lay staff alike were young, idealistic and empathetic. ‘The Mount’ was very different. Within a few weeks of my arrival, I was flogged with a strap by a notoriously vicious priest for talking to another boy in the dorm after lights out.

This was a harsh punishment for a 12-year-old, but I quickly learned that this was how things were done. Violence was embedded in the school from top to bottom like a stick of rock. In my first swimming lesson, I was held under water by an older boy who I had even never spoken to before. On one occasion, I was doing my homework in an empty classroom when the same boy came into the room with two of his mates, dragging a boy named Kelly who they regarded as a swot.

I sat in silence at the back of the room while they made him strip to his underpants, and he cried and pleaded with them to leave him alone. But they threw his clothes out the window and forced him to run outside to get them.

I had never seen anything like this before. The Jesuits didn’t approve of bullying, but some of it was built into the school system. Prefects or ‘captains’ were entitled to slap you around and impose unlimited ‘PE sessions’ as punishments for whatever infraction they found you guilty of. I remember many winter afternoons, holding a brick in each hand with an outstretched arm, or performing endless press ups, while these petty sixth form tyrants stood by eating jam and toast.

The school still proclaims its commitment to ‘improvement in living and learning for the greater glory of God and the common good.’ I didn’t learn much about the common good, but I often wrote out the initials AMDG, for the Latin motto ‘Ad maiorem Dei gloria’ that accompanied the chits we were obliged to write out, as part of the Jesuit system of corporal punishment.

On the appointed day, we were expected to present these ‘bills’ at the punishment room, where some bryl-creamed Jesuit would sign them and administer the specified ‘cracks’ on the hands with the shoe-shaped, rubber-cased whalebone ferula. Six and sometimes nine was the common number, though it had been known in the past to reach twelve or even twice twelve.

We then made our way out into the corridor, past the gauntlet of gawkers looking to see who cried and who didn’t, and bathed our stinging, swollen hands in cold water.

All this was entirely normal, in this school and many others, at a time when the rod was not spared, and few parents questioned it.

I often received these punishments, which oddly - and 21st century readers in a more educationally-enlightened era may not be at all surprised by this - did not fill me with a greater appreciation of God’s glory. Nor did I benefit from the Jesuitical commitment to ‘develop the whole person’ and ‘create an awareness of God’s presence in all things.’

My experience was closer to Blake’s description of the ‘Garden of Love’ where ‘priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds/And binding with briars, my joys & desires.’ Like Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s If, I learned to despise the school and most of its ways, whether it was high mass or the militarist antics of the CCF.

I left school at sixteen, and year later I heard from former ‘Mountaineers’ who I had known in those days, that I had missed out on the best part of the school. I also learned that the school has changed for the better. The ferula and its variants have long since passed into history. Some years ago, I visited the grounds with my young daughter, and was amazed how wealthy it had become. Everything about it oozed wealth, from the gleaming modern classrooms to the state-of-the-art sports facilities.

School’s Out - Forever

For these reasons, I was surprised to discover last week that the school had closed with immediate effect, along with its prep school Barlborough Hall. In the statement announcing its closure, the school attributed its decision to go into administration to ‘increased financial pressures, in line with the wider challenges affecting the independent education sector in the UK, including the addition of VAT and the removal of business rates for independent schools.’

I didn’t feel the sadness that many people connected to the school have expressed, but nor did I take any satisfaction from it. I recognize that many people will have very different memories to my own, and whose sadness is entirely genuine. But there are also those whose sadness is not genuine, and whose outrage at the school’s closure is mainly due to its usefulness as a stick to beat the Labour government with.

In an article last week, the Mail lamented the fact that a ‘prestigious independent school’, which has ‘served the community for nearly 200 years’ has ‘suddenly shut down, blaming financial pressures of Labour’s tax raid on fees.’ The fact that Mount St Mary’s school fees are £21, 420 a year might raise questions about which ‘community’ the school is serving, but that was not the purpose of the Mail’s crocodile tears. Its journalist made it clear that another independent school has gone down because of Labour’s imposition of VAT, and a depressingly-rabid pack of commentators rushed to the Mail’s below-the-line section to gnaw on these chunks of red meat.

Some ranted about ‘commies’, ‘3rd form Marxist illiterates in the Labour party’, and ‘communism lite’; others condemned Labour’s ‘politics of envy’, and ‘Labour’s brain dead voters.’

‘This what communism is all about - total state control and liebour is getting there’, observed someone from Albania. Well no, it really isn’t what communism is about. And whatever Keir Starmer is, he he is not Enver Hoxha.

Others - no guesses who they will be voting for in the next election - predicted that the school will be turned into an ‘immigration hotel’ and that ‘Starmer will be itching to fill this beautiful building with boat people’.

Were it not such barking racist nonsense, this would be a perfect symmetry in the minds of these suburban swamp-dwellers: commie Labour shuts down our historic schools and then turns them into migrant hotels.

Facebook also overflowed with messages from parents of former pupils and other commentators, expressing their sadness at the school’s closure, some of which echoed the ‘politics of envy’ line as its principal cause. Once again, I don’t deny these people the right to their sadness, but their outrage is misplaced, and more often than not, entirely disingenuous. Because there are many reasons to be critical of this Labour government, but requiring independent schools to pay VAT and business tax is not one of them.

In a 2024 parliamentary debate on removing the VAT exemption, the then-shadow education secretary Helen Hayes claimed that average independent school fees were £15, 200, compared with an average of £8,000 in state school spending per pupil.

These differences matter. A 2019 report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission on ‘elitist Britain’ found that 39 percent of the government’s cabinet were privately educated; that 44 percent of newspaper columnists, 59 percent of permanent secretaries, 52 percent of diplomats and 48 percent of FTSE 350 CEOs had attended independent schools.

In effect, independent schools are one of the ways in which a class-bound English society perpetuates the social distortions that result from class privilege, by paying for an elite education - and the connections that often come with it - that is unavailable to those who cannot afford it and that places a disproportionate number of independent school pupils in positions of power and leadership.

Supporters of independent school often comment on the sacrifices that parents make to put their children through these schools, but these are voluntary sacrifices, intended to give their children a heads up. Nor is Labour opposing meritocracy and ‘dumbing down’ by removing the VAT exemption. In a true meritocracy, every child would have the same quality of education, regardless of whether they enter the educational system from a different social background.

We don’t have that. In fact, we don’t even come close to it, and removing the VAT exemption is the least that any government can do to bring about some level of parity in opportunity.

It’s not even clear that VAT brought about the downfall of Mount St Mary’s. While I am not privy to its internal finances, the school has been in financial difficulties for the last nine years, despite what it calls a ‘generous’ £3 million loan from the Jesuits.

It has a capacity for 400 pupils. Using my crude maths, 400 pupils paying £21,000 a year gives you an annual income of roughly £8,400,000. If you can’t run a school on a budget like that, then it’s very likely that you have been doing something wrong. And there is another factor at play here, which was missing from the Daily Mail’s ‘going to the dogs’ lament.

In theory, Mount St Mar’s has capacity for 400 pupils. Yet in 2016 an Independent Schools Inspectorate report found that it had 315 pupils, including 79 boarders. Another inspection in April this year found that the number had increased to 329 pupils, only 38 of which were boarders. The removal of the VAT exemption may have accelerated the drop in numbers, but it clearly did not cause it.

While the actual numbers are not entirely clear, there is evidence to suggest that numbers of pupils at independent and state schools are falling, in the former case because parents who would normally send their kids to such schools were already cash-strapped, like everyone else, before the removal of the VAT exemption, to the point when they can no longer afford the ‘sacrifices’ required. And also because, demographically, the number of pupils in all UK schools is falling.

The extent to which falling enrolment unravelled Mount St Mary’s remains to be seen - if it ever is seen. Amid the outpouring of sadness and anti-Labour outrage, the school’s administrators have escaped largely unscathed. Yet the trustees announced that the school was going to administration only days after it had been advertising an open day in September. Teachers only learned that they had lost their jobs on Facebook, and pupils in the middle of their education have effectively been left to fend for themselves.

A quick search on Facebook yesterday found at least two creditors have not been paid by the school for services rendered. As the National Education Union has pointed out, this is not the way a responsible organization behaves. In short, there is clearly a lot more to be revealed about why Mount St Mary’s fell apart, but the manner of collapse is very much in keeping with the dysfunctional management that characterises so many British institutions.

And there are many reasons to criticize this Labour government, but the ignominious collapse of my old school is not one of them.