The Assisted Places Scheme was established in the UK by the Conservative government in 1980. 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. 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 government announced that the funds were instead to be 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^[who?] the result of abolition has been to reduce the social range of pupils educated at independent schools. Some private schools have taken steps to provide their own funding for pupils from poorer backgrounds through bursaries.

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 him or her self 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.

[edit] External links

• Assisted places information on TeacherNet

[edit] References

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