No-Frills
Public Schools: Independants' Day
January 22nd, 2005
High Quality affordable private education is many
parents' dream. So can a businessman from Dubai make
it come true?
Article by Wendy Wallace
Photographs by Stewart Freedman
In entrepreneur Sunny Varkey’s fledgling chain
of English private schools, Sherfield outside Basingstoke
is calibrated as “premium”. Its vast, oak-paneled
lobby is more plush hotel than school, eerily quiet,
with car magazines on the coffee table. Varkey draws
inspiration partly from hotels, with front-of-house
staff having hospitality training in how to meet and
greet his parent-customers; the silence is because
this is its reception area, and not for children.
Launched last autumn, the school has just 113 students
and 22 teaching staff rattling around the extensive
grounds and buildings; meanwhile, more parents come
daily to look at what is on offer.
Sherfield School senior pupils walk to class.
Dubai-based Varkey, 47, is throwing down a gauntlet
to independent schools in this country. His company,
Global Education Management Systems (GEMS), promises
affordable but high-quality private schools for those
fed up with both hit-or-miss state provision and overpriced
independents. Varkey, who plans to invest £100
million here, has recently acquired 13 schools in
England to add to his portfolio; within five years,
he aims to buy 30, build 20 new ones and have 120
more under GEMS management.
The Varkey schools in the United Arab Emirates –
there are 25, including one with 5,000 students working
on two shifts – were inspired by English public
schools. After starting out by teaching in their own
home, Varkey’s parents opened their first school,
Our Own English High School, in Dubai in 1968. Varkey
went into banking, but remained close to the family
firm. When he took over in the Eighties, he opened
four more Our Own English Schools – plus “Cambridge”,
“Winchester” and “Westminster”
schools.
Now, Varkey is invoking the characteristics of his
Middle Eastern schools in his bid to reinvent public
schools here. He promises a forward-looking, all-round
education at a reasonable price to aspirational working
families. For day pupils only, they will come in three
price brackets – budget, mid-market and premium.
The budget schools, pitched at around £5,000
per year, are divested of some of the non-essential
trappings of privilege. “The schools are for
parents who want their children to go to good universities,”
he says, “who are really not into golf and squash
courts.”
GEMS schools will court a potentially lucrative market
segment – the half of all parents who would pay
for the quality private education if they could afford
it, according to one survey carried out by MORI last
year. Currently, only seven per cent of children go
to private schools. In the longer term, GEMS directors
must hope that British governments might go the way
of Dutch and Swedish ones, by handing out vouchers
for families to spend where they wish. The fact that
the Government, in its new five-year plan for education
specifically rules this out, proves that it has at
least been considered. The Tories, in recent policy
statements, are promising if elected to give vouchers
of £5,500 per year per child for “core
education”; parents would be able to buy private
provision if they chose, but could not use the money
to subsidise a place costing more.
