PRIVATE schools should be celebrated and not blamed for the ‘social ills’ of the country, an East Lancashire headteacher is warning.

Simon Corns, headmaster at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, in Blackburn, which is attended by pupils from across East Lancashire, was speaking following a speech by the chairman of the Headmaster’s and Headmistresses’ Conference.

Richard Harman argued that independent schools help to improve social mobility, rather than hampering it.

He told the meeting that society should move beyond envy and take ‘collective pride’ in the fact that some of the best schools in the world are in Britain.

Mr Corns said for this reason, it would be ‘perverse’ to scapegoat them and blame them for ‘society’s ills’.

QEGS was a fee-charging school for hundreds of years, but became a free school this month. Despite students no longer paying the school still places strong emphasis on its ‘independent ethos’.

Mr Corns said: “I am firmly of the belief that they have a role to play in helping to improve education and am delighted by the strong line they are taking on the appalling standard of marking of public examinations.

“It is also great to see so many of the wealthier schools sponsoring academies and trying to ensure that the most important aspects of an independent education can reach through a different medium those who would not otherwise be able to afford it.

“These include a real focus on educating the whole child, involving pupils in many extra-curricular activities and not focusing to the exclusion of everything else on arid data.”

However Simon Jones, from the National Union of Teachers in East Lancashire, said: “I do not think claims independent schools support social mobility are at all founded in reality. I think that by the nature of them through the financial and other academic selection that they are by definition elitist.

“I think what has become a problem is the number of independent schools that have jumped on the band wagon and become free schools.

“They have caused chaos in planned education provision.

“I do not recognise independent schools as a force for good.”