TL/DR? Extend the principles of the Cambridge BID to cover all private education establishments and impose a levy on all of them to fund new activities bringing children from all backgrounds together.
The problem? It would need ministers to move the necessary regulations in Parliament to establish this – reflecting our over-centralised system of government.
That said, if the regulations were drawn up flexibly enough, they could cover any local authority area in England – mindful that it’s likely to be a devolved matter for Wales & Northern Ireland, and almost certainly is in Scotland.
This is something I’ve covered before.
“The big public policy question for local institutions irrespective of sector is: “how do we as a city ensure that schools & colleges are getting students from all backgrounds to mix & get to know each other?””
https://cambridgetownowl.com/2022/02/22/whose-cambridge-is-it-anyway/
“Some families can’t afford to pay to do fun things in Cambridge and that’s not fair”
As one nine year old told me a few weeks ago at The Playlaws. Personally I’d rather see a massive overhaul and restructure of local government to enable councils to solve these issues at a local level without recourse to ministers, but that’s unlikely to happen in the near future, if at all. In order to get both a sustainable stream of funding (rather than the Section 106 funding that funded The Playlaws programme of events) the principle is to empower local councils to raise revenue via a levy on private educational establishments and language schools using proposed [by me!] new legal powers similar to BIDs to create new local organisations that can organise and commission activities that bring children and young people from all backgrounds together.
“Why?”
Three reasons.
The first is that Cambridge has under-provided for most of our city’s children and teenagers for as long as I can remember. It still is.
The second is that while those educated privately – especially at the larger and older schools such as The Stephen Perse Foundation schools, and The Leys – have the sorts of extra curricular activities and resources most other state schools could only dream of, the lack of access and growing inequalities in our city does not bode well for our collective future.
The third reason is that – and in particular for summer programmes, new friendships, contacts, and connections are made in our city by children from all over the world with affluent parents (the fees are not cheap!) yet the teenagers of our city are excluded from those programmes. I only learnt that such programmes existed after I left Cambridge to go to university because an acquaintance from Italy mentioned she was going on one.
It just strikes me as unfair that the children of our city are excluded from the benefits of activities that are being hosted in their home town. Furthermore, it’s not beyond the influence of well-connected people in our city – town and gown, to get this changed.
Because if the city is not for the children who live in and grow up in it, who is it for?
Food for thought?
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