Like any successful business, independent schools need to understand and deliver what their customers - fee-paying parents - want in order to stay ahead in the education marketplace. The survey results appear to substantiate that with advanced strategic planning many schools are successfully achieving this.

Discrimination is discrimination and like it or not, students from public schools do suffer at the hands of it. Why? When is any of this information relevant to whether or not you are a good enough candidate for a place at university or a job? The answer is never.

Many of the new education policies seem to focus on the short-term rather than long-term. Of course a rational person wouldn't want to defend Gove, but he's right about one thing. Change is needed.

As a boy in a boarding school myself many years ago, which was single sex until A levels, the arrival of girls in the sixth form was the worst possible distraction to teenage boys about to embark serious exams. Boys and girls perhaps learn differently and approach work in different ways.

The problem is that there is a dark side to the British boarding school system, which is nothing like the homo-erotic hazing and initiation of the 20th Century that everyone associates with boarding life.

Ofsted has announced plans to overhaul inspections for more than 1,000 private schools amid concerns that teaching is "seldom inspiring". Under the...

This surge in tutoring comes from a growth in the number of universities and increasing numbers of school leavers aiming for university. It's university or bust time, Chinese students and parents are feeling the strain of university competition.

More than half of parents would send their child to private school if they could afford to, a poll suggests. Many believe that fee-paying schools p...

The Common Entrance exam is used as an admissions process for academically selective independent secondary schools. Children attend preparatory school to ready themselves for the exams and sit them aged 13.

I myself went to Eton. By default that makes me an Old Etonian. But I'm fed up with being defined as one by the likes of Miliband in some lazy, self-satisfied act of stereotyping.

What seems obvious to people who went to a school where the closest thing to a tuck shop was the Chicken Spot over the road, is not what they believe over at Britain's top schools. Ask most Wickamists, Etonians or Salopians* and they'll tell you that getting into Oxbridge from a state school is easier than looting trainers in a riot.

Mastering several languages makes it possible to get rid of the tyranny of monolingualism in the sense that it does away with the very narrow view of the world whereby language and reality have an unchangeable equivalence.

So, my logic tells me, the country has to as well. Interest rates, quantitive easing and stuff (yes, 'stuff') might paper over the cracks, but for the national bank balance to improve we need to bring more money in from the outside. From overseas.

A large number of independent schools have pledged to open their doors to talented pupils from non-privileged backgrounds if the government agrees to ...

Here's some advice about getting into the big two that's a little less 'be yourself' and a little more 'prepare like so'. I graduated from Oxford a couple of years ago and while I was there I worked at University open days and for my college as an interviews chaperone. I know the system, and in my next three posts I'll reveal what you need to do to get in.

A girls' boarding school today topped an A-level league table for the fifth year in a row. Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire took the first spot aga...

Private school fees have increased by significantly more than inflation over the past decade, making it difficult for people in many occupations to af...

State-school pupils in affluent areas may perform poorly in their GCSEs as their teachers are more likely to feel under-paid and move to the private s...

Well fancy that. Boys get A-level results too? We never realised... After years of dominating the headlines and front pages, the girls have been pu...