To outsiders the world of the English boarding school can occasionally seem incomprehensibly foreign: the esoteric slang, the strangely archaic routines and the flamboyantly Edwardian dress codes tending to elicit amusement and derision in equal measure. These things can be, and generally are, seen as essentially harmless. They are throwbacks to bygone eras, of interest only to the eccentric antiquarian seduced by these pockets of Victorian idiosyncrasy which Britain has managed to preserve over the years with little but an occasional swipe from an embittered Guardian columnist. The cream of English boarding schools live on in their quirky outdated grandeur across the country, keeping themselves to themselves and their peculiar rituals intact.

Scattered across the English countryside, self-sufficient and withdrawn into themselves like monasteries, each one is an island. Even exceptions like Harrow, which has now been swallowed by the relentless march of London’s urban sprawl, still retain this essential characteristic by virtue of being built quite literally upon a hill, permitting its residents to survey London’s post-war suburbs with haughty disdain. This physical isolation means, of course, that the modern world’s pedagogical insistence on the primacy of socializing between the sexes at the crucial ages of adolescent development, poses a logistical conundrum.

Most, over the last thirty years, have responded with modernizing glee, ebulliently opening their doors to the opposite sex and proclaiming their new-found liberalism to the applauding outside world. Others, however, have defiantly resisted such knee-jerk reactions and instead settled upon the notion of the ‘social’. This institution has long bemused me. The idea of busloads of 14 year old girls being deposited at Eton’s doorstep every weekend for a round of forced socialising seems faintly surreal. But recently I noticed a particularly pernicious – yet apparently absolutely fundamental – aspect to this tradition. Overhearing a conversation amongst teenage girls of an all-girl boarding school and their mothers, it became readily apparent that the school in question organised their ‘socials’ according to a rota of some three or four boys' boarding schools. The girls' school, it seemed, offered their students a rotating diet of male company, with each weekend defined by which top boys' boarding school they would descended on this time.

No doubt the sociologist’s take on all this would be fascinating. Forced socialising of children of this age cannot, I assume, be particularly beneficial for its victims. And as I overheard this innocent conversation and the list of boys’ schools was unveiled, I was struck by the sheer geographical range of the schools – and how far away from the girls’ school each one was. I felt compelled – although social proprieties prevented me from doing so – to interject with what should be a fairly legitimate enquiry: what was wrong with a local- or, just possibly, state- boys’ school? Why is it considered normal that boys holed up some fifty odd miles away are called upon to give these girls their recommended dosage of inter-gender socialising? The answer – which hardly needs enunciating, so patently obvious it is when one considers the scale of institutionalised snobbery entrenched in the fabric of English society – is that the schools, or perhaps just the girl’s parents, automatically assume that like must mix with like.

Or, to put it another way, they are simply adhering to a natural instinct to ‘live among one’s own kind’. There must be plenty of lesser institutions throughout the local environs which could provide these girls with young male company. These institutions are tacitly, and probably unthinkingly, rejected, as the company of young Etonians, or young Harrovians, is considered not only infinitely preferable but also completely normal. The possibility of any other class of company for the girls is ignored, and, diminishing with it, their ability thereafter to integrate in the world outside the closed community of the boarding school network. Unlike the French lycée system where children of all backgrounds tend to be educated together and where a child from the sixteenth arrondissement can share a desk with one from an Algerian banlieue, the reality here is that those in the private school system, and particularly those who attend introverted boarding schools, tend to have minimal opportunity to come into contact with those from outside this closed social circle.

This is what it ultimately amounts to: educational apartheid. I am sure most of the parents of these children do not voice, or actively enforce, socially exclusionary policies by insisting that their children do not mix with children from anything other than the country’s top boarding schools. Nevertheless, this is what the system produces: isolated and self-sustaining, the schools’ students have little to no contact with the local communities and function in a different sphere entirely. For the students, the world, or, at least, their social community, is strictly limited to the private school network, or perhaps even narrower. Their ‘imagined community’ – the ‘reality’ of school which is perhaps more powerful than the ‘reality’ of the outside world - is a landscape of elite schools stretching across the country, but mostly clustering around London and the South-East; a selection which represents at best 5% of the country’s 3500 secondary schools (of which around 3/5 are non-fee paying).

To limit this to the country’s boarding schools would, however, be unfair. Social segregation is characteristic of most British private schools in their relationship with the state sector – meaning that children lucky enough to attend them rarely integrate in any meaningful sense with those who cannot afford to. Even young children attending private preparatory schools rarely mix with children at nearby primary schools. Games and sports are most often played against other private preparatory schools, regardless of the often ludicrous distance between them. Instead, most contact between the two spheres is negative – a 'town versus gown' relationship which only ossifies as the students grow older and attitudes harden. The resilience of Britain’s age-old class structure makes perfect sense when one recognises the pernicious effects of a school system which encourages a false sense of superiority amongst those who attend the best and most expensive, those which sit comfortably above and distinct from the nation’s comprehensive schools, and which systematically fails to promote genuine integration between the parallel worlds.

Eton College Chapel

The ‘charitable’ status of most traditional public schools is therefore laughable: rather than genuinely bringing benefit to a ‘sufficient section’ of the public, they are the preserve of a minority and, despite Labour-led attempts begun with the 2006 Charities Act to ensure that such schools reach out to their wider communities, that minority continues to enjoy privileges quite separate from the rest of society. ‘Community outreach’ undertaken by these schools in the name of charity (often as tokenistic as merely sharing sports equipment and after-hours use of playing fields) tends to take place completely separate from the day-to-day operation of the schools. They are ring-fenced activities which mean that the fee-paying students continue to be insulated from the less privileged.

And, what is more, on October 14th the Independent Schools (ISC) won a landmark legal battle against the Charity Commission regarding the nature and extent of this supposed public benefit meaning that attempts to force private schools to comprehensively restructure their approach to community outreach in order to remain registered as charities have floundered. The tribunal has ruled that private schools can essentially continue to function as they did before the 2006 Charity Act attempted to force them to act more decisively as charitable institutions (above all, by granting a higher number of bursaries for poor students). This legal victory for the ISC means that fee-paying schools will no longer be forced to give more bursaries to pupils from poorer backgrounds in order to claim millions of pounds in tax relief: an ‘all’s clear’ sign for the continuation of educational apartheid.

As for the lucky pupils themselves, this legal wrangling is utterly irrelevant. Even after they leave the gated community of the private school world, the distance between their world and the real world remains substantial. The social division our education system establishes from such a young age ensures that at university those who attended private school instinctively gravitate towards one another, taking advantage of their experience of an exclusive network which provides them with an armory of shared language, received assumptions and, of course, mutual friends.

Any account of the social lives of most Russell Group universities will acknowledge that there is an indisputable divide between those who attended private school and those who did not – and furthermore, a peculiar hardcore of those who attended the country’s most prestigious boarding schools (where social segregation is most deeply entrenched). Indeed, The Timeslast year published a feature on the University of Newcastle, where this is particularly visible. It pointed out that a Facebook group had recently been set up by some of the university’s state school students in response to feelings of marginalisation by the university’s extremely vocal private school minority. In Oxford, this social divide has traditionally been especially manifest, and, over the years, well-documented. Today, whilst it would be unfair to claim that there is rigid social zoning, it is nevertheless evident that there remain defiant cliques of public school boys (and perhaps to a lesser extent, girls) arriving in Oxford with their social groups firmly intact, who proceed to spend the next three years living more or less apart from those lacking insiders’ knowledge of their intimate and introverted social circles.

It seems a little bit futile to rail against the private school institution. Those in positions of power and influence have no vested interest in confronting the issues associated with it head on because the system confers considerable social benefits upon the lucky recipients even after university and into the outside world – and the rich and powerful tend to have been those lucky recipients. Added to the advantages of a good degree are the same old social networks rooted in the private school experience which not only provide alumni with invaluable personal contacts and lifelong affinities (in a phrase, the ‘old-school tie’), but also tend to shut out those outsiders ill-versed in the language and manners of the privileged.

This means that the corridors of power and influence, in particular the political and media elite, are still dominated disproportionately by those who attended private school. Over half of the top hundred journalists (according to a Sutton Trust survey), and as many as three out of five Conservative MPs, were educated at a private school. Private schools in Britain are clearly not going to be abolished at any point in the foreseeable future, and indeed it is highly unlikely that such an act could ever be legitimate in a free society. Real debate about their future is also unlikely considering the particular implications for educational policy deriving from the tendency for the country’s elites to be educated there – as has been the case for centuries. But criticisms, at least, must be leveled, and the recent conclusions of the Charity Tribunal’s review show a failure to understand the key issues. At the core, the issue is the social segregation which characterizes the system, which is divisive and only serves to compound the problem of unfair advantages conferred upon the children of the well-off. Furthermore, it reinforces class divisions and social stratification by creating the sense of a dichotomy between those who are part of the private school world and those who are not.

Few things in Britain are less class-neutral than its education system, and, in the 21st century, its social segregation is so far proving to be remarkably resilient to change. For private schools to be able to claim charitable status they must prove that they provide genuine public benefit. If they continue to be run solely for the class of the fee-paying children, and if they continue to operate in such a way that their pupils are segregated from the rest of the nation’s school-age population, then this simply cannot be the case.