Independent schools 'teach pupils not to think'

Independent schools may be spoon-feeding pupils and so damaging their ability to think for themselves in the hope of achieving high academic results, the private sector's inspection service has warned.

Tasks at fee-paying schools tend to be "over-directed" so that pupils do not "have sufficient opportunity or incentive to think for themselves", the service said in its first annual report.

The study, by Tony Hubbard, director of the Independent Schools Inspectorate, said independent schools must resist the pressure to become "exam factories".

However, the intensive preparation of private school pupils for tests and examinations often amounts to spoon-feeding, his report found.

"Spoon-feeding works," Mr Hubbard said in the report, based on nearly 200 inspections of schools in 2000-2001. "But it works at the risk of something British schools have always been good at: turning out young people able to be inventive, creative, independent-minded, even awkward.

"Examination and its marking, carefully moderated and published to be fair and predictable, can be reduced to a formula. However, the economic, political and social world for which pupils are being prepared is characterised not by predictability but by its opposite: uncertainty, unpredictability and the need to be able to make rational decisions based on incomplete information or in face of conflicting attitudes and opinions."

Teachers' excessive concern with exams causes the lack of freedom in fee-paying senior schools, inspectors found. But even preparatory schools have narrowed their curriculum to focus on getting pupils through senior schools' entrance exams.

Mr Hubbard warned that this meant "aesthetic and practical aspects of curriculum tend to take a back seat" in private junior schools. "In schools faced with a plethora of different tests or examinations for different pupils, teachers often start to concentrate on setting practice papers at the expense of pursuing the subject in a broad and balanced way," he said.

"The majority of schools manage to avoid these pitfalls. But there remains a minority, where ... the breadth, balance and coherence of programmes suffers distortion and narrowing in the final year or two."

Standards in fee-paying schools are high, Mr Hubbard found. But, he said, "given the advantages of many of the pupils ... they should be".

At independent schools, 94 per cent of pupils achieve at least five good GCSE passes. But at comparable state schools – those where few pupil are eligible for free school meals – 97 per cent of students achieved this standard, he said.

However, more than half (53 per cent) of GCSE entries from independent schools were awarded the coveted A* or A grades last summer, compared to 16.1 per cent of all entries.

The Independent Schools Inspectorate is the inspection arm of the Independent Schools Council, which represents 1,270 fee-paying schools. It inspects all ISC schools in England and Wales every six years.

* Headteachers will be told to cut the cost of their school uniforms after a survey by the Department for Education and Skills found parents were forced to spend an average of £157 on each child.