Best Schools - A college for teen international students has launched in the UK’s southwestern city of Bristol

Based in the UK’s tenth largest city, Bristol International College will accept its first intake of around 50 students in September 2020.

The college will offer 2-year GCSE and 1-year IGCSE courses, along with an International Foundation Programme that will seek to prepare students to gain access to top UK and international universities.

“As a specialist college for 14- to 18-year olds, we can offer a best-of-British education experience, combined with exceptional wrap-around care for our younger students,” said co-founder and CEO John Milne.

“Places in the first year are limited to 50, which means we can offer an intimate setting with very small classes and exceptional care outside of the classroom,” he added.

Interest in the school is already high, according to Tony Evans co-founder and sales & marketing director.

“Bristol is a fantastic city in which to live and study,” he explained.

There is no better place to sample a “truly excellent English education”, he said, thanks to the city’s historical, geographical and cultural significance.

BIC is a joint venture between Constellation Group and Experio Life and aims to set students on paths to academic careers at UK and international universities.

The school will be based at Torwood House in the North West of the city, with accommodation located in the fashionable Clifton Village.

Banning private schools now won't magic away the inequality that blights society

Daily Record columnist Darren McGarvey argues that properly resourcing state schools should be the immediate priority in education

“I’ve had the privilege of visiting a couple. One was a boarding school and the other was more like your average school – if your average school was on a high dose of educational steroids.

There’s a great deal of hyperbole flying around about independent schools. It is, for example, assumed that every child who attends one comes from a wealthy family.

This is not the case. Many kids receive grants that contribute to the cost. Then there are families who put themselves under tremendous financial strain to give their kids an educational advantage.

Obviously, the majority of kids who are independently schooled do come from upper middle-class or upper-class backgrounds. But the first thing to remember before incautiously railing against the principle of private education is that we are talking about children and young people who did not choose which family or social class they were born into.

Of course, where private schooling is concerned, virtues such as integrity and competence are not always the product being advertised. What many parents are buying is access.

Access to gated communities full of opportunity and access to the self-belief (sometimes entitlement) that can propel an academically unremarkable individual to the very apex of society.

Ultimately, independent schools are communities designed around the educational needs of children whereas state schools are tailored to suit the financial constraints of government.

The issue here is about how state schools are inadequately resourced and, more broadly, how kids from different social backgrounds are, thus far, poorly integrated into one another’s lives.

For now, I believe private schools should be mandated to take on more children from poorer backgrounds, among other things, in return for their charitable status.

Calls to immediately abolish them may be cathartic and politically lucrative. But the assumption that society would just level itself out is, in my humble opinion, uneducated guesswork.”