Best Schools - Bolton School contributes more than £20 million to the local economy

Research by Oxford Economics found that that in the last financial year Bolton School, contributed £22.1 million towards Bolton's gross domestic product (GDP).

This represents 0.46 per cent of the town’s entire GDP.

Further afield, Bolton School contributes more than £33 million to the UK’s GDP, a figure which comprises the school’s own GDP plus that of its UK-based supply chain and the induced GDP which is generated through the spending of staff and the school’s suppliers’ staff.

Philip Britton, headmaster of the boys’ division said: "Independent schools save the tax payer £3.5 billion every year, through educating children who would otherwise be expected to take up a place in the state-funded sector.

"Had all independent schools ceased to exist in the 1940s, this new report found that UK GDP would have been 3.6 per cent lower, or £73 billion, than it was in 2017.

"In the last year alone independent schools contributed £13.7 billion to the UK economy, generating £4.1 billion of annual tax revenues and supporting 303,000 jobs — more than the total number employed in the city of Liverpool.

"Aside from financial input into the economy, our pupils contribute enormously to the region through their volunteering and work in the community and the school collaborates regularly with local state schools and opens its doors to the public."

‘The Impact of Independent Schools on the UK Economy’ was commissioned by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) and supported by RSAcademics.

The independent sector encompasses a vast range of schools, many non-selective or with low fees. They are not the agents of social division portrayed in the press

Lord Lexden, president of the Independent Schools Association, writes in The Spectator debunking some of the myths that surround the sector.

Will independent schools ever be sensibly discussed in the media, in politics or over the supper tables of the nation? It is a long-standing national habit to view all independent schools as aloof, expensive, exclusive and barred to almost everyone in the land. The impression is now gaining ground that the cost has become so great (the figure £40,000 a year crops up regularly) that soon only Russian oligarchs and other members of the world’s super-rich elite will be able to afford them.

This takes to extreme lengths a misapprehension that all independent schools, of which there are 2,500, have been created in the image of a handful of famous public schools. Discussion revolves around the famous few as if they were typical representatives of the sector as a whole. The traditional refrain never alters. A fixation with a small number of ‘faux-Gothic spires’, as a new book rudely describes some of their cardinal features, means that the entire independent sector stands accused of playing a central role in creating and sustaining deep social division in our country.

the tremendous variety and diversity which are the chief features of today’s independent sector have been lost in the never-ending debate about its role.

Its schools range in size from 50 to 1,700 pupils. More than half are not academically selective, a fact that would by itself do much to bring some realism to the incessant supper-time conversations about education in which parents with children at private schools can be made to feel like agents of social division.