Governors at St Paul’s School for Boys in London have voted to endorse a plan for the school to go “needs-blind”, offering places purely on merit.

Families who could afford to pay would. But those of lesser means would have a proportion of their fees paid, down to those on the lowest incomes paying nothing at all.

The move comes as the Charities Bill, which will require independent schools to “earn” their tax breaks of around £100 million a year by demonstrating they are of “public benefit”, returns to Parliament next week. It is expected to lead to schools providing more bursaries and opening more facilities to the local community.

The pressure is forcing other independent schools, such as Dulwich College and Roedean, to consider pursuing a similar needs-blind course.

St Paul’s has the best boys’ GCSE results in the country with 93 per cent of pupils gaining A and A* grades at GCSE. Yet fees of £15,000 a year ensure that only an elite attends. Scholarships and bursaries are available only to a minority. “A school like this should be a college of all the talents,” Martin Stephen, High Master, told The Times. “It’s as simple as that. And we would like to admit anybody regardless of race, colour, creed or social and economic background.”

Under Dr Stephen’s plan, the school would become completely “needs blind” within 25 years. Fully-funded pupils would not be subsidised by the richer parents of fellow pupils. Instead their fees would be paid from an endowment fund, built up with donations from alumni and philanthropists. It would need to reach £250 million to generate enough income.

The plan is the elusive aim of the entire independent schools sector, which are recognised in international surveys as some of the most successful in the world.

Yet, since the ending of the direct grant and assisted places schemes, which provided state funding for bright working-class pupils to attend independent schools, efforts to widen access have been stymied by political controversy and class hostility.

However, Dr Stephen and others like him believe that the climate is now changing. At Dulwich College in South London, Graham Able, the Master, is confident that all places will be offered needs-blind within 15 years. The school already has an endowment income of £2.3 million a year, generated from the Dulwich estate and supplemented by franchise operations in the Far East.

Other schools are following suit on a smaller scale. Roedean school for girls in Brighton has announced three fully-funded bursaries and Eton is raising £50 million for bursaries to make itself more socially diverse.

Independent schools are shifting money from scholarships, which often go to pupils of wealthy parents, into means-tested bursaries. At Rugby, scholarships now cover only 10 per cent of fees.

The Government has made it clear that it will not contribute to any endowment scheme as long as schools operate selective admissions policies. However, it is in discussions with 20 private schools for a scheme under which the schools would abolish fees and have open access. In return they would become academies, with funding from the State.

Jonathan Shephard, general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, says that a potential obstacle remains in the form of the Office of Fair Trading, which has forbidden schools from acting in concert to switch money from scholarships to bursaries.

Mike Simpkins, chief executive of the foundation which funds Christ’s Hospital, the only needs-blind independent school in the country, has no doubts that the needs-blind approach works: “We select according to need — 18 per cent of our parents are unemployed and 50 per cent are single mothers. We have five applicants for every place.”

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