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Middle-class parents who spend thousands of pounds on private school fees should be prepared to find more money for their children’s university education, the Chancellor of Oxford said yesterday.

Lord Patten of Barnes, the former Governor of Hong Kong, said that such parents “should not object to being asked to pay rather more on university”.

He told independent school head teachers at the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) that universities should be allowed to charge limitless tuition fees.

Lord Patten, who was a Conservative education minister under Margaret Thatcher, criticised the “intolerable” cap set by the Government, which restricts university top-up tuition fees to a maximum of £3,000 annually.

Addressing the HMC’s annual conference in Kensington, West London, he said that the independent sector could feel “pretty pleased with itself”.

He added: “Your own cup runneth over. The choices that so many parents make [in sending their children to independent schools] may be deplored, but parents seem to be behaving rationally.

“They can pay money to purchase what they reckon is a better education with smaller classes, more teachers, less disruptive children, a broader curriculum, more facilities, better results. Is that a fair picture? Not entirely. Is it what many parents think? Yes, it is. Are they wrong? Too often, alas, they have it exactly right.

“The unacceptable feature is that for all the public money, for all the rhetoric, for all the well-meaning effort, our maintained secondary schools are not better. That is what we should focus on, not the rights and wrongs of the purchase of a good education.”

Lord Patten, who is also Chancellor of the University of Newcastle, said that Oxford and Cambridge endured “populist venom” and were an “easy cheap shot for left-wing politicians on a quiet weekend”.

Universities should be concerned with widening participation, he said. He added, however, that they “should not be treated like local social security offices”, saying that universities could not “make up for the deficiencies of secondary education”.

It was difficult for Oxford and Cambridge to take on more students from state schools, he said, while the proportion of them achieving A grades in traditional subjects, when compared with independent schools, remained the same.

Meanwhile, a new report suggests that independent schools achieve the highest academic standards because they are free from government interference, not because they choose the brightest pupils.

The research by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson, of the University of Buckingham, claims that even when selection by ability and background is taken into account autonomy is the more crucial factor.

“Interviews with head teachers indicate that the key feature of autonomy is that it enables teaching and learning decisions to be taken close to the classroom, rather than being handed down through central directives,” they said.

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