The Best Days of their Lives

Sir Cyril Taylor, who is chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, is a seventy-year-old graduate of the Harvard Business school and former brand management resource for Procter and Gamble. As a child he served as a native platoon commander in Britain's dirty war against Kenya's independence movement and, as one would expect of a Blair government adviser, was an active member of the Conservative party until that party lost the 1997 election. Since then, as one would expect of a Blair government adviser, he has had "no political affiliations".

Sir Cyril, who is a "key adviser" to the Secretary of State for Human Resource Maturation, Ruth Kelly, has made a compelling moral case for getting children out of care and into boarding schools. It's cheaper.

A child in foster care costs the state fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, and might be as much as fifty thousand. Of course, Britain's children are not worth that much, particularly those without appropriate family values. On the other hand, claims Sir Cyril, "the cost of a state boarding school is only £7,000 per year." Despite the obvious ethical necessity, however, "only some 3,000 or so of the 70,000 children in public care in the UK are placed in boarding schools."

About forty-two thousand such children are living in foster homes, the rest being in public and private residential children's homes. "Sadly there is little stability in the lives of these children as there are frequent changes in both their foster parents and their school," Sir Cyril said. "It cannot be right that a young child is moved around in this way," particularly when it costs so much.

Besides, Sir Cyril said, "children from 'broken homes' were often among the best pupils at boarding school". So it wouldn't just be cheap; it would be a painless transition for the boarding schools. I wonder what the Secretary of State for Human Resource Maturation is waiting for.