Legal threat to Surbiton High School fees campaign (From Surrey Comet)

Legal threat to Surbiton High School fees campaign

7:00am Sunday 25th October 2009 in News By Martin George

The charity that runs Surbiton High School is fighting a legal battle to identify those behind an anonymous campaign protesting against the redistribution of the school's tuition fees.

The school is one of 10 independent fee-paying schools run by the United Church Schools Trust (UCST), and charges £11,553 a year in fees for girls attending the senior school.

The campaigners are protesting against the trust's system of collecting tuition fees from all its schools centrally and using this central pool to fund them, which the parents claim means their children lose out.

An eight-page document written by campaigners claims more money is contributed by Surbiton High parents through tuition fees than the school receives back from the trust, and that parents are effectively subsidising other schools in the group.

The trust said that pooling resources was sensible and standard practice across the charitable and educational sectors because it provided financial security for all schools in the group.

The protest document says: "Surbiton fee money should be spent on Surbiton, or refunded to parents.

"Unless UCST gives a clear plan for how it’s going to remedy this injustice, and a proper apology, we shall take action.

"We need a fees freeze in January – refuse to pay the January fees until July, that will give them food for thought."

The charity has received court orders to help identify who is behind the campaign, which calls itself the Surbiton High School Parents Action Group.

Councillor David Cunningham, a member of the school's local governing body, said: "I have received no representations from parents about this issue.

"I have only had an anonymous email from the campaign.

"Surbiton High is an excellent school and the people are middle of the road."

Its governing body is chaired by former Conservative education minister Dame Angela Rumbold, and includes former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey and Martin Donnelly, a senior partner at Ofcom.

The trust was founded as an educational charity in 1883 with the objective of creating schools based on Christian principles and had a gross income of £61.7m in 2007/08 according to the Charity Commission.

The Surrey Comet contacted the UCST, but they declined to comment.

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