Children who risk being put into care will be sent to boarding schools instead
Public schools are launching a new diversity drive that will see children who risk being put into care offered places at Eton College and Harrow School instead.
Under the initiative, named The Boarding Schools Partnership, youngsters from some of the most vulnerable families will enroll at some of Britain's top boarding schools.
More than 80 councils have signed up to the scheme which will be launched on Tuesday by the schools minister Lord Nash and Lord Adonis, a former Labour education minister.
Harrow, Rugby, Benenden and Eton are among the schools taking part. Colin Morrison, chair of the Boarding Schools Partnership, said the school fees, typically ranging from £25,000-£39,000 a year, will be covered by their local councils.
Currently, only about 100 children go to private boarding schools paid for by councils, but there is hopes that the scheme will help boost this number to about 1,000 a year within five years.
Hugh Grant's old school takes in 100 state pupils after their comprehensive was abandoned because it is in the Grenfell Tower exclusion zone
A leading public school has opened its doors to children from a state comprehensive that had to be abandoned after the Grenfell Tower fire.
The £19,000-a-year Latymer Upper School, whose alumni include actors Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman and TV chef Heston Blumenthal, is sharing its facilities with pupils from the nearby Kensington Aldridge Academy (KAA), which is so close to the tower that it has been closed for safety reasons.
The initiative came from Latymer Upper head David Goodhew, who grew up in modest circumstances in a tower block near Grenfell Tower in North Kensington and attended a local comprehensive before studying Classics at Oxford.
About 100 children and 20 teachers from the academy’s sixth form have been allocated their own classrooms where they are taught by their own teachers but share libraries, sports facilities and the canteen.
They have even teamed up with Latymer Upper pupils to play rounders, taking on other local schools.
The rest of the children from KAA have gone to another nearby state school, Burlington Danes Academy in White City.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4636204/Hugh-Grant-s-old-school-takes-100-state-pupils.html