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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

It's only boarding schools. Many, if not most, independent schools do not offer boarding and thus don't have foreign pupils at all.

Boarding schools have always been for a minority and this hasn't changed because of foreign pupils.

Now, boarding schools are often keen on foreign pupils (esp. Chinese nowadays) because it IS actually good for their reputation: The Chinese education system is such that these pupils tend to ace maths and science subjects in exams and so the school can then market their outstanding GCSE and A levels results.

As for taxes: People who send their children to independent schools fund the public sector through their taxes in the same way as everyone else but do not use public sector resources at all. I think it is fair that they are not taxed twice on top of that.

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There were three Chinese students in sixth form at my independent day school when I was 16-18. They lived with a host family.

Searching for "family boarding" shows this isn't unique.

> Boarding schools have always been for a minority

I sincerely doubt this. I’m not sure if my father’s school had day students when he attended but boarders were definitely a large majority. The omnipresence of boarding schools in post WWII British fiction doesn’t make any sense unless there was at least rough parity among independent schools. CS Lewis, George Orwell, Roald Dahl, off the top of my head. Seamus Heaney after looking it up.

I think it might have been more common to send children to boarding schools among the elite, but that does not mean that it was not a small minority overall.

Obviously boarding schools are always going to be much more expensive than day schools.

Independent schools were always for a small minority. Among independent schools I’m reasonably confident boarding schools were a majority. They were not for an elite. They were for the economically successful, a middle class much smaller than what we have now but it was not unusual in small town or rural Ireland in the ‘60s for the children of shopkeepers or successful farmers to send children to board for secondary school. That’s a definition of elite so expansive as to be meaningless.

Another reasonable hypothesis is that only the elite had the opportunity to become authors

Lewis’ father was a solicitor, Dahl’s a shipbroker. Orwell and Heaney both attended boarding schools on a scholarship. Their fathers were respectively a civil servant and a farmer. Even by extremely expansive definitions of elite at most 50%.

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