Charterhouse School - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

In November 2005, the school was one of fifty of the country's leading independent schools which were found guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, exposed by The Times newspaper, although the schools made clear that they had not realised that the change to the law (which had happened only a few months earlier) about the sharing of information had subsequently made it an offence. Each school was required to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000 and all agreed to make ex-gratia payments totalling three million pounds into a trust designed to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in respect of which fee information was shared. However, Mrs Jean Scott, the head of the Independent Schools Council, said that independent schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and that they were unaware of the change to the law (on which they had not been consulted). She wrote to John Vickers, the OFT director-general, saying, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."

In August 2010, former English footballer Gary Lineker publicly accused Charterhouse of failing to get his son, George, into university. Lineker claimed that the school had used him as a 'guinea pig' by ditching A-Levels for the new Cambridge Pre-U. The school reacted by saying it was proud of its students' results. John Witheridge, the headmaster at Charterhouse, strongly defended the choice of the Pre-U as being more academically rigorous and educationally valid than the current A-Level standard, in an article in The Spectator in August 2010.