Handicapping private school pupils for university admissions risks replacing "one type of perceived unfairness with another", a top headmaster has argued.
In particular he mentioned complaints in the media about private school pupils achieving better exam results, better jobs and more Olympic medals than state pupils.
Most private-school pupils get good exam results and go on to university and a well-paid career.
More than 90% of private-school pupils can expect to get their matric, compared with just 30% of state-school pupils.
The subjects at which private-school pupils excelled were those demanded by the top universities: maths, further maths, English and physics.
Tonbridge Grammar School offered 41% of its places to pupils from private schools, while The Judd School, also in Tonbridge, offered 35%.
Government statisticians said the reasons for the fall in GCSE result was complicated, but highlighted a drop in the number of pupils from private schools being entered for GCSE English.
Most still come from better-off families, partly because these can better afford the fees, partly because pupils from private schools outclass those from public ones in the national entrance exam that almost all universities use.
If the Prosperous Suburbia Primary School has 60% of pupils receiving private tuition while the Deprived Inner City Primary has none, then how much of a guide are the league tables to the relative quality of teaching at these two schools?
Harvard University's Programme on Education Policy and Governance found that, after two years, pupils at Cleveland's private schools performed seven percentage points higher than the national average in reading and 15 points higher in maths.
Nor did the private schools purge themselves of the most difficult pupils at the end of the first year.
Over the past decade both universities have abolished their entrance exams, because they were felt to favour private schools which were more likely to give their pupils special preparation.
These would enable poor parents to choose their children's schools (including, controversially, private and religious schools) thus promoting competition to attract pupils.
On Monday the HMC's universities spokesman told the Daily Telegraph that private schools might potentially boycott institutions that discriminate against their pupils.
Private schools did not close their doors to the poorest pupils.
In Manchester, in one of the most visible reactions so far to Act 60, the new private Maple Street School opened on September 1st with 37 pupils.
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ESSEC, a top (also private) business school, both run schemes to recruit bright pupils from poor areas, many of them non-white.
Arguably, the bank should be proud of old pupils who have achieved growth, repaid debt and attracted private financing.
American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the state would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools.
Instead, a private school in Scotland has given sleek new iPads to every single one of its pupils to use in class and to even take home, nixing the excuse that the dog ate their homework.
It presents figures for 19 countries gathered over the 1998 (or 1998 - 1999) school year from national and other sources including the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and covers access and participation of pupils and students from early childhood to tertiary level in both public and private education, teaching staff and education expenditure.
As his first initiative, he proposed sweeping changes to America's schools, including the annual testing of elementary-school pupils and the use of vouchers to help parents of children in bad public schools to pay for private or religious education.
He said at his school, sixth form teachers looked at pupils' personal statements in their "breaks and rare free periods", while he knew of private schools where senior members of staff were taken off the time table "to do nothing else" but help students polish up their forms.
And secular groups also point out that while state school pupils are "protected" from creationist teaching, similar guidelines do not exist to cover children who attend private religious schools - Christian, Jewish and Muslim.
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