I’m greatly looking forward to the School Proprietors’ Association’s inaugural conference at Great Houghton School, Northants, tomorrow. Educationalist James Croft (Director of the Centre for Market Reform of Education) and his SPA colleagues have done sterling work in getting this off the ground.

Proprietorial schools are often overlooked in the national education debate, with the public schools and the maintained sector grabbing all the media limelight. Yet they represent a signficant grouping in the UK, quietly delivering both high educational standards and excellent value for money. Of course, proprietorial schools are themselves diverse, encompassing both large chains of schools and tiny, family-owned invididual schools, and everything in between.

From our own experience of working for proprietorial schools at Edge Media, we’ve found that their parents generally care very little about who owns the school – there’s certainly no sign that they object to a profit motive in education – yet they care very much indeed about exactly those two qualities of academic strength and cost-effectiveness.

What’s interesting is that in today’s UK education scene – Free Schools et al – proprietorial schools may well constitute an idea whose time has come. Their tradition of academic rigour, financial flexibility and, dare I say, a can-do attitude may be just what is needed as the Government moves towards increasingly localised and diversified education provision within an economic climate that remains uncertain at best.

Time will tell. In the meantime, while proprietorial schools may be generally low-profile, it is of course important that they are not isolated. Tomorrow’s conference will be an excellent opportunity for proprietors to make contacts, share good practice and catch up with the latest thinking. Edge Media are there because I (Paul Herbert) am offering free marketing and communications consultations to member schools. It should be a good day.

Trundling down the Northern Line (London Underground) between meetings the other day, a large banner caught my eye. It was advertising a school for those with ‘Learning Differences’. Now, I’ve come across a few variations over the years – ‘Learning Difficulties’, ‘Learning Disabilities’ and the like…but ‘Learning Differences’?? I have ‘Learning Differences’ from my wife – I can watch a film and then have largely forgotten it after six months, whereas she will be able to remember intricate plot details quite clearly several years later even if she was reading a book at the same time as ‘watching’ said film – but I hardly think that’s what this school had in mind.

Of course, it’s not unusual for the education powers-that-be (btw that’s a typically clear coinage by William Tyndale, the 16th century Bible translator and Gloucestershire local hero) to change terminology apparently for the sake of it. It’s been a long time now since we were all encouraged to stop talking about pupils being ‘suspended’ or ‘expelled’ and were instead informed that miscreants had been ‘temporarily excluded’ or ‘permanently excluded’: after all, why use one word when two will do?

Did I just say ‘pupils’? Obviously, I should have written ‘students’. We’re all ‘students’ now, whether crying in the playground because it’s our first day in Reception and we’d rather be with mummy, or powering our way towards a Nobel Prize, or indeed putting a couple of hours a week into our lifelong learning course.

Some of the blame for this lack of clarity can doubtless be attached to the fact that, even in an era of Academies and Free Schools, we have a public-sector education system still largely driven by the state. Parenthetically, I’ve always found it rather wonderful that, given linguistic tabula rasa back in the 1980s, our national education bureaucrats managed to devise a system in which the first year of compulsory education became ‘Reception’ and the second was named Year 1. Nevertheless, as someone who frequently interviews teachers in order to write marketing material for schools, I think it’s fair to say that some teachers can lean towards obscurantism. It’s always tempting for a profession, club or cult to take refuge in its own jargon; education-speak can make those in the know feel somehow more secure. The message is: ‘We can speak a special language, so we’re the experts and you (parents, the public, whoever) are not.’ Let me hasten to add that this is by no means universal. It’s probably more common among younger teachers: the, ahem, more mature teachers perhaps no longer feel the need to try to impress in this way.

Could I make a plea for clarity? If those in schools are tempted to introduce jargon into their conversations with parents, perhaps they could first take a step back and ask themselves ‘Is this terminology necessary, or would it be better said in plain English?’ Teachers are usually the first to complain about state interference in their jobs, but not, it would seem, when it comes to the language they use. Maybe it’s time to rebel and make a (learning) difference.