What you state seems very true but unfortunately I feel that in the U.K, there is a fair bit of stigma placed upon private education. Some may feel that the system is in some way unfair; that the presence of such schools deprives the other children that are forced to attend state schools of opportunities equal to those that are fortunate enough to attend private schools.

Rather than striving to improve the terrible quality of state education as whole, there seems to be a lot of people that would rather simply drag everybody down to the same lower level. It would be nice if they could view the best private schools as leading examples for the state schools to follow. Yet, I fear that this will never happen, especially in the current political and economic climate.