I attended Nottingham High School from the age of eight to eighteen. It is an independent fee-paying day school, founded in 1513, that occupies an entertainingly Victorian building near Nottingham city centre.

I was bemused when reading this week’s Mind Your Languages column in The Spectator, where, referring to Ed Balls, it said that he “…was born in Norwich and went to a public school, Nottingham High…”

I never thought of the school I went to as a “public school”. Sure, it is a private school, but my compadres had parents in business, trade, the professions, and the civil service. I associate public schools with being the traditional old boarding schools like Eton and Harrow, with pupils an order of magnitude posher than anyone who went anywhere near Nottingham. I guess this is just prejudice and ignorance on my part.

Looking at what defines a public school, one traditional definition is those schools covered by the Public Schools Act 1868: Charterhouse School, Eton College, Harrow School, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, St Paul’s School
Westminster School, and Winchester College. A more modern definition seems to include all the schools that are members of the Headmasters’ Conference; well over two-hundred schools would be classed as “public schools” by this definition, and would therefore include Nottingham High School.

How would you define a public school?