When Dr Anthony Seldon said many parents of Brighton College students were struggling to pay the fees, he was sympathising with them rather than chiding.

The controversial head made the remark in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

In it, he added: "Squadrons of Range Rovers and silver Mercedes are not to be seen proceeding down the drive."

Some critics said Dr Seldon was guilty of snobbery, interpreting his comments as suggesting the parents were not posh enough.

His views were juxtaposed with those of his incoming chairman of governors, the distinguished Lord Skidelsky, who said: "The parents are mainly small business people and professionals. They tend not to have lots of books in their homes or a wide cultural life."

Dr Seldon said yesterday his future colleague's comments had also been taken out of context.

He said: "It is the complete opposite of what I believe. The chairman of the parents' society is on record as saying it is a travesty of everything I have ever said or thought.

"I don't mind being criticised for what I believe in and have said but this was wrong."

Dr Seldon, who has been headmaster for almost seven years, said: "We have a broad range of parents and I welcome that. A lot of them find it very hard to raise the money for the fees and I admire what they do. Many of them make great sacrifices so their children can be here.

"As an independent school, we are more concerned than most with the community and are involved in many partnerships."

Dr Seldon is joint chairman of the Brighton and Hove City Forum in which leading figures discuss issues of topical concern. He presided at the latest meeting on health issues held last night.

Brighton College has close links with two schools based in the most deprived areas of the city. They are East Brighton College of Media Arts (Comart) and Falmer High School. This week he discussed a forthcoming exchange of teachers with the new head of Falmer.

Dr Seldon said: "Parents do not see us as a socially elite school and that is the point I have been making. I never said we should be like Charterhouse or Tonbridge. We are not like them. We are in town. We are in the environment and the community."

Dr Seldon said he was proud the cricket fixture list for the school included Eton, Harrow, Tonbridge and Dulwich College but not because they were public schools. It was because they were the best at cricket.

Brighton College, which had a strong sporting tradition, had changed some of its rugby fixtures to include several state schools because they happened to be among the strongest.

Dr Seldon said he was keen for Brighton College to have a good social mix of pupils from different backgrounds and abilities. He denied telling the Telegraph he would like to "redefine the school but was constrained by the quality of the intake". Instead, he positively welcomed it.

He said Brighton College could never compete with Manchester Grammar School or King Edward's in Birmingham, which had enormous catchment areas.

He said: "We don't have sufficient numbers in the area to make it an academic hothouse. But we do well academically and we also have excellent sporting activities.

"Even if we had a catchment area of four million people like King Edward's, I don't want to be elitist. I want to have children leaving Brighton College who can cope very well with the socially-integrated world of the 21st Century.

"I don't want to be socially and academically exclusive like the independent schools of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

Dr Seldon said he had been asked whether parents minded that there were so many links with state schools. He said they welcomed it and it had been productive.

His quarrel, which received blazing publicity last month, was more with middle-class parents who played the postcode lottery to win free places at high-performing state schools rather than pay to go private and then claimed to be on the moral high ground.

He said: "Parents can criticise me if they want to for what I believe in and I stand by what I have said in the past. But I do not want to be criticised for what I didn't say."

Asked how he would like to take Brighton College forward, Dr Seldon said he would like to forge even closer links with the community.

He said: "We want to play our part in Brighton and Hove and there is more we can do."

He is worried about what he sees as a growing gap between the independent and the state sector, believing universally free state education does not and cannot work. Instead, he has proposed a regime under which state schools would charge means-tested fees.

But Dr Seldon stressed he was not worried about whether parents of the current 1,200 pupils at Brighton College drove a silver Mercedes or even whether they drove at all.

He said: "We take children of all sorts. Those who are doing well academically, those who excel in sporting activities and children with no particular skills.

"They form a real cross section."