Our leaders believe the myth that private school parents can afford fees effortlessly
Daily Telegraph
Tax rises can be painless and without consequence – only the undeserving rich, the very antithesis of Labour’s cherished “working people”, will pay and they can easily cough up.
That seems to be the underlying myth behind Rachel Reeves’s myriad tax hikes.
Imposing VAT on school fees fits this way of magical thinking perfectly. Up to £1.5bn would be raised and 6,500 new teachers would be conjured up for the state sector to somehow transform millions of disadvantaged children’s lives.
Why 6,500 extra teachers, when there are already over 460,000 working in the state sector, would make any significant difference has never been adequately explained.
This term’s bills are the first to include VAT and we can begin to see their impact. Labour’s pain-free policy is proving the very opposite.
The state sector, we were told, could easily accommodate extra demand when parents were priced out of private education. Even if this were true, imposing VAT in the middle of the school year was an egregiously cruel move, inevitably disrupting lives and needlessly uprooting children for little or no public benefit.
For those children having to change schools in Year 11, the GCSE year, it is particularly damaging as it is more than likely that the school they will move to will be preparing for a different exam board and thus a different curriculum just months before their exams.
But Labour’s claim is proving hollow. Some 27 local authorities have no places and 87 more have fewer than 100 places in at least some year groups.
Years 7 and 8, the first two years of state secondaries (and increasingly also for those in the independent sector), are particularly badly hit, including areas with large numbers attending independent schools such as Kensington and Chelsea and Sutton in London and Bristol.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, had bought into the myth that most parents who send their children to private schools can afford the fees effortlessly. In fact, a study published last month shows that two-thirds already receive some help with the fees, be it from grandparents, friends (if only mine were so generous), or the schools themselves.
The pupils are much more diverse both financially and ethnically than popularly imagined. The parents of children in the London day schools my children attend range from impecunious journalists and other representatives of the precariat to literal billionaires.
Unlike in some independent schools where the wealth range is much narrower, it means financial one-upmanship is virtually absent – as it is a game, you are always likely to lose. Who wants to boast about flying business class when the boy at the next desk then asks, so you fly commercial?
While 36.3pc of pupils in English state schools are from an ethnic minority, the Independent Schools Council (ISC) 2024 census shows the equivalent number is 40.4pc for the private sector. Admittedly, this figure is slightly skewed as a disproportionate number of independent school pupils are in London, where ethnic minority numbers are much higher, but it still does not fit the stereotype.
This diversity is not purely the product of vast numbers of rich foreigners attending UK schools. There were 556,000 pupils in ISC schools last year, and of these, 62,700, or a little over 11pc, had non-British parents.
And those foreigners are not the much hyped offspring of Russian oligarchs – there are roughly 1,800 Russian pupils at British independent schools, with under 1,000 of them having parents living overseas. Germans, with over 3,000, are a much more important market.
But schools will inevitably become less financially diverse as bursaries are cut. This is already underway.
My pet peeve regarding journalism about independent education is that it seemingly invariably ends up writing about Eton – a wholly unrepresentative establishment with little in common with the vast majority of private schools.
So, to my shame, I will do just that. In the school year 2022-23, 105 Eton boys, out of 1,300 or so, were on free places at a cost to the school of £9.7m. For the school year 2027-28, over £1m will be cut from this budget and the free places will go down to 70. Scores of boys will lose out on a genuinely life-transforming opportunity, thanks to Reeves’s tax raid.
In this instance, Eton does not stand alone. Scores of schools are planning to cut their bursary programmes to make their accounts balance.
Phillipson may say the extra funding going to state schools will benefit many more – but it is spread so thinly it is likely to have little or no impact. All Phillipson will succeed in doing is making Britain a little less meritocratic and further boosting the advantages of the already privileged.
Private schools will soon face an additional hit making the situation worse. After the Easter holidays, independent schools will face their next raid when mandatory business rate relief is scrapped – until now, all charities have automatically enjoyed an 80pc reduction on their rate bills.
From April 1, charitable independent schools alone will be singled out to pay the full charge. Schools with large grounds or in areas like London with exorbitant property prices will be paying up to an extra £1,000 per pupil per year, and this will inevitably end up being passed on to parents.
The right thing for Labour to do would be to admit they have got things wrong and U-turn. But, of course, they won’t.
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