In policy terms, Rishi Sunak has more of the right than Sir Keir Starmer when the two clash over private schools.
Much like consumers of private healthcare (another vector on which the Prime Minister has been attacked in recent weeks), those who pay all their taxes and then extra on top to take themselves (or in this case, their children) out of the state sector are a boon to the State in these straightened times.
In an era of tight budgets, when public services are under increasing strain, it is hard to see the upside of suddenly bringing over 540,000 pupuls – the 95 per cent of private pupils in England who are British or whose parents are resident in the UK – onto the state’s books. Even assuming you nationalised the actual schools, half a million and change of school places aren’t going to pay for themselves.
The politics of the clash, however, favour Labour. Whereas even a generation ago private education was a relatively normal expenditure for upper-middle-class households, the sector today is increasingly the preserve of the extremely wealthy. Fees, much like house prices, have grown wildly out of proportion to incomes.
Part of this is to the Government’s credit: the gap between good state schools and their private counterparts is not what it once was. Buying one’s way into the catchment area of a good state school is basically another way of paying for a superior education in today’s Britain, and one that nets a valuable asset on top.
Yet pleasing as this explanation is, it seems unlikely to be the whole story. After all, private school fees were affordable back in the heyday of grammar schools, and whatever the overall shortcomings of the tripartite education system, selective schools surely performed the function of school of last resort for the middle classes perfectly adequately.
Another common explanation is that private schools are catering to the international super-rich at the expense of domestic pupils. But unless the figures above are wildly off, the children of overseas parents constitute five or at most ten per cent of the total.
Perhaps it is simply that, as the outcome gap has narrowed, private schools have elected more and more to compete on other fronts, such as facilities, extra curriculars, and so on, which are just more expensive. This would be especially true of boarding, a facility which is (almost) entirely unavailable in the state sector.
Whatever the reason, defences of private schools don’t currently have the audience they would have had even a couple of decades ago, which makes defending them difficult for the Conservatives.
In truth, removing charitable status may not have the decisive impact on the private sector that some left-wing activists might hope. Many such schools already operate as completely private businesses, and there will be plenty more – especially the big-name institutions most likely to draw progressive ire – which would be able to withstand a 20 per cent increase in fees.
Given that, it’s not obvious how the costs and benefits of the move would shake out. The Government would gain extra tax revenue from those schools, but in exchange lose a lever to pressure them to do more to assist the state sector, as many do at present. Those that survived would also be free to actually turn a profit, which as charities they don’t actually do at present.
If the Tories really want to defend the sector over the long term, then they need to try and find a way to broaden their social support base in the country, i.e. bring them back within reach of the sort of middle-class families upon which previous generations of Conservatives built their majorities.
The most obvious way to do this would be reviving the Assisted Places Scheme, established by the Party in 1980 and abolished by New Labour. Another method might be introducing regulated fees for schools with charitable status, although this would need to be done carefully to avoid repeating what free tuition has done to universities in Scotland, which squeeze out loss-making domestic students in favour of profitable international applicants.
Alas that Michael Gove, one of relatively few Conservative ministers to grasp the essential importance of the education brief, has tended towards indulging populist attacks on the sector than defending what are often old and independent institutions which Tories ought to respect. Hopefully whoever succeeds to the mantle of Tory education reformer in chief, if anyone, will take a different view.