Georgia L Gilholy is a Young Voices UK contributor.
Picture this. A sweaty mid-summer crowd waits with bated breath as a progressive politician is set to deliver a surprise speech. Somewhere across the country, the governing party remains embroiled in an internal crisis.
As he begins to speak he outlines some of the ideas he plans to implement, should he and his team displace the incumbent rulers. One of his remarks, consistent with his previous comments on the topic, is his ambition of cracking down on the liberties of non-government schooling.
This is not Russia in the months preceding its Bolshevik putsch, nor France as the guillotine operators began to sharpen their blades, but among the anonymous glass and steel structures of Birmingham’s revamped city centre. The date is July 11th 2022. The speaker is Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
While Starmer is yet to ascend to the power possessed by historic radicals, his plans to rob independent schools of their charitable status risk many of the pitfalls such events set in motion.
Such plans would first and foremost, slap VAT on private schools, which they are exempt from under a charitable status.
The idea that this will accumulate enough cash to drag state schools toward a bright new future is nonsense. A 2018 review by Baines Cutler Solutions and KPMG demonstrated how axing this exemption will create a £416 million bill for the government within five years when accounting for the pupils that would be pushed back into state schooling as private schools would be forced to hike rates.
Yet as the Conservative Party continues to lack inspiring educational reforms, Labourites could well garner support for misguided assaults on the independent sector. Governments of all partisan stripes should be trusted not to attempt such a cheap and short-sighted shot, and instead invest in serious strategies to resurrect Britain’s flagging schooling system.
Starmer also fundamentally misinterprets Britain’s educational inequality as a casualty of unfair finances. School spending has been partly hammered by cuts over the past decade, but the UK remains one of the biggest bankrollers of education in the world.
Yet our system lags behind much of the post-industrial world. Socio-economic deprivation sadly holds back many students, but this is often an issue that begins in the home and impacts the classroom- not vice versa.
We once possessed an educational culture better geared toward social mobility regardless of whether one’s parents were toilet cleaners or CEOs, and we deliberately eliminated it. The destruction of grammar schooling, a system that Sir Keir benefited from, was never about widening opportunity. It was an emotional attempt at levelling classrooms regardless of the cost to children’s life chances, and it is a mistake that neither the Labour nor the Conservative party has attempted to rectify.
The civil service’s anti-grammar evangelist Graham Savage admitted that he favoured an American-style “democratic” comprehensive ethos, regardless of whether it stunted academic performance. It is a perfect example of wishing to tear something down for ideological purposes, without proving how its replacement will be an improvement. Indeed, the triumph of state education now leaves one in twenty Brits functionally illiterate.
It is obvious that the alumni of the independent actor dominate the highest rungs of British professions, but making private schools just that bit pricier will not aid meritocracy.
More middle-class students whose parents can just about afford minor private school places will finally be priced out entirely. There will be less money for bursaries, scholarships, and academy partnerships that help working and middle-class students who would otherwise have no hope of benefitting from private education, as indeed Sir Keir himself did.
I am someone who was not gifted the “golden ticket” of private education that 54 per cent of British journalists did. My particular school performed so badly that universities offered me places with lower grade requirements than they did pupils from the other 85 per cent of UK schools.
I do not oppose Starmer’s vision because I dread to think of the white-tailed boys of Eton sobbing into their croquet mallets, but because I think the plans are an attempt to sling “red meat” at a leftist base without the responsibility of truly rethinking education.
It also appears that many who praise Starmer’s approach pray for the total destruction of private schooling. This is as much a mistake as the destruction of the grammar system. Elites will always find a way to get their kids the best start in life, whether this means shipping them off to an international school or flooding the selective, faux-comprehensives that line the streets of Chelsea, Hampstead and Chiswick.
It is the job of the government to make up the shortfall for poorer families, ensuring that British society can cultivate the best talents, regardless of background. In a free society, elites will always exist. The trick is ensuring the checks and balances on their influence.
Creating needless financial hurdles for private schools will do little to hold the real elites accountable, and could leave the government with yet more funding shortfalls.