Teachers are not usually despised by the government of this country, but if you currently work in an independent school it is hard to escape the conclusion that, if they were allowed to do so, Labour would abolish the sector in a heartbeat. They hate us. The current Secretary of State for Education spent more than two years shadowing the role without visiting any independent schools. The Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, when she was shadow education secretary, said that Labour would end the ‘privatisation’ of education. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in 2018 that she has ‘always and will always oppose’ selective schools, and in 2019 she was quite clear that a Labour government should ‘work to abolish private education’.
Labour know they can’t actually go that far: the right for parents to choose an education of their choice for their children is long-established. The 1952 Protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights states that governments must ‘respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. These freedoms must be applied without discrimination. One can only imagine how conflicted the Prime Minister and many members of his Cabinet are that they have to publicly support the ECHR while knowing that if they left it they would be able to finally kill off a sector they have hated for so long (even though many of Labour’s most admired leaders attended some of this country’s most prestigious public schools).
Instead, the Government has launched a war of attrition on our private schools, in an effort to erode the sector’s size and to create a culture around the survivors that marks them out as being the bastions of privilege and the enemies of progress. The impact of levying VAT on school fees, introduced early for maximum pain, is already visible: schools are closing down, staff are being made redundant and fees are going up. These effects are well-documented, but not all the economic damage is so obvious. Independent schools are often major employers in their communities (they support over 300,000 jobs nationwide). As schools look to cut costs wherever possible, many of these jobs too are increasingly vulnerable.
As with any ideologically-driven policy, the Government’s impact assessment will be cursory and have no influence on the legislation. For Labour, all jobs are valuable, but some jobs are less valuable than others – and some schools are clearly disposable. What you hear less of now is that this legislation will help the state sector in any substantive way. As Robert Colvile wrote in this week’s Sunday Times, Labour’s figures are ‘essentially fictitious: years old…The estimates have since been made to look prettier. But they remain wildly uncertain. Because this is a measure driven not by revenue projections but class envy.’
We know what is coming next: the abolition of business rates relief, already announced, will increase the financial pressures on many schools even further. Scottish independent schools lost charitable status in 2022 and the Welsh government is now considering doing the same; how soon before this becomes uniform across the UK? It is inconceivable that the Treasury is not looking closely at the Ministry of Defence’s Continuity of Education Allowance (CEA) fund, which subsidises the private education of serving British officers (and which costs the taxpayer approximately £250m per year).
Depending on how vindictive the Government wants to be, it could even introduce a ‘hard cap’ on the number of privately-educated pupils being offered places at Oxford and Cambridge, as Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman argue in their new book, ‘Born to Rule’. Such a policy would no doubt appeal to Reeves and Phillipson. But as Jonathan Simons has argued, the more you weaken or restrict the sector, the more damage you risk inflicting on other, related sectors that depend heavily on a constant supply of graduates who attended independent schools:
If you introduced a hard cap across the Russell Group, without some form of amelioration, undergraduate medicine would collapse almost overnight. Ditto veterinary science. Probably ditto law (fewer Magic Circle solicitors sure, but also fewer barristers able to work for the Crown Prosecution Service).
The abolition of independent schools is a dream that I fear many Cabinet ministers fervently hold on to. It has become a socialist lodestar, a defining ambition that waves aside all economic and social considerations which would, for any other sector, persuade a pragmatic Chancellor that seeking to destroy them is not only fundamentally flawed, but damaging to the long-term prospects of the country. When it comes to public schools, all logic is suspended, all counter-arguments dismissed.
Yet these are the schools that have successfully opened over one hundred campuses overseas, and attract thousands of families from every corner of the globe who see them, rightly, as among the best schools available. Labour may not like them, but many do. They are genuinely world class.
Those international, ambitious parents must be looking on with astonishment as we attack these schools, without any idea of what could replace them when they are gone. Instead, we should be celebrating our independent schools and the success they inject, through the many brilliant young people they educate, into countless areas of British society. If we allow their slow strangulation, Labour’s Left will have won, but we, as a country, will have comprehensively failed.
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