LABOUR VOTES TO AXE PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Outrage over £7bn move to integrate likes of Eton into state education system

PRIVATE schools could be abolished under a future Labour government after the party voted yesterday to ‘integrate’ them into the state sector.

It would mean the end of world-class institutions such as Eton, Harrow and Marlborough, and could cost £7billion.

The move at the Labour conference in Brighton provoked fury, with the Tories accusing the party of hypocrisy and independent school representatives saying it would not improve standards.

Critics pointed out that several members of the Shadow Cabinet – including Diane Abbott, Shami Chakrabarti and Valerie Vaz – had sent their children to private schools. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was also privately educated, as were his spokesmen Seumas Milne and James Schneider.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said yesterday: ‘Yet again Labour are putting ideology before the education of our children. Labour would weaken discipline, lower standards and reduce choice and information for parents.’

Schools minister Nick Gibb said: ‘All this shows is that Jeremy Corbyn’s party is more interested in fighting ideological political battles than making sure all our children receive the best start in life, whatever their background.’

Tory MP Ben Bradley said: ‘This is blind hypocrisy. It’s one rule for the Corbyn few and another rule for the many.’

Tory MP David Gauke tweeted: ‘Labour’s new policy on abolishing private schools and seizing private property is chilling.’

At the party’s conference in Brighton yesterday, Labour delegates approved a motion that said a commitment on abolishing private education should be included in its next general election manifesto. This would include withdrawal of charitable status and ‘all other public subsidies and tax privileges’, including business rate exemption.

The motion said endowments, investments and properties held by private schools would be ‘redistributed democratically’ across the country’s educational institutions.

Universities would have to admit the same proportion of private school students as in the wider population, currently 7 per cent.

The vote in favour of the motion came after education spokesman Angela Rayner said a future Labour government would scrap ‘tax loopholes’ that benefit private schools in its first budget.

She told the conference she would task the Social Mobility Commission – which would be renamed the Social Justice Commission – with ‘integrating private schools’.

The motion, moved by Battersea Constituency Labour Party, said: ‘The existence of private schools is incompatible with Labour’s pledge to promote social justice, not social mobility, in education.’

Julie Robinson, of the Independent Schools Council, condemned the vote as an attack on the ‘rights and freedoms of parents to make choices over the education of their children’. She said: ‘Abolition would represent an act of national selfharm. This decision is an ideological distraction from dealing with the real problems in education.’

Barnaby Lenon, of the Independent Schools Council and a former headmaster of Harrow School, said: ‘This is an attack on the right of parents to choose the education best suited to their child’s needs – a right enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

‘You don’t improve education by tearing down excellent schools.’

Professor Alan Smithers, an educationist at Buckingham University, said the move ‘will greatly add to the costs of state education’.

Comment – Page 16

‘This is blind hypocrisy’