Sending your kids to private school makes you a total sham, Shami
EUROPEAN friends are often baffled by the supremacy of private schools within the UK education system. One recently expressed bemusement at the number of parents she heard saying they planned to go private because their child was “so driven”. A huge gulf divides the five per cent who are independently educated from the remaining 95 per cent. Yet there is very little fight against it.
When Labour Party politician and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti was revealed to be sending her son to fee-paying Dulwich College, she was accused of hypocrisy because she had campaigned against selective grammar schools.
Chakrabarti responded by saying: “I live in a nice big house, and eat nice food, and my neighbours are homeless and go to foodbanks. Does that make me a hypocrite, or does it make me someone who is trying to do the best, not just for my own family, but for other people’s families too?”
She seemed to be arguing for her ability to campaign against something while actually participating in it, just as someone else might say they could advocate for tightening up of the tax system while avoiding tax themselves. One can make that argument, I suppose, but it smacks of double standards.
Chakrabarti doesn’t seem to recognise that a great deal of the desire for such schools is triggered by feelings about the dominance of private and public school-educated people in British society. People, or at least some middle-class people, want grammar schools because they see them as a way to by-pass the private system and catapult people from the lower rungs into the bastions of power.
So it doesn’t look good that while campaigning against grammar schools, Chakrabarti is participating in that top tier of fee-paying education. We live in a competitive, individualist culture, and the private school system is a key part of that. Chakrabarti joins a long line of politicians on the left who have foundered because their own children’s schooling didn’t chime with what appeared to be their principles.
Labour MSP Anas Sarwar was criticised for sending his child to Hutchesons’ Grammar in Glasgow, but then he was a former Hutchie boy himself. Harriet Harman got a drubbing for sending her son to a distant grammar school – she attended a grammar herself. Diane Abbott, who famously put her son into an independent school, was also a grammar girl. And even politicians like Chakrabarti, who went to comprehensives themselves, have spent years living and breathing a political world mostly dominated by the products of private schools.
On one level, it’s hard to criticise these politicians, since it seems like so many people are doing it. Middle-class society is dominated by a feeling that what’s best for your kids is what matters. And for those who can afford it, that cannot possibly be compatible with having them in an ordinary state school, with all the other surrounding strata of local community.
OFTEN the reasons given for sending children to independent schools have a hollow ring to them. Some, like left-wing SNP MSP Ashten Regan-Denham, who sent her twins to private school, claim that it is lack of “wrap-around care” that has driven them from the state to the independent sector. Some talk of the sports and other activities. Some say that the comprehensive schools bored their children. Very rarely does anyone say what must, surely, be going through some of their heads – that it’s because, when it comes to education, there are two classes in the UK and they’ve decided which one they want their kids to belong to.
The problem with Chakrabarti is that she is just one of many who argue that they are still fighting for change, equality and a good state system, but who, by taking their own children out of that system, are only going to weaken their drive to make it happen.
Until all children go to the same schools, and all parents – including the Chakrabartis, Sarwars and Regan-Denhams – are in there, using their pointy elbows to force governments and councils to prioritise investing in education for all children, and lobbying for improvements to the actual schools themselves, this situation is only going to Shami Chakrabarti was accused of hypocrisy because after campaigning against selective grammar schools while sending her son to fee-paying Dulwich College Photograph: Getty Images continue. There are other options. We can see them in the success of the Finnish system, which has no fee-paying schools at all, and outlaws school selection, formal examinations (until the age of 18) and streaming by ability.
In Scotland, we should keep our eye on this as the prize. Meanwhile, if Theresa May wants to improve social mobility she’ll have little impact by introducing more grammar schools. She’d be better off getting rid of the private ones. Little chance of that, though.