Corbynite councillor who rails against privatising schools – but sends his girl to UK’s priciest!
A CORBYNITE councillor who has slammed the ‘privatisation’ of schools sends his daughter to the most expensive private girls’ school in Britain.
Nick Childs faced accusations of hypocrisy yesterday after it was revealed he has a daughter who attends Roedean School, where fees are up to nearly £40,000 a year.
Mr Childs, the deputy leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, was elected as a Labour councillor in May as part of a slate of candidates approved by the pro-Corbyn group Momentum.
He is an outspoken critic of the turning of publicly owned state schools into academies, and has criticised what he calls the ‘fetish for privatisation’ at the Department for Education. He has also spoken of his ‘socialist vision’ for education in the city.
Mr Childs, who chairs the Children, Young People and Schools committee in Brighton, recently posted on Twitter: ‘Privatisation fetish won’t provide our children with good education. Our city will.’
He has opposed plans to turn a failing local primary school rated inadequate by Ofsted into an academy – which would mean it could accept private finance and be taken out of local authority control.
Mr Childs, an official at the teachers’ National Education Union, has also called schools watchdog Ofsted an ‘ enforcement agent of [a] neoliberal education system of competition, recidivist notions of education/intelligence, narrow data sets, privatisation and denial of impact of poverty’.
He proudly includes the Labour slogan ‘ For the many not the few’ on his Twitter profile, where he regularly retweets Jeremy Corbyn’s posts as well as expressing his own views on education – although he only has 226 followers.
Roedean, founded in 1885, sits on a cliff in East Sussex overlooking the English Channel. Set in 118 acres of grounds, it has its own golf course and a private tunnel to the beach. The school motto, ‘ honneur aulx dignes’, is in Norman French and means ‘honour the worthy’.
Fees per term range from £5,670 for a Year 7 day pupil to £13,305 for a full boarder in Hypocrisy claims: Nick Childs Years 10 to 13. The Independent Schools Inspectorate rated Roedean as excellent in all areas in its most recent inspection in March 2016.
After it was revealed by Mail Online that his daughter goes to Roedean, Mr Childs attempted to defend himself on Twitter by posting that he does not oppose independent schools. But he received dozens of critical messages in response as other Twitter users lined up to accuse him of hypocrisy. One said: ‘Typical left wing hypocrite’. Another branded him a ‘champagne socialist’. A third wondered: ‘What’s wrong with the local comps in your area Nick?’
Others compared him to Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, who was accused of hypocrisy in 2003 for sending her son to private school rather than a comprehensive near her home in Hackney, north London. Miss Abbott had previously criticised then solicitor general, Harriet Harman, for sending her son to a selective school in Orpington, south- east London. Miss Abbott said: ‘She made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another.’
Last year, senior Labour figure Shami Chakrabarti was branded a hypocrite by online commentators after an appearance on BBC’s Question Time where she gave an impassioned defence of comprehensive education – despite spending almost £20,000 a year to send her son to Dulwich College in south London.
Yesterday, Mr Childs said in a statement: ‘My children, like all children, are entitled to their privacy. The decision about where children go to school should be made by parents and carers taking into consideration each child’s unique skills, abilities and needs. My own family’s decisions are made on that basis and are not up for public debate.
‘My views on the privatisation of publicly owned state schools through the academisation of publicly owned schools remain clear and should not be confused with my family’s personal decisions or my views on independent schools.’
He added: ‘I do not oppose independent schools and have never been on record doing so.’
‘Champagne socialist’