Labour’s threat to private schools

In the past, there would be a day’s holiday at Eton when one of its old boys was made prime minister. That doesn’t happen any more – but alumni of the £40,000-a-year school, which has just produced its 20th PM, can still expect to claim the best paid and most powerful jobs, said Steven Longden in The Guardian. Only 7% of British children are sent to private schools, yet according to a recent Sutton Trust report, 65% of senior judges, 49% of Armed Forces officers, 44% of newspaper columnists and 29% of MPs come from them. I tell my pupils at a comprehensive in Manchester “not to lose hope”, and assure them that if they work hard, they might get one of the remaining top jobs – but “they don’t look convinced”. Social mobility in Britain has ground to a halt, which is why the Labour Party must now address this monstrous injustice. It has pledged to impose VAT on school fees, but that’s not enough: to tackle structural inequalities, it must phase the schools out.

This proposal will be put to the party conference in September, said Anoosh Chakelian in the New Statesman, and it has already garnered considerable support. But Labour has been here before. Anthony Crosland railed against private schools, yet when he had a chance to abolish them, as education secretary in the mid-1960s, he passed on it. Later, he explained that he’d felt that funding the education of wealthy children would have been a strange use of resources, given the poor condition of state schools. That’s still a concern – as is the risk of the policy being challenged in court. Finally, there’s the political hurdle: voters may think the Government’s priority should be improving state schools for all, not tinkering with the privileges of a few.

Abolishing private schools would certainly be problematic, said John Claughton on CapX. To transfer 580,000 children into the state system would cost around £3bn a year – and worsen the glaring inequalities in that system by pushing up demand for places at the best schools, which tend to be in expensive areas. All true, but such arguments are being choked by “the stench of privilege”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. As charities, private schools should be run thriftily, to provide an education for as broad a swathe of deserving children as possible. Instead, too many have ramped up their fees to provide countryclub facilities for the offspring of the super rich. Meanwhile, their much-vaunted means-tested bursaries are claimed by families earning up to £140,000pa. Ancient now-posh schools such as Eton were set up to drive social mobility, not restrict it. If they don’t do far more to live up to their founders’ intentions, “they are feeding a fire that will, sooner or later, consume them”.