September 28, 2021 - 2:00pm
Keir Starmer’s announcement that Labour will pledge to end private schools’ charity status and use the tax revenue to raise £1.7 billion for state schools may sound like a good idea. After all, private schools are run like a business and should be treated as such. It is also refreshing to finally see a clear Labour policy (even if it is a rehash of one of Jeremy Corbyn’s) — I just wish it was a coherent one.
While it may make a good headline, the scheme is likely to harm more families than it will actually help. It’s also a distraction from some of the Labour’s more interesting ideas, such as improving financial education so that students are taught about pension planning, mortgages and credit scores at school.
Any tax raised by the private school proposal would probably be outweighed by the cost of educating the resultant influx of children entering the state sector. Currently, private schools educate around 600,000 children and save the government £3billion in state school costs. Taxing private schools and removing the VAT exemption would undoubtedly lead to more expensive tuition fees (and fewer scholarships and bursaries), rendering private schools even more inaccessible. The scheme would also only raise roughly £190 per child, which is hardly enough to fund “education fit for the future”.
There is no doubt that private schools play a part in ongoing inequality in the UK, but should we not be focusing on making sure that private schools live up to their charitable status, rather than withdrawing it altogether? Over the last decade there has been a huge explosion in the number of bursaries at private schools, with the total value of scholarships and bursaries increasing by £195million since 2011. There are some amazing success stories, such as Christ’s Hospital School in West Sussex, which has become the UK’s largest bursary charity; two-thirds of pupils are on bursaries, with most paying nothing at all. Even at Eton around 20% of pupils have some sort of financial assistance (averaging a 67% reduction), with about 10% on free places, while Latymer Upper School has also pledged to offer bursaries to 300 pupils by 2024.
As a teacher at a private school, I have seen firsthand the transformative impact bursaries can have on students. I also completed the Teach First scheme at a state school in a disadvantaged area, and I know that levelling the educational playing field isn’t about dragging down the top, but raising up the bottom.
Labour’s policy feels out of touch with recent educational shifts. Private schools are making very conscious decisions — for example, waiving scholarships (too many of which go to already well-off families) in favour of bursaries, creating new fundraising initiatives and even taking out millions of pounds worth of debt to pay for access schemes — and these haven’t happened spontaneously. They are the result of public and parental pressure; changing cultural attitudes towards privilege, diversity and accessibility; and, of course, a need to justify private schools’ charitable status. Labour should try and capitalise on this positive momentum, rather than grind it to a halt.
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Consider that the child going private is already paying twice for education, now they are supposed to pay 2.2 times? How is that fair? Start by giving me a rebate on taxes already collected that go towards (my kids’) education, and then you can have your petty VAT.
And in any case, why do private schools entrench inequality? You don’t want grammars either, so everyone is supposed to go to the local comprehensive, but why? So that everyone is equally disadvantaged? If the school system was SO good why do parents pay megabucks for something they could have for free? It makes no sense. And what about those parents who make HUGE sacrifices to give their kids the best there is?
In short, you want to penalize the parents who can barely afford to send their kids to a private school and those receiving a bursary.
The wealthy won’t care either way.
Another fine example of a rule for the rich and one for everyone else. So not only the Government manages to create them, her Majesty’s opposition can too.
Notice how they pretend not to notice rich parents buying houses in expensive catchment areas next to top ranking state schools.
Yes, that’s the current scam. Buy a house in the catchment area, then spend what you save on school fees on secret private tuition. Your kid then rocks up for their Oxbridge interview an apparently 100% authentic downtrodden prole and gets in off worse A-Level results than are expected from the private sector.
Good point, as is Samir’s above. It’s not a defence of elite education, but it’s absolutely true that this is not the only way in which the well off give their children an unfair advantage.
And another gripe of mine is that you and I pay towards an expensive education for members of the armed forces, the only advantage it seems to me being that it at least allows people other than the very rich to attend them.
Ironically, in the days of slow transport, negligible long-distance communication and when we had armed forces all over the world, this subsidy wasn’t available, illustrating the fact that as UK government becomes ever more ineffective, it rewards itself ever more than in the past.
The policy is typical left wing envy, if the state can’t deliver to the standard some of the population want, then drag the competition down rather than improve the state provision.
How would it drag down the standard of private education? All it’s doing is making these businesses pay their tax like the rest of us, it doesn’t attempt to alter the curriculum or teaching at all
“If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that’s the place they want to go to.” John Prescott, 2005.
To Labour, good schools are a “great danger”. The only safety is in making all schools equally bad.
“While it may make a good headline, the scheme is likely to harm more families than it will actually help….rendering private schools even more inaccessible”
And you wonder why Labour are so keen on these proposals.
If Public Schools are a charity, then might I suggest the following collective mission statement:
”to enable the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country to pass on their advantages to the most privileged children in the country (theirs), ensuring, as far as is possible, that power and privilege remain in the same hands.”
Hmmm – somehow it just doesn’t sound like a charity I would want to contribute to – or to give a tax break to, for that matter. It’s not exactly Oxfam is it.
Oxfam, isn’t that the organization whose training material condemns white women for reporting sexual assault and rape because it results in people of colour going to jail and loosing jobs
Haha – I knew I was leaving myself open to that one, but couldn’t be bothered to change it to another charity.
You get my point though.
Charitable status for private schools is another financial leg-up that mainly benefits the middle classes; just like, in the past, free university education.
Its unfair to expect poor people, most of whom could never dream of accessing private school services, to subsidise richer people who CHOOSE to use these services for the lifelong benefit it provides to their children, which is much greater than attending state school.
Its always been unfair, like all these subsidies for the middle classes to maintain their ‘privilege’. Grammar schools should be the alternative for these children, although this too needs controls to prevent the middle class monopolising the benefit.
I know people who were not well off who sent their children to public school and made sacrifices to do so. They made the decision because of the appalling standard of the state school.
There is little or nothing that can be done to improve the standard of state schools since they are run primarily with the interests of the teaching staff at heart and the education establishment is fundamentally left wing.
Also how well a child succeeds essentially depends on parental expectation and support. if the parents do not give a toss then no amount of additional spending is going to make a difference and this is something that the left cannot accept.
I’ve no problem with private education, if people wish to pay to give their child a leg up that’s up to them. My argument though is that these private schools are a business, and them not paying tax the same as any other business means that they’re effectively being subsidised by those who can’t afford to go. It’s immoral
I dragged my son to Dulwich College to hear a speech by the Master about the value of decent schooling. He gave us all a lot of examples; a shop assistant whose family sold their home and lived in a caravan to send their two sons to the College. The diversity mix at DC is about 50/50 white to BAME. A really large number of parents sacrifice so much, work two or three jobs, sit up late to do homework etc. to give their children what they KNOW is the best thing they could ever give them – a really good education and grounding for life.
My son didn’t want to go to DC. Which was fortunate for me and my parents! He got into a grammar school in Sutton where the competition was seriously stiff – 250 boys for 20 places.
Unless Grammar schools return, boys like my gifted(150 IQ) glasses-wearing, very tall son will have to go to private schools for their education. At the time, his life was literally not worth living in an inner city London comprehensive.
I had no idea private schools were given charity status.
I’ve nothing against private education, if the wealthy want to pay to educate their children that’s up to them, but ultimately it’s a business and should be treated as such in regards to taxation. It’s a question of fairness in my eyes, why should they be allowed to earn money tax free when every other business has to pay tax?
Because higher taxes would be passed onto customers, ie parents, many of whom are not rich and sacrifice lots to afford decent schooling.
If we are happy for the taxpayer to foot the bill for useless arts and xyz grads, why is it such a big deal to just partly subsidise parents willing to spend good money on quality education.
Why should I fund something that I myself can’t afford? Why should the working class pay taxes to give even more of a leg up to those richer families who already have a considerable head start in life?
You are not funding it. School fees are paid out of taxed income and sending children a private school saves the state of the cost of educating them. Also, unless you earn more than £48K pa you are a net recipient of the state’s largess and are not funding anything.
I did not go to public school and neither do my children
If they’re not paying their fair share of tax the same as other businesses then my tax money is indirectly subsidising it
If you knew the slightest thing about it, you’d realise that you’re NOT funding it, but that other people are spending money, it may be small, it may be large, to buy something which the state would otherwise pay for.
Whether or not pupils of private schools have advantages over others is a different argument which I won’t address here.
As a plumber, by installing a fixing water supply pipework I’m saving the state having to step in and do it. Can I not bother paying tax on my earnings as well, seeing as I’ve saved the state money?
Not all of them are.
I agree with you. Unless 50% of the attendees come from families in poverty, then they ought to lose ‘charity’ status.
It’s a strange charity that helps those with the means to not just help themselves, but can afford to pay to give their children an advantage over their peers
Perhaps the Labour party bright spark who thought up ending private schools charitable status should go back to school to resit the maths they clearly failed. Spend £3bn to save £1.7bn is straight out of the Corbyn/Abbott economics school and should be dismissed for the fantasy it is.
The current Gov’t should institute a voucher education scheme. Every parent in the UK would receive an annual voucher for the full cost of a state education. Where they chose to spend that, on a state comp, an independent school, a Grammar whichever, would be their choice. They may chose to top up to cover independent school fees, or go with the nearest comp at the value of the voucher.
That would give a fairer chance for all, but also further highlight the value of a good education and the fact it isn’t ‘free’. Also it should reduce the pointless independent vs state education argument that hasn’t moved anything forward for decades.
I’m afraid this sounds just like yet another “if we do anything to tackle privilege it will only hurt the people it’s meant to help” argument. Rolled out every time the privileged feel under threat.
Other countries manage to educate their populations perfectly well without expensive public schools.
For the record, my opposition is not to private education as such, it is to a system of expensive elite schools which enable parents to pass on privilege to their children.
I think you need to look at the issue differently.
State education in this country is, to put it politely, poor and politized. In fact my children who recently completed their state education were damming about it, many of the teachers and the effect the process had on their contemporaries. They supposedly went to an outstanding school
The teaching profession is very left wing and a bastion of the labour party. The profession, the unions and the labour party are instinctively opposed to any measure intended to improve standards since this usually entails more work and effort on the part of teachers and some form of objective assessment and competition.
The reason why the left, and the teaching profession in particular, hate public schools is that they show what can be achieve. This is also reason why public schools are a national asset, they produce people of the calibre that the country needs
There’s actually much I agree with here.
Specifically, that putting money in on its own is not enough – there needs to be systemic change.
One of labours central myths is that the interests of the providers and the recipients of public services are always and necessarily aligned. They are not, and these services are prone to provider capture.
We may be thankful that politicians are no longer expected to live up to their manifesto promises.
It’s a sensible policy. It will drive significant numbers of parents who are the most engaged in their children’s education into the state system. They will act as levers, raising the standard for all children in state schools.
And what about the extra costs the state will have to shoulder to accommodate all these extra children?
How much extra would these proposals cost each student in the private education sector for the school to maintain its current profit margins? I’d wager not much at all, certainly not enough to cause thousands of wealthy families to put their children back into state education..
This article appears to be more of a scare story from an industry currently enjoying a tremendous advantage to discredit a policy designed to make these businesses pay their fair share than anything else. Whilst I’m definitely no fan of Labour in their current incarnation I think this is a good idea, simply from a fairness point of view. Poorer taxpayers are effectively subsidising an education for the wealthy that they themselves can’t afford
No, it is the other way around. People going private are subsidising the others because they have already paid for the state sponsored education, money that the state is spending anyway and not giving back.
Apart from contributing VAT like everybody else obviously. Why is welfare only ok when it benefits the wealthy?
For the record, charging VAT on schools would disadvantage them in competition with schools in the EU, because education is exempt from VAT by EU directive.
The great majority of public schools don’t make profits. Why? Because they’re non-profit making.charities, in the same way, I guess, as many state-funded schools, universities, hospital trusts, and many other institutions.
Spot on. But expect a lot of thumbs down. This is one of those issues that splits Unherd readers. Which of course is great – stops it becoming an auto Tory bubble.
But he’s not ‘spot on’. As Colin Elliott states above, vast majority of private schools are non-profit making charities. So paying private school fees are not ‘tax dodging’. They are set up to provide an education to those children whose families chose to make a sacrifice and pay fees, rather than use taxpayer funded state schools.
Sadly the Labour parties blind socialism sees it propose spending £3billion to ‘save’ £1.7bn. Diane Abbott must have done the sums on this policy. Labour & it’s far left teaching union supporters hate private education because it cannot be controlled and dumbed down by them.
Even you must recognise that a charity which benefits the richest in the land is an odd sort of charity.
Your envy narrative of ‘privileged children’ when in fact many parents sending their children to private schools make huge sacrifices to do so, exposes your inability to accept that people should, in a free market society, have the option to pay to school their children.
Charitable status is given to private schools as they clearly save the taxpayer £1.3 Billion not having to state educate these kids.
Precisely. My parents were both primary school teachers who sacrificed a hell of a lot to send my sister and I to private schools. They’d seen the system at first hand and decided to spend their hard earned cash as they saw fit. Just one more reason for me to be eternally grateful to them.
So your parents earned a living providing a substandard education to other children – and used the money so earned to send you and your sister to private school? Any idea how that sounds?
When I was a state school governor I met many teachers who had opted out their own children from the sort of education they were providing to other people’s children. Their hypocrisy was breathtaking.
How many? Let’s have some stats rather than anecdotes and the tired old “envy” trope. This is about equality of opportunity not envy.
Or gaming opportunity by buying advantage.