Labour’s private school policy is a catastrophe in the making. Yvette Cooper’s inability to explain what would happen to the children forced out of private education is merely the most recent example of the party being unable to explain the point of the policy in any terms other than simple spite.
It’s a familiar story. Too often, Labour supporters phrase support for VAT on independent school fees as a matter of “fairness”; real terms funding per pupil has fallen in the state sector, so the private sector must pay.
What an extraordinary example of doublethink. A policy that is condemned for one sector of education – reducing expenditure on schools – suddenly becomes justified if it is applied to another sector. It is apparently wrong to deliver a financial hammer blow to one sector of education, but suddenly it becomes acceptable if delivered to schools Labour does not like.
Yet this policy poses a deeper threat to democracy. All the political blarney in the world cannot hide the fact that the imposition of VAT on school fees will deny many more people the ability to choose the school their child attends. Throughout history, totalitarian regimes have sought to control education. Labour Party policy is tantamount to saying that parents have no choice in the education offered their children.
In their world, the choice of school their children attend is not the parents’ choice at all, but the choice of the state. You may like or you may hate independent schools. What you cannot deny is that they offer choice to parents who do not like what the state offers.
The Labour claim that it does not wish to do away with independent schools denies its history, and asks the middle-ground of UK voters to accept that the attack on independent schools is not Sir Keir Starmer’s sop to his hard-left – a purely political decision designed to bring left-wingers inside the tent, and nothing to do with a parents’ freedom to choose the education their child receives.
But it is hard to deny that the success of independent schools is an embarrassment to Labour, a reminder of what can be achieved if only enough money is allocated to education, and what can be achieved if providers listen to what parents want, instead of telling them what they need.
The only justification for Labour’s animosity to independent schools is that the opportunity to send a child to such a school is limited by income. Their response is to make it even harder for parents on average incomes to send their children to independent schools. Under the VAT rule, independent education will become even more elitist and available only to the super-rich. This policy is not only the politics of envy. It is something far more dangerous, ironically akin to what we have seen from Putin: don’t argue with those who oppose you, destroy and silence them.
The sadness of it all is that there is another way. The London Academy of Excellence is a state 6th Form College that has achieved everything a Labour government could wish for in state education. With an entry policy that discriminates unashamedly in favour of local applicants from a disadvantaged area, it sends high numbers of its pupils every year to Oxford or Cambridge, and many of the rest to Russell Group universities. It has done so hugely aided by the co-operation of a group of independent schools, including Eton.
Why cannot Labour see that co-operation with the independent sector is a far better way forward for the children of the UK and their parents than seeking to kill it?
Martin Stephen is a former High Master of St Paul’s School and was a Governor of the London Academy of Excellence from its foundation in 2011 to 2023
original source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/03/vat-private-school-fees-democracy-threat/
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