Independent schools are an asset to the education system and they have been singled out by Labour for a tax rise which has as much to do with pressing the right buttons for the party faithful as it does with raising revenue. But really, those schools could do with better PR. Whoever thought it a good idea to suggest to the i newspaper that private schools will be putting plans for new swimming pools, astroturf pitches on hold, and doing away with frills like personalised ring binders, in reaction to the imposition of VAT on their fees? They have succeeded only in feeding education secretary Bridget Phillipson with an attack line. ‘Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery,’ she tweeted on Saturday. ‘Our children need mental health support more than private schools need new pools. Our schools need careers advice more than private schools need astroturf pitches.’
It is easy to dismiss Phillipson’s tweet as a product of class envy, which of course it is. Private education has been a totemic issue for many in the Labour party for decades. All the same, there is a reason why this Labour government has been moved to impose VAT on private schools when previous Labour governments have not. The independent schools sector has helped invite this upon itself by increasingly offering only a premium product. It costs an average of £6,300 to educate a child at a state primary school, and £6,900 to educate one at a state secondary school. The average fee for a day pupil at a private school affiliated with the Independent Schools Council, by contrast, is £18,063. Why is the independent sector seemingly only interested in the upper end of the market? With virtually any other product we expect the price to come down when the private sector competes with the public sector. The private sector tends to be more efficient, more innovative when it comes to working practices, marketing, product development and everything else.
Yet the independent schools sector seems to work along very different lines. Independent schools have engaged in an arms race on facilities. Many employ staff-to-pupil ratios which verge on the extravagant. There seems to be no appetite among them to develop budget-priced education which ordinary parents could afford. In moving relentlessly upmarket they have pushed out the pupils who used to make up the meat of their intake – children of doctors, rural solicitors, small business owners – and, when they have struggled to fill their rolls with local children, they have tapped into the international market instead. By doing so they have made it much harder to argue that they deserve charitable status. They have made it much easier for the likes of Phillipson to lampoon them as repositories of rich kids whose parents might not even notice if VAT is added to their school fees.
Many socialists fundamentally dislike the idea of an independent schools sector – they don’t like the thought of some children getting any kind of advantage, nor of control of education being ceded to anyone other than state functionaries. But I do wish that Starmer’s government had settled on a compromise which could have spared less-wealthy parents some of the pain, as well as making a point about the direction of the private school sector. Why couldn’t the government, at least, have applied VAT only on the proportion of school fees which exceeds the average cost of educating a pupil in a state school? For example, if a private school charges £18,000 a year for a secondary school-aged pupil, why couldn’t Labour have said that the first £6,900 would be tax-free and that VAT would only be charged on £11,100?
Personally, I am not in favour of imposing VAT on school fees at all, but I would be a lot less inclined to object were the government to say to the independent sector: educate children for the same price as the state does, then your customers will continue to pay no tax.
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