At first I was energised and vaguely excited by the private schools debate. Abolish, I say. Get rid of a profoundly unequal education system that reproduces inequality and divides society! Bye! And then, as the debate continued, I started to consider what we’re not talking about when we’re talking about private schools.
As the election approaches, private schools have become a topic of extreme agitation, with Labour’s plans to levy VAT on school fees leading to politicians being asked endless questions about it and newspapers running endless pieces warning of the chaos it will unleash on “middle-class” families. This obsession is no doubt influenced by the fact that, while only 7% of the population went to a private school, according to social mobility charity the Sutton Trust, 43% of “the UK’s 100 most influential editors and broadcasters” did (and 44% of my fellow columnists). Anyway, one such middle-class family appeared in the Telegraph last week beneath the headline, “We moved to Spain to dodge Labour’s private school tax raid.” A stern couple were photographed with their daughter in front of a portrait of Napoleon III, a picture that invited the age-old question, “Middle class?”
I wearily looked it up – the median household income in the UK is £35,000 and average private school fees are £15,200. A family sending a child to private school would be left with £19,800 to live on for the year and that’s before Labour’s VAT application. Which suddenly illuminates the way the phrase “middle class” is so often used by the press to mean “people like us” and the vastly different ways people view their own wealth.
But something important is getting lost among all the debate, all the questions, all the details about subsidies and hypocrisy and class sizes, the clumsy reveals about generational wealth, about “the politics of envy”. The thing getting lost is the reason this move is necessary, the reason it is increasingly essential in fact, to rinse private schools of all their benefits as a first step (if I were king) to abolishing them entirely. The reason being: the children at state schools are suffering.
While the wealthiest families in the world continue to quibble about the sacrifices they’ll have to make if taxed on school fees (small point, worth repeating – foregoing luxuries is not making a sacrifice), a recent report revealed that schools are now the biggest source of charitable food for struggling families as they are increasingly forced to step in to help. One in five schools across England runs a food bank, rising to one in three in areas with high numbers of pupils from deprived backgrounds. Recently, Gordon Brown wrote about visiting a primary school in Merseyside where a teacher hands out toilet rolls to students every Friday; alongside the food banks he predicts a rise, too, in “school launderettes” to wash the children’s clothes.
And it’s not just the poorest pupils who are struggling. The BBC reports that: “Schools across the UK are under unprecedented pressure as they struggle to address a range of social issues unrelated to teaching.” Teachers are expected to be nurses, dentists, therapists, babysitters and cleaners as well as educators. Some of this is related to the forced closure of schools during the pandemic: parents were too busy working to home-school their kids, too, and when schools reopened, attendance dropped. Parents and children’s mental health suffered at a time that coincided with the closure of support services. “Some parents today do not know how to play with their children,” the BBC reported, on a school in Telford, “so it now runs a weekly class to teach them.” This is at a time when nearly as many teachers in England are leaving the profession as entering it, quitting for less stressful or better-paid jobs, and not being replaced.
As a parent I’m more than aware of the impulse, or even pressure, to “put children first”, as the families and politicians campaigning for private schools say they’re doing. But it seems clear to me that putting your children first should not mean doing so at the cost of other children, especially those in less fortunate families.
Putting children first, really, would mean replacing every question asked of an MP about private schools with a question about free school meals, or the 900,000 children caught in “the hunger trap”, who are living in poverty, but whose parents’ wages are deemed too high to qualify for school meals or holiday clubs, or asking about Tories’ plans for the largest school budget cuts in a generation; cuts which could force schools to close. It would mean, at the very least, being willing to pay your taxes. I’m starting to feel, and I don’t think I’m alone, increasingly sick about the airtime given to concerns about the education and finances of Britain’s richest children and their families, when our state schools are at breaking point, and a far greater proportion of children are arriving at school hungry and exhausted in too-small shoes, their families scrabbling to simply survive.
Email Eva at [email protected] or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
