Freshers week conversations are an interesting phenomenon. Wherever you are and whoever you’re with, the extent of your conversational ability becomes suddenly limited to “So… where are you from?” Sometimes, you’ll push the boat out and ask them what they’re studying (a schoolboy error when you’re sitting next to each other in a History lecture). Then, every so often, someone throws a curveball at you. “What school did you go to?”
When they expect to hear about a school they might know from their cricket tournaments or the Sunday Times League Table, Bishop Heber High School seldom elicits many nods of approval. If only my parents had gone and got their act together, I could have done some serious bonding over a shared love of the Eton wall game or Latin grammar. Unfortunately, this experience is far from unique. Such conversations are probably commonplace in most Russell Group universities. The most recent figures show that some 40% of Edinburgh University’s 50,000 students were privately educated, an enormous number considering they make up only 6% of the population. Fortunately, these universities are at the forefront of tackling social inequality and have taken it upon themselves to develop stringent measures to address this imbalance.
I’m lying of course. Edinburgh’s only step was to instruct those from privileged backgrounds to avoid snobby behaviour, whilst a Professor of English at Oxford University took a swipe at diversity drives because “state school pupils struggle to read long books”.
It has become increasingly evident that universities have been unable to tackle widening admission inequalities. According to the Department for Education, the gap between private and state students going to the top universities has continued to enlarge, with private school students now twice as likely to advance to higher education as their state counterparts. Why then is the government’s decision to charge VAT on private school fees considered so controversial? Well, to be honest, it’s not.
The sensationalist headlines from much of the right-wing press (I doubt I need to name any names) would have you believe that there were poll tax-esque protests on the streets. However, recent studies have shown that almost 60% of the general public supports the policy, and by the time it was announced in Rachel Reeve’s budget it was mostly ignored as a foregone conclusion, overshadowed by drawn-out semantics over who a ‘working man’ actually is.
So what is all the fuss about? The general claim is that placing a standard rate of VAT on private school fees will result in some mass exodus into an already overstretched state system. If all private school fees were to rise by 20% (plus any subsequent rises in the price of private schools to compensate for their lower uptake in students), some parents would in fact be forced to move their children to a non-fee-paying school. If this were the case, the Conservative Party – in their famously limitless benevolence - have claimed it would disproportionately affect the middle classes, for whom school fees are only possible at their current rate because of what they deem ‘considerable sacrifices’, whilst having very little impact on the wealthiest in society.
Now this argument is fair. Those who will be priced out of the private system will not be the children of Russian oligarchs but rather will be those whose parents have had to cut back on their lifestyle to afford such education for their children. Why though, should we assume that the burden of the 20% would be passed directly onto the parents? Last month Eton announced that they were unable to absorb any of the fee increase themselves despite, in the same breath, celebrating a £100,000 pay increase for its Headmaster. Eton is probably unlike most private schools in the country but this hardly signals an industry strapped for cash.
In the past 25 years average fees have risen twice as fast as average wages, totalling a 265% increase in day schools, with some of the most prestigious ones seeing fees rise above £50,000 a year. Yet this has escaped backlash. Perhaps an increase in fees is only intolerable when it has the possibility of contributing to the education of the other 96% instead of a seventh heated swimming pool.
Description: Index 199=100, from 1999 to 2024
Source: Independent School Council Annual Census, ONS, OECD. LPI calculations
I’m being facetious, but considering that the median household disposable income in the UK was less than £35,000, and 2.1 million students are now eligible for free school meals, you would be forgiven for having very little sympathy for those charged with a 20% rise in their private school fees.
The extent to which this will raise the funds the government claim it will is debatable, however. The OBR estimates that the policy will raise £1.6bn a year from next year, which can then be spent on funding 6500 new teachers. Assuming that somewhere between 3 and 6% of all private school students then join the state sector, at an average cost of £7,690 per student, the government would still be over £1bn to the good. The Conservative Party doubts this figure, of course, arguing that the cost of new students will prove more costly than any tax increase (colour me shocked. The party of Truss’ mini budget disagrees with the OBR figures). Moreover, The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that fears of state schools becoming swamped by a mass withdrawal from the private system are also largely unfounded, with most regions having the capacity to absorb new students, particularly with an influx of newly trained teachers.
In many ways, the figures are largely irrelevant. The increased fees are less of an attempt to fill the black hole in the budget, and more of a dog whistle to the Labour left that Starmer can, every now and again, break out the donkey jacket and muscle in on some historical class issues. Realistically though, as much as Starmer would like you to believe that he is some working-class champion, this is unlikely to placate those who jeer at him for being a Tory in sheep’s clothing (paid for by a wealthy donor of course) and will have very little impact on the UK’s education-based social hierarchy.
Essentially the tax is a stepping stone. Merely an exercise in highlighting the fundamental problems in our education system. Whilst private schools continue to game the system, allowing students to sit IGCSEs and claim obscene numbers of students needing extra time, the state sector remains underfunded and overstrained. In 2019, a Sutton Trust study showed that 8 top British schools received as many Oxbridge offers as another 2894 schools put together. The declining state of the British education system is by no means a shock, and yet it seems that the British media and political establishment only care about such startling figures when it is their children who may end up on the wrong side of the statistics.
Too much time has been given to hearing the grievances of parents who might have to face taking their children out of private education, and too little time taken to question why the threat of state education seems to elicit more fear and anger than the existing condition of education itself. Herein lies the real issue with Starmer’s plan: he could raise taxes on private schools as high as he wishes, and yet some would still rather pay than see their child in state school. We cannot hope to have an effective discussion about state education in this country if the political and media establishment has no real skin in the game. Why would they want to invest more in an education system they know their children will never experience?
Ironically, the issue with private schools is inadvertently confirmed by the arguments of those who attend them. They would have you believe that they are too small of an issue for Starmer to focus on and do not give their students an unfair advantage over those who cannot afford to attend. That is until they are threatened with closure, at which point they suddenly become integral institutions, without which, both our education system and economy would fall apart at the seams. Both, of course, cannot be true.
So, either the 6% admit their unfair advantage and we rethink how we view university admissions and tackle social mobility, or they face the seemingly intolerable possibility of pasta king, semi-permanent mobile classrooms, and becoming part of the 94%.