Hey, leftists, leave independent schools alone

The Labour Party’s policies on education have always been distorted by its obsession with independent schools. There are many senior figures, including the Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, who loathe the sector and would abolish it tomorrow if they could. They simply cannot see the benefits such schools — many of which are genuinely world-class by any objective measure — bring to British society.  For them, the sector is Eton, all entitlement and arrogance, although the reality is, of course, very different. Nuance has no place in this particular form of class envy. For those on the left there is only one acceptable school model and it is non-selective, co-educational, and paid for by the state.

Independent schools are an easy target that can unite those from various factions of the party

Of course, the Labour Party would not be the Labour Party without independent schools. Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Tony Blair, all were educated outside the state, and all were committed to making the country a fairer and more equitable country (how much they did so is down to your own personal politics). Other, rather less consequential figures, also benefited from attending independent schools: Harriet Harman, Ruth Kelly, Shaun Woodward, Louise Haigh and even Hilary Benn, to name just a few.  And if the sector can say, proudly, it was responsible for producing Winston Churchill it also has to hold its hands up and accept that it is partly our fault that we have Anneliese Dodds sitting in the Commons.

Labour has always been a coalition of competing ideas, and independent schools are an easy target that can unite those from various factions of the party. Most Labour MPs think that these schools will survive whatever is thrown at them, and so supporting the January introduction of VAT on fees was something that they knew did not interest many voters and so was no real risk to them, even though it was seen by many as being particularly hurtful to those parents of Y11 and Y13 children who had to decide whether to take their sons or daughters out of school just a few months before their public exams. Others will be aware that of the 105 independent schools that have closed or merged this academic year, many will be in marginal constituencies. Again, this won’t bother the zealots on the left who do not care about the jobs lost, or the friendship groups destroyed, with each closure: what matter is that the sector, in the long term, becomes so unaffordable that, with a lot of help from the Treasury, it is seen to bankrupt itself. The secret hand of the state has never been more visible or more reckless. The imposition of VAT on school fees was a hammer blow to many schools who were already financially fragile but with the loss of charitable business rates relief, plus spiraling staff and pension costs, the hope for many in government is that the slow death of these schools has been hastened. 

But equally important to the cause are those on the liberal left who research, write, report, or podcast on issues relating to education. Nothing should be overlooked if it provides them with another opportunity to prove, yet again, how damaging and systemically unfair these schools are. What is important is that the “noise” around them is always negative, so that anything remotely positive is never allowed the chance to be heard.  

Take the latest publication from Francis Green, Professor of Work and Education Economics at University College London. A quick glance at his “outputs” (as research papers are now depressingly referred to by some university departments) include objective and evidence-led titles such as “Private Schools and Inequality”, “Pathways from origins to destinations: Stability and change in the roles of cognition, private schools and educational attainment”, “Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem”, “Do Private Schools Manage Better?”, “Private Schooling and Labour Market Outcomes”, “Private Schools and the Provision of Public Benefit”, and “The Changing Economic Advantage from Private Schools”.  Approaching his publications, then, we have to know what we are getting. You wouldn’t turn to Zarah Sultana for a balanced take on Israel and Palestine.

Green’s latest research, which attempts to “prove” that most bursaries and scholarships go to the richest families. This has, inevitably, been picked up by the mainstream press and generated the usual garish and misleading headlines about privilege and entitlement. But, as this X thread shows, the dataset used in this study is deeply compromised. Indeed, Green and his co-authors admit, almost as an aside, that: 

… unfortunately, a limitation of our analysis is that the Family Resources Survey (FRS) does not collect expenditure data, nor any information on which private schools are attended. Thus we are unable to investigate the grants in comparison to the school fees paid by individual families.

This introduces such fundamental flaws that much of their work is rendered worthless. Even worse, they conflate bursaries (which are usually means-tested intended to widen access and can be up to 110 per cent of fee remission) with scholarships (which tend to be merit-based and often only have nominal sums associated with them). There are many more scholarships awarded than bursaries, and so if you combine both then you get a fundamentally distorted picture. But in the current climate, frankly, who cares about such distractions?

This campaign against independent schools is unceasing.  It has to be, because so many on the left are obsessed with it. It is their lodestar — a guiding truth that cannot be challenged, cannot be compromised. When the left does eventually establish their new Jerusalem, free of fee-paying schools, will society be a fairer and happier place? Will this country be better suited to the challenges of tomorrow with one school model that remains chronically underfunded? Will we, as a modern economy, be able to better compete with China, India and the United States, with some of the best schools in the world converted into Wetherspoons and the sets for the latest Netflix drama? You would hope so, because if not it has all been a dangerous obsession of the few which will, ultimately and unintentionally, damage the success of the many.