“We shall be ending tax breaks for private schools”. I’m sick of hearing it. The Labour Party which, in 2019, voted to abolish private schools, will instead be stealing from parents and children who choose them. Stealing safe, low-cost, small school, education. Robbing charitable faith-based education, and, in the process damaging the state system, stripping all children of services they need. 

Schools have been created where the teachers work for lower salaries than their state teacher counterparts, and where low-income parents save or borrow to pay fees, volunteering their time and talents so their children can be part of these educational communities. These are often started by Christians. Some of these schools have agreed a flat level salary structure; the head and the infant teacher on the same 20 or so thousand a year. They find ways to hire halls or playing fields for sports from others, and can be found in adapted homes, ex-offices, or church buildings providing excellent, peace-filled education. They bend over backwards to accommodate children where they can. They keep their classes deliberately small and make no profit whatsoever. They are families.

Doesn’t sound like Eton does it? Nor does it sound like a monolithic state education factory system. Institutions with hundreds and hundreds of children or teenagers, where so many are held back and do not flourish because of their size as well as their structural challenges. Should there really be no affordable option of escape from this when needed?

So, who will be stolen from? The parent of the child who would be waiting not months but years for the state SEND or mental health assessment and then the release of funding for the resources or staffing their child needs to access education in these huge settings. They find a home, a family, in these schools instead. Or consider the parent of the 12-year-old boy being bullied. He could not face another incident of assault, and so could be moved, because of the generosity of others, to a small Christian school. How about the child who would not celebrate or join in with promotions of Pride and transgenderism due to their faith, and who could no longer cope with the ostracisation of the other pupils and even of the teachers. Such parents would come to me weeping and desperate, when I was a headteacher of one of these small schools. 

The so-called “tax breaks”, which private schools benefit from are nothing of the sort. It is envy politics spin. Our society decided fairly recently that teaching children to read might actually be a good thing. No government has thought it acceptable to tax those who provide such education when they attempt to cover the costs of this from the recipients or from generous donors. It has always been seen as a social good to educate. Post-war, the welfare state stepped in to continue the work which had been started predominantly by Christians, faith-based sacrificial communities, who had never previously had or expected any state funding to support them. They had been following the biblical mandate to contribute to their community, in loving thy neighbour and so had sought to “train up a child”. The opposite spirit entirely from stealing.

Indeed, parents with children whose educational, spiritual or mental health needs are not being met are already paying tax towards the educational services of the state which they are not taking up, and so, in effect, preventing the stretching of those services for the majority. All who privately educate are propping up the state system. They should be thanked, not taxed.

Which children in the state system will actually benefit from the less than one third of a teacher per state school that the tax policy will supposedly create. With the government itself expecting at least 45,000 children to be forced to move from private to state schools, and many of those with special needs who would be entitled to tens of thousands of pounds of funding, that will soon stretch the system beyond any advantage obtained. 

Eton’s children will, with one small change of a standing order, make the small adjustment from paying 50k per year to 60k per year. Taxing the super-rich who often populate these expensive schools has always been done through other taxes, so no wonder many of us are suspicious of the influence of a particular socialist obsession at the heart of government as they begin to demolish private choices.

Working families, faith filled families, low and middle income families have often needed to exercise choice away from state provision, and the generous and charitable in society have never been taxed for supporting those who do, be that through providing food, clothing, health care or education. This has not happened in the developed world and may be against international law. But it is beginning here in the UK. Penalising parents for not accepting the state’s provision, especially at a time when it has so many issues, and taxing them for their care and nurturing of their children, is nothing like Robin Hood’s legendary taking from the rich to give to the poor; more like the taxes of the sheriff of Nottingham.  

Legal actions are being prepared, headteachers of these small low-cost schools are appearing in the media, parents and children themselves are trying to be heard, but the treasury is persevering and the budget is about to be announced. Our policies and laws were once built on the Ten Commandments. Will the former QC and current PM understand there is a reason why education has never been taxed, and remember the foundational biblical law that “Thou shalt not steal”?