There is no longer any justification for private schools in Britain

Labour is right to debate the future of these unjust institutions, which at last are no longer seen as untouchable writes Frances Ryan in The Guardian

 

Pupils at Harrow school, London: ‘Removing charitable status is rightly no longer seen as radical.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo


A few years back, I finished a PhD on how to tackle Britain’s unequal life chances – which, among other measures, included abolishing private schools. Dusty academia seemed the home for this sort of proposal, one that has long filled endless papers but never quite makes it off the page and into reality.

That is no longer the case. In a few days, the Labour party will debate the future of private schools. The grassroots group Labour Against Private Schools (Laps) will bring a motion to the annual party conference in Brighton calling for the full integration of state and private schools, including nationalising the endowments of the hugely wealthy public schools. It has support from six constituency parties so far and the backing of senior party figures, with the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, putting his weight behind the motion this week. A leaked memo to the Telegraph last week noted that the party is already considering making a manifesto pledge to remove tax breaks from the sector – while leaving the door open to getting rid of the schools altogether.

Removing charitable status is rightly no longer seen as radical. In 2017, that well-known lefty Michael Gove declared that private schools were “welfare junkies”, calling the VAT exemption “egregious state support to the already wealthy so that they might buy advantage for their own children”. The classic argument that private schools deserve tax breaks because they provide bursaries to poorer children is as thin as paper: in 2017, only 1% of private school pupils were schooled for free, while figures show “financial assistance” is considerably more likely to go to affluent middle-class families than children in need. 

It’s exciting, then, that the conversation is no longer restricted to this. For decades, private schools have held an untouchable air in this country. We know very well the damage they cause – both to the children whose education is harmed by losing advantaged peers and their influential parents, and to a society that is stifled by positions of power handed out on the basis of wealth rather than talent. We know how bizarre this set-up is – that 7% of schoolchildren will go on to control much of the media, the judiciary and parliament. And yet it is greeted with borderline rabid resistance by many commentators, while even those on the left have been reluctant to argue for comprehensive solutions. It typifies the worst of class privilege, where a small section of society is permitted to buy power and influence despite all the evidence of the damage that causes, and the rest of us must shrug our shoulders and accept this as an inevitability.

What feels different now is that these ideas are becoming mainstream at a tipping point in this country. Years of austerity have highlighted the resources gap between the highly funded private sector and the starved state sector. When many working-class children don’t have basic equipment in class, the dominance of elite schools feels even more obscene. The calamity of Eton alumni taking their turn at Downing Street, meanwhile, is now a real-time display of how dysfunctional a nation becomes when structured to be forever run by a tiny pocket of the wealthy.

The abolition of private schools is not an outlandish idea but rather an extension of what we already do. Societies constantly set limits on how far a parent can go in giving their child an advantage in life – that’s why it’s illegal for a mother to bribe a university admissions officer to give her son a place, and unethical for a father to do his daughter’s GCSE coursework. This is because it is widely understood that no matter how natural a parent’s desire to do the best for their child, it does not trump the good of society. Other countries, such as Finland, have already acted on this by slowly merging private and state schools.

When many working-class children don’t have basic equipment in class, the dominance of elite schools feels even more obscene

That the recent Telegraph front page had to rely on the retro “politics of envy” accusation to describe Labour’s ideas – akin to a playground cry of “You’re just jealous!” – shows how weak critics’ arguments are. In an era in which the damage of inequality is ever clearer and the movements to tackle it are growing stronger, those who cannot comprehend a desire to make life fairer for other people’s children sound increasingly out of touch.

It’s clear that tackling private schools alone is not enough to level the playing field, but that there are multiple causes of inequality doesn’t seem a good argument to ignore one of them.

The protection of a two-tier school system comes down to a fundamental question about what we think education should be. If we want the education system to be about giving every child a fair shot, then merging state and private schools is the logical move. The question is: what is really stopping our children being educated together?

Why Brexit Britain needs to upskill its workforce

Simon Kuper in The FT

A British hospital director told me he was hunting for staff to replace foreign doctors and nurses leaving because of Brexit. He hadn’t found many qualified Britons queuing to replace them. In fact, he specified: “Not one!” 

You could interpret this as yet another cautionary tale about Brexit. In an age when the chief global business cliché is the “war for talent”, the UK is fighting a war against talent. But if I were a Brexiter, I’d say: Brexit should be the prompt for Britain finally to start training enough of its own talent. 

Obviously, I’m not arguing that every departing foreigner frees up a job for a Briton. Economists dismiss such reasoning as the “lump of labour fallacy”. Rather, I’m saying that if the UK wants to avoid economic decline, it will need to train far more of its own nurses, construction workers, bankers, architects, etc. For a country whose policy has always been not to educate the working class, that would be a reversal of history. It would come too late for the over-45s (the generation that actually voted for Brexit), but it could transform the futures of young Britons. And it’s doable. 

The British tradition is to educate each class separately, writes historian David Cannadine in Class in Britain. Even in the 18th century, posh males went to public schools and Oxbridge, whereas the poor were taught almost nothing. The purpose of education then, says Cannadine, “was more to teach people their place than to give them opportunities to advance”. His words apply pretty well to today’s country. The alumni of nine expensive “public” schools are now 94 times more likely than the average Briton to reach the elite, according to London School of Economics research. (The conservative Daily Telegraph reported the findings under the headline, factually accurate as far as it went, “Boys’ public school dominance over British elite has ‘diminished significantly’ over time”.) 

The UK — without any more wars of conscription and with few surviving factories or mines — now struggles to find a use for low-skilled people who live in places where they can’t perform personal services for higher castes (see this week’s cover story on Blackpool). 

Before Brexit, the rest of the country didn’t need these people. High-skilled immigrants staffed world-class British sectors such as the City and London’s creative economy. In healthcare, the UK developed a brilliant racket: let a poor country like Romania fund a nurse’s education, then underpay her to look after sick Brits. Low-skilled immigrants eager to work all hours for little money gave the UK cafés, carers and corner shops that seldom closed. Low-skilled Britons could have done these jobs, but mostly didn’t. 

The coming wave of British talent is largely immigrant too: the kids who have made London’s state schools the UK’s best, plus the offspring of Russian, Chinese and other foreign elites who fill the public schools. Many of these people would love to stay and make the UK richer. 

But Brexiters want to cut immigration. The obvious, if tricky solution: equip working-class Brits to do jobs from nursing to banking. “That’s the opportunity,” says Charles Leadbeater, a consultant who has long advised British governments on innovation and education. “I just think it won’t happen. It would require something like a wartime national mobilisation of people and skills. That would require state leadership of the kind most Brexiteers abhor.” 

Leadbeater points out that Tory Brexiter politicians — almost none of whom send their children to state schools — rarely talk about apprenticeship schemes à la Switzerland. Instead, their vision seems to be a low-tax, low-regulation Britain. 

Jonathan Portes, economics professor at King’s College London, adds: “The problem of UK vocational education has been known for at least a century. We’ve always neglected it. When I was involved in government we had a new skills strategy every two years, and none of them worked.” 

Anyway, executing Brexit will distract ministers and civil servants for years to come. “The government has neither the fiscal room nor the mental bandwidth to do much about skills,” says Portes. In fact, in August the UK removed the NHS bursary for people training to be nurses, midwives and speech therapists, among other professions. Students now have to fund their courses themselves, knowing they can expect a low lifetime salary. 

If Britain doesn’t upskill its workers fast, it will lose skilled jobs. It will continue to have the world’s best universities per capita only if it can find enough Britons to replace departing foreign academics. Much the same applies to finance or design. Meanwhile, low-skilled foreign fruit pickers have already melted away since the pound plunged. With few Britons queuing to replace them, much of this year’s produce rotted in the fields. 

So the most likely post-Brexit outcome is a Britain that cannot keep itself in the style to which it has become accustomed. The war against talent will probably leave the UK looking a bit more like today’s English seaside towns, or most of the country in the 1970s: culturally homogeneous, relatively poor and under-serviced. On the upside, housing should be cheaper. For many Brexiters, I suspect the trade-offs will be worth it.