How do you square the circle that is a 20% tax exemption for wealthy people? That is the difficult question the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the lobby group for the UK’s private schools, finds itself trying to answer. Accepting that it is “increasingly likely” that Labour – which has a policy of charging VAT on private school fees – will win the next election, the body representing independent schools has stepped up its tactics.
In its fightback against one of the few policies that puts clear daylight between the Tories and Labour, the ISC has written to MPs and contacted private schools – one letter gives schools “a template that Labour insiders suggest could be shared with parents to try to discredit the party’s policy”. This prompted party figures to warn that they could write to the Charity Commission about private schools expressing political opinions or engaging in political campaigns. Were all this not enough, the lobby group’s own emails reveal that officials described Labour’s shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, as “chippy” – someone who “doesn’t know diddly” and can not “appreciate the great good our sector does”.
That private schools do much “good” for “local communities” is an argument their defenders repeat so often, you could be forgiven for thinking this is the real reason why “hardworking parents” opt to go private. Little mention is made of the socioeconomic premium that private school attendance awards children over the course of their lives. After all, people who hold the top jobs in Britain – in politics, the judiciary and the media – are five times more likely to have gone to private school than the general population.
By existing, the ISC argues, private schools enrich the school ecosystem, serving communities and creating opportunities for less fortunate children. They point to their charitable partnerships with their poorer state school cousins, warning these might end, should VAT be applied to their fees. And, were that not enough, they make threats: a smaller independent sector places an even greater burden on the already stretched resources of the state sector. Leaving to one side that extra students could well be considered a boon for the state sector, if private schools do believe that they will haemorrhage numbers, then why don’t they countenance making changes to absorb the VAT fee rise rather than pass it on to parents? In any case, many experts are not sure what the effect VAT on fees will have on student numbers – after all, the rise in fees over the past two decades hasn’t dented demand; fees are at a record high and so, too, are pupil numbers.
The sector has raised its fees at a rate far exceeding inflation – the average annual fee for a non-boarding school is £16,656 – reflecting how its market is hardly those “hardworking”, middle-class families that it likes to speak of. Instead, as one head at a leading independent school put it in 2014, hiked fees have seen them become “finishing schools for the children of oligarchs”. The Telegraph has also sounded the alarm, worriedly reporting earlier this year that “private school fees cost parents twice as much of their income as they did a generation ago”.
Under Theresa May’s premiership, the Tories saw the sense in scrapping the tax exemption on fees. So much so that Michael Gove, in a 2017 column for the Times, asked, given the over-representation of public school alumni in Britain’s top jobs, whether “the children of the rich” are “intrinsically more talented and worthy, more gifted and more deserving of celebration than the rest?” His answer was, of course, no. That didn’t stop May losing her nerve and ditching the policy.
Last November, during prime minister’s questions, Keir Starmer posed his own simple question to Rishi Sunak: why, since the latter’s alma mater, Winchester College, “has a rowing club, a rifle club, an extensive art collection … did he hand them nearly £6m in taxpayers’ money?” (This was Labour’s estimate of the value of the school’s exemption.) Sunak’s response was to accuse Starmer of “attacking the hardworking aspirations of millions of people”. In casting the small minority of parents who can afford private school fees as aspirational “strivers”, Sunak revealed more than he perhaps intended. What’s more, to learn that parents who can afford to go private would perhaps reconsider doing so were an extra 20% added to fees will garner little to no sympathy. Many parents, I suspect, would like the £1.7bn the Treasury would raise in applying VAT on fees to be pumped back into an education system that serves the majority of our children.
“Parents have a right to choose how they educate their children, it is one of our basic human rights,” says Julie Robinson, chief executive of the ISC. “The parents of children in independent schools just want to do the best for their children and that is not something anyone should stop.” Be that as it may, surely, the question remains, why must the rest of us subsidise their drive to secure their children a lifetime of advantage?
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism
