In the run-up to last year’s general election, and in the months following it, a fallacious fiction slowly but surely became accepted as fact. Countless stories and endless airtime were dedicated to this newly established truth: that Labour’s decision to remove private schools’ long-standing exemption from VAT would have devastating consequences for the entire education system.
The change would, we were warned, spark an immediate exodus of private school pupils into the state sector. This would be so severe, private school leaders insisted, that 20 per cent of all pupils in private education would likely be forced to move into an already struggling state system.
Month after month, these predictions of impending doom were reported as fact rather than what they really were: flimsy falsehoods produced by one of the most overblown, melodramatic and self-interested lobbying campaigns against any tax change in recent history. And so the myth gradually become accepted as truth: children’s futures would be destroyed. Parents would be financially crippled. Private schools would close in their droves. The policy would be an unmitigated disaster.
Almost a year on, how has this catastrophe unfolded? Of course, it hasn’t. In fact, all the dire predictions seem to have been wrong.
So far, 80 per cent of councils report no increase in the number of applications to state schools. Private schools do not appear to be closing in numbers any greater than they were. And Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has told this newspaper that more pupils than ever before got into their parents’ first choice school this year. Private schools’ warnings of educational apocalypse appear to have been as accurate as the Mayans’ predictions about actual Armageddon.
So why, we might well ask, were these fictitious threats awarded so much weight? Why were people told, repeatedly and without any real evidence, that Labour’s VAT policy would be a disaster for the nation’s schoolchildren? Why were exaggerated warnings from private schools treated as fact rather than what it now seems they were: highly inflated, alarmist claims designed to protect their own financial interests?
Perhaps one explanation is self-interest. The British establishment is obsessed with private education and the right of a small minority of parents to pay vast sums of money for their children’s schooling (and to do so, it seems, without having to pay tax on it).
It is no coincidence that many of the country’s editors, commentators and media executives have children at private schools. Those with power and influence care more about issues affecting independent schools than most people do. If the governing classes were sending their children to their local comprehensives then maybe Britain’s state system might get more attention instead. But mostly they aren’t, and so it doesn’t.
But that is too simplistic an explanation. The real reason that warnings by independent school spokespeople were given a level of credibility they did not deserve is because of Britain’s enduring class system. In fact, there are few areas where the impact of class is quite as obvious as the way in which private schools and their leaders are still lauded by politicians and the media.
It is class stereotypes that explain why Britain’s elitist private schools are still treated as bastions of our cultural heritage and beacons of academic excellence, even though many are neither. And it is why representatives of independent schools are heeded as trusted and valued experts on Britain’s education system, while education union leaders who represent half a million school teachers are dismissed as troublesome and ill-informed vested interests.
The way that private school leaders are awarded an eminence that many have done little to deserve looks an awful lot like cap-doffing deference, especially when successful headteachers in the state sector are almost never afforded the same respect.
Were this not the case, perhaps the crisis in Britain’s state schools would have been deemed worthy of as much attention as Labour’s tax hike on private schools. Sadly, it wasn’t and still isn’t.
As Conservatives governments slashed spending on state schools, few newspaper front pages expressed outrage about the consequences for an entire generation. When an expert adviser appointed by Tory ministers to help schoolchildren recover from the pandemic resigned because the Government had only provided a fraction of the money he said was needed, it prompted barely a shrug. And for all the warnings about private schools closing because of Labour’s plans, when did you last hear about the fact that more than 600 state schools in the UK have closed since 2010, sending average class sizes soaring to 20-year highs?
State schools did get one short moment in the spotlight in 2023, when it was found that 232 of them contained dangerous concrete that was prone to collapse. But even then, it has barely been reported that, as of this January, 202 of those 232 schools – 87 per cent of those affected – had still not had the dangerous materials removed.
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Read MoreBut the starkest and most shameful evidence of how private schools are deemed more worthy of attention than their state counterparts lies in the conversation about children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Labour’s announcement about applying VAT to private schools triggered a cascade of warnings about the devastating impact on their SEND pupils if they were forced to move into the state sector. The concern is a valid one: in general, independent schools are far better equipped to support pupils with special needs, who may not get the attention they need in the state system.
But that, surely, is the real scandal – the fact that the state sector has been failing SEND pupils for years. Yet this was only deemed newsworthy when it emerged that a handful of wealthier pupils might now have to suffer the same consequences. Where was the concern for the two million SEND pupils in state schools who in too many cases, because of devastating cuts to local council budgets, have long been denied the support they desperately need? Are they not just as deserving of a decent education as their peers in private schools?
Talk to parents of SEND children, as I regularly do on my LBC show, and the stories are crushing. Countless children having their education stunted because schools cannot give them the support they need. Desperate parents left feeling helpless and alone as they watch their children get more and more isolated and dejected. Councils that seem to be automatically rejecting any request for SEND support, knowing that most parents won’t have the resources to fight the decision in the courts. How must those long-suffering parents feel, knowing that much of the British establishment only seems to care about the crisis in SEND support now that a small number of private school pupils’ might now be exposed to it?
You might think that private school leaders who pedalled propaganda about Labour’s VAT policy will now be written off as the unreliable fearmongers they appear to be. Don’t bank on it. That they were given so much credence for so long shows where power and influence lies in our broken political and media world. It shows who is deemed worthy of attention and who is not; who gets listened to and who doesn’t.
The British establishment’s obsession with private schools runs deep. Let us hope that one day the crisis in Britain’s state schools – this one real, rather than imagined – will be treated with the same seriousness.
Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is a former Westminster editor
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