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Private schools are morally unjust, harmful for the nation, and Labour must dismantle them. 

The worst thing about private schools is that they work.

'There’s a kind of weariness to the way they wheel out the munitions. The right-wing press have spent the week trying to shoot down Labour’s policy on private schools. The Telegraph says that “Labour’s class war” would “drag the whole country down”. The Daily Mail dedicated two front pages in succession to the issue, complete with some really very dodgy research claiming fee-paying schools somehow save the Treasury money.

Labour’s policy on private schools is in fact very moderate. It is two-fold. First, it wants to remove their charitable status, which would hit them to the tune of a perfectly survivable £144m a year. Second, it wants to apply VAT on private school fees. This is the more substantial element, coming in at probably around £1.5bn. But the overwhelming majority of them would survive just fine, perhaps with some modest tinkering on the teacher-pupil ratio.

Labour won’t be very worried. The private schools policy is very popular. Forty-seven per cent of people think private schools should lose their charitable and tax-exempt status, while just 10 per cent believe they should keep them with no strings-attached.

Those Mail front pages are basically a welcome publicity drive for Labour. You can almost tell by the tone of the coverage. There’s a defeated air to it, which you can sense all over the political right at the moment, compounded by the winter of discontent, the dire polls and the drip-feed of retiring Tory MPs. They go through the motions of attacking Labour’s position in the standard terms, but it feels dutiful rather than passionate.

Even Michael Gove agrees with the opposition. Back when he was briefly a backbencher in 2017, he wrote in The Times that private schools’ tax advantage “allows the wealthiest in this country, indeed the very wealthiest in the globe, to buy a prestige service that secures their children a permanent positional edge in society at an effective 20 per cent discount”.

He was quite right. We have VAT on gingerbread men decorated with chocolate. It should therefore plainly apply to an eye-wateringly expensive educational product whose primary role is to freeze privilege on a hereditary level.

The real problem with Labour’s private school policy is not that it is too harsh. It is that it isn’t harsh enough.

The worst thing about private schools is that they work. Researchers at the UCL Institute of Education found that private school pupils are more likely to study subjects favoured by universities and to perform better at them, leading to better A-level results and disproportionate university placement. Why? Because of money. They have “vastly superior” resources, of which pupils enjoy roughly three times the state school average. Pupil-teacher ratios are around half that of state schools. 

Even this level of unearned advantage doesn’t take into account the real reason for sending pupils to private school, which is the purchase of a place within elite social circles. It secures a position in what journalist Robert Verkaik, in his book on the subject, calls the “privilege network”. The pupils make friends for life. They maintain those friendships into their professional careers. They enjoy opportunities which are not available to people outside of them. This helps explain the massive over-representation of the privately educated in the senior judiciary, the upper branches of the civil service, journalism and the diplomatic corps. 

And the same applies, of course, to politics. It exists on the right, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson posing together as children and then playing out their psychosocial pathologies over our public life. And it exists on the left. Even the socialist campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, which deserves credit for first putting Labour’s private school policy in place, was beset with the privately educated – from the leader himself to his core allies like Seumas Milne and Jon Lansman.

Morally, the picture is therefore quite simple. This is not a meritocratic society. It cannot be. The children of the successful have a higher chance of themselves becoming successful by virtue of the success of their parents. Private schools allow for privilege from the point of birth to be cemented into place for the entirety of the individual’s life. It is a kind of vestigial hereditary organisation.

But the moral implication is ultimately less important than the national one. This is simply a very bad way to run a country. The successful are not being selected on the basis of their talent or ability. They are being selected on the basis of their parents’ wealth. So we systematically limit the talent pool for the most senior positions in society while arbitrarily promoting those from a narrow social milieu.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Finland has banned charging in basic education for half a century. Its 15-year-olds outperform those in countries with private schools. Its own pupils are remarkably equal, with success rates in school operating regardless of background. As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says: “No other country has so little variation in outcomes between schools – and the gap within schools between the top and bottom-achieving students is extraordinarily modest as well.”

There may be other factors in play here. Finland makes sure teachers pass the dinner-party test, by making it a highly paid profession with a large degree of autonomy over their work. It also starts formal education late – after seven years of age – while encouraging play in early child education.

But it tells us one thing, at the very least. You can get rid of private education without dramatic consequences, while improving equality of educational outcomes and broadening the talent pool from which you fill society’s top roles.

Labour’s policy is a good first step, but it shouldn’t be the last one. Private schooling is morally unjustifiable and nationally self-harming. It’s time we dismantled it, one unearned privilege at a time.’