![Illustration showing headmaster and private school boys in the trenches as if at war](https://dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net/2025/01/28/202505Coverillo.jpg)
Political spats come and go, but one that may enter the history books occurred on the last Wednesday of November 2022. Against a background of the right-wing press launching a barrage of attacks on Labour’s proposed imposition of VAT on private-school fees, Keir Starmer surprised many by going on the offensive at Prime Minister’s Questions, with Rishi Sunak’s prestigious alma mater specifically in his sights. “Winchester College has a rowing club, a rifle club and extensive art collection – they charge over £45,000 a year in fees,” Starmer declared, before asking why the Conservative prime minister had, through the VAT exemption, handed it “nearly £6m of taxpayers’ money this year”. Starmer contrasted the very different educational resources down the road in Southampton (Sunak’s home city), where he said four in every ten state-school pupils failed either their English or maths GCSEs. “Is that £6m of taxpayers’ money,” he asked, “better spent on rifle ranges in Winchester or driving up standards in Southampton?”
Sunak responded with apparently genuine anger. Accusing the leader of the opposition of “attacking the hard-working aspiration of millions of people in this country”, he went on: “He is attacking people like my parents. This is a country that believes in opportunity, not resentment. He doesn’t understand that, and that’s why he’s not fit to lead.” A last word went to Starmer, saying that Sunak was being “pushed around by the lobbyists” over the private-school issue.
Over the next year and a half those lobbyists, above all the Independent Schools Council (ISC), kept up the pressure, culminating in an extraordinary episode during last summer’s election. The ISC was sent a report by Baines Cutler, an educational consultancy to private schools, surveying parents about whether they would move their children to a state school if an incoming Labour government imposed VAT on fees. While many parents responded, the survey was by no means representative. Yet the ISC duly fed the bald results to the ever-helpful Daily Mail, resulting in the arresting front-page headline “Four in ten to quit private school under Keir’s tax”. Baines Cutler was appalled, feeling that its research had been misused, and that the estimate was, in its eyes, “too high for many reasons”. It was not exactly the basis for a rational public discourse.
Before, during and after the election, Labour, spearheaded by proudly state-educated Bridget Phillipson, held firm amid a constant drip-feed of protest from leaders in the private-school sector and their supporters in Westminster and the media. Late last year the Daily Telegraph published a leader calling the VAT measure “an act of class warfare”, and a parliamentary sketch headlined “Is Bridget Phillipson the nastiest person in politics?”. There has been similar outrage from the usually more restrained Times, which in its nakedly partisan letters page twice declined to print counter-arguments from one of us; whereas when Tory politicians remorselessly churned out epithets like “wicked, stupid and cruel”, “spiteful” and “merciless”, they were reproduced in outraged headlines.
It has made a striking spectacle. For decades, there had been a kind of embarrassed silence surrounding the whole issue of our quaintly named “public schools”, with their defenders largely adopting a low profile and much of the liberal left preferring to look the other way. So what was going on? Why did the private schools and their supporters at last put their heads above the parapet?
One obvious possibility is that they truly did think they could pressure Labour into dropping its policy, perhaps even influence the result of the election, even though all the polling evidence suggests that, as taxes go, this was a relatively popular one. Perhaps at some level they also felt genuinely affronted – a case of what psychologists call “loss aversion”, whereby the detrimental effects of income losses are perceived to be greater in magnitude than the beneficial effects of an equivalent income gain.
Our view, though, is that ultimately something else was at work, something more fundamental: that the coordinated attack on Labour’s VAT policy – a tiff that quickly escalated into a street fight – was in effect a warning that there would be a battle to the death if any more radical reforms were to be contemplated. After all, the UK’s private-school sector has become, by its own lights, a stunningly successful service industry during the past half-century. If seriously threatened, it is unlikely to take any prisoners.
Since the start of 2025, private-school fees (other than for special schools) have been subject to VAT, a change soon to be accompanied (from April) by the removal of the 80 per cent relief from local business taxes currently enjoyed by private schools with charitable status. The only possible threat to this new fiscal settlement is an impending judicial review, supported by the ISC. Back in 2011, the private schools’ judicial challenge to the implementation of the 2006 Charities Act was largely successful in allowing private schools with charitable status to specify, without interference from the Charity Commission, how they would provide a “public benefit” (which every charity must offer). Can they now repeat the trick?
The current challenge raises the philosophical stakes by calling (at huge legal expense) on the authority of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The aim is to secure a ruling that the new tax law represents a breach of the convention, on the grounds that it is discriminatory, and that it takes away the right to education. It might seem bizarre to the dispassionate observer that it could be deemed an inalienable human right for the parents of, say, an Etonian or a Harrovian not to pay a sales tax on their school fees – but that is the hope. We suspect the challenge will fail. Still, if it were to succeed, perhaps at least this would persuade the right that the ECHR has its uses.
What about the fiscal settlement itself? The prosaic truth is that the new taxation policies will soon be raising a small, if welcome, sum for the Exchequer – best estimates are around £1.5bn per annum in the immediate future – which the government has earmarked for state schools, thereby reducing marginally the grotesque resources gap between the private and state sectors of our education system.
The fee increases, expected to average around 10 per cent, will not make a huge difference to the private-school population, currently over 600,000. Some schools will close in the next few years, no doubt each time to a clamour of indignation, but the underlying reason will be hard to pin down, amid the usual churn of small school start-ups and failures. Though the figures are rather uncertain, up to 14,000 children could switch sectors in the next academic year, and perhaps 35,000 in the long term. Against a national pupil population of more than ten million, these numbers are minimal.
As long as our extreme wealth inequality remains what it is, against the backdrop of a state-school sector that has been starved of resources since 2010, the advantages provided by Britain’s private schooling and its networks will continue to be in demand – unless something is done.
Given that the high-end Etons and Harrows are not going to fold their tents, the effect of the fee increases will be to render a socially exclusive system just a touch more exclusive. Annual average fees are already upwards of £18,000 at day schools and £42,000 for boarders – way out of reach of most parents, some 75 per cent higher in real terms than at the turn of the century, and three times higher than in the 1980s, when many of our recent leaders were in school. The British private-school sector has in the 21st century existed in a completely different socio-economic world from the state sector. VAT or no VAT, the stark dilemma remains: what are we to do about that morally unpalatable reality?
This country’s peculiarly entrenched educational apartheid did not entirely escape the attention of previous generations. Occasionally the dog barked, even threatened to bite, particularly in the 1940s and 1960s.
Wars often bring social change, and it was in the 1940s that Britain glimpsed the road not taken. As early as April 1940 the 23-year-old Edward Heath, future Conservative prime minister, was demanding in the Spectator that the state-educated schoolboy be allowed to compete on a level playing field with the public schoolboy, and declaring that the solution was “to establish equality of opportunity” by “abolishing inequality of education”.
George Orwell in 1941 looked forward to not only how the “war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges”, but specifically to how “the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten”. Even Winston Churchill envisaged major change, telling a Labour politician in 1942 that he “wanted 60-70 per cent of the places [at public schools] to be filled by bursaries”, adding that “the great cities would surely be proud to search for able working-class youths to send to Haileybury, to Harrow and to Eton”.
Yet Labour, when it came to power in 1945 with a huge majority, almost entirely failed to deliver on this front. Historians have understandably tended to attribute the inertia to the PM, Clement Attlee, whose “only interests outside politics”, as Denis Healey recalled, “were cricket and his public school, Haileybury”. Attlee’s first education minister, Ellen Wilkinson, meanwhile, insisted the right approach was “to make the schools provided by the state so good and so varied” that it would seem “quite absurd” to send children elsewhere.
The inconvenient truth, though, is that there existed at the time, in what was still a predominantly working-class society, precious little popular enthusiasm to tackle the issue. Almost all the evidence we have about postwar Britain is that, until at least the 1960s, the prevailing parental emotions about education were apathy and fatalism. For most people public schools existed on an entirely separate, barely recognised planet. The 1960s brought another Labour government, Harold Wilson’s, from 1964 to 1970. The signs looked good: a seemingly meritocratic, insurgent, anti-establishment zeitgeist; the PM himself an upwardly mobile Yorkshireman very different from his Old Etonian predecessors at No 10; and at the heart of education policy for almost three years an education minister, Anthony Crosland, who in his seminal The Future of Socialism had flatly stated that “we shall not have equality of opportunity so long as we maintain a system of superior private schools, open to the wealthier classes, but out of reach of poorer children however talented and deserving”.
But again, nothing tangible happened. In July 1968 Crosland’s Public Schools Commission produced a mouse of a report; Crosland himself found his egalitarianism being trumped by his libertarianism; and Wilson had a nugatory appetite for serious confrontation. No doubt he read the poll published by the Sunday Times shortly ahead of the report, revealing a clear majority – 67 per cent of voters – in favour of leaving the public schools as they were, with even a majority of Labour voters taking that view.
Then, by and large, the issue dropped out of sight for the next four decades. A mixture of division, confusion and complacency combined in the 1970s to characterise Labour’s approach; the Thatcher and Major governments gave the sector unswerving political support, while the private schools themselves made their great leap forward in the provision of facilities far beyond the possible reach of state schools; and New Labour, for all its talk of meritocracy, sat tight and largely ignored the issue. It was somehow a richly symbolic sight when in May 2010, after the election and the end of New Labour, David Cameron (Eton) and Nick Clegg (Westminster) stood together in the Downing Street rose garden. The two public-school boys so instantly and palpably clicked, with the almost as congenial George Osborne (St Paul’s) waiting in the shadows ready to wield the austerity axe.
The boys were indeed back, to be followed in due course by Boris Johnson (Eton), Jeremy Hunt (Charterhouse) and a proudly Wykehamist PM, Sunak. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the issue of private education returned, too. In 2014 a cover story in this magazine on “The 7 per cent problem”, co-written by one of us, provoked a considerable response. It took its cue from Sutton Trust findings that so small an elite in our education system went on to dominate positions of influence in business and public life, with, to give just one example, seven out of every ten judges having been privately educated.
In 2017, Michael Gove revealed how, when education secretary under Cameron, he had lost his temper with ministerial colleagues “who defended subsidies to private schools when I wanted to give more money to state schools”; and by 2019 three new organisations had begun: the student-run 93% Club (a deliberate antidote to the old-boys’ network), the think tank Private Education Policy Forum (PEPF), and the pressure group Abolish Eton. The last of these briefly took Labour under Jeremy Corbyn down the abolitionist route, before the party’s hasty and muddled retreat ahead of the disastrous general election won by the blond Old Etonian – in large part, with supreme irony, on the cry of “levelling up”.
Yet perhaps Johnson, even if never intending to do anything about the private-school issue itself, sensed that plates were shifting in an egalitarian direction. A year earlier, when reports circulated that Philip Hammond as chancellor was considering imposing VAT on school fees, an Ipsos Mori poll found 54 per cent in favour, more than double the 26 per cent opposed. Soon afterwards, when for our book Engines of Privilege we commissioned a poll by Populus asking people whether they thought it “unfair that some people with a lot of money get a better education and life chances for their children by paying for a private school”, 63 per cent of respondents agreed with that statement and only 18 per cent disagreed. At last, in our pluralist democracy, there was potentially something for advocates of reform to work with.
It would be wrong not to acknowledge that there are sincere, reforming voices within the private sector, in particular striving to improve access by widening the availability of bursaries. Some of the older, richer schools, as well as former direct-grant schools such as Manchester Grammar and others that participated in Margaret Thatcher’s “assisted places scheme”, have expanded their fundraising efforts and focused on means-tested bursaries rather than new Olympic-sized swimming pools. Yet bursaries remain, and look likely to remain, far too small in number and value to make a substantial difference to the make-up of the private-school population – which, for all the propaganda about parents skimping and saving, is in reality as highly skewed towards the children of the rich as it has been for many decades.
Children from families in the top 10 per cent of the income spectrum are ten times more likely to be at private school than those from the lowest 40 per cent. Even with the best efforts of fundraisers, parents’ willingness (and in some cases ability) to pay for other children’s resource-rich education on top of their own have their limits. The fact is that precious few children at private school – a little over 1 per cent – get to attend for free. And even if private schools in some local area were, by some miracle, to raise enough funds for a game-changing expansion of 100 per cent scholarships and bursaries, would they be thanked if they selected away all the brightest children in the neighbourhood?
So, external action it has to be, with the most dramatic and in some sense seductive option being the full-scale nationalisation of the private sector, in effect abolishing fee-paying education. But the hurdles facing the implementation of such a policy are obvious and immense. Quite apart from the considerable economic cost involved in compensating the owners of for-profit schools, as well as suddenly funding the education of some half a million children, there is the absolute certainty of intense and concerted political and legal resistance from the private schools, along with their friends in the media.
Put another way, our reservations are not on the moral side: to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous two concepts of liberty, we would weigh the positive freedom of the many to receive a fair chance in life above the negative freedom of the few to buy educational advantage. Our qualms are practical. It would take an almost superhuman effort of political will to carry this through; and if the attempt failed, as it well might, there would be every danger of nothing being achieved and the whole issue being buried for at least another generation.
An alternative approach would be to build on the current fiscal changes and continue to reduce the attractiveness of private education. About half of the schools are registered as “charities”, and some reformers might relish removal of that privilege: despite the legal complexities of such a move, it would have some symbolic value, even though most of the tax benefits have already been gleaned through the VAT policy. Others in recent years have pinned their hopes on progressive-minded access policies at some of the elite universities, above all Oxford and Cambridge, where by more assiduously assessing the potential of applicants who have achieved despite the circumstances of their neighbourhoods and their schools, the proportion of private-school admissions has fallen significantly since about 2018.
Yet in truth, as with fiscal changes, the viability of the UK private-school system seems so far to be no more than marginally discomforted, let alone threatened, by this admittedly welcome development. Typically adroit game-playing, for instance private-school pupils transferring to state sixth forms, has helped to lessen the impact on privileged students; alternative elite university destinations, especially in the US, have become increasingly popular; and anyway, contextual admissions policies can only be expected to go so far before plausibly legitimate charges of unfair treatment arise.
Our preferred reforming emphasis would instead be on a phased partial integration of the two sectors, through what we call the Fair Access Scheme. In essence, one third (initially) of the new intake at all private schools (whether primary or secondary) would become non-fee-paying, state-school places, funded by the government at the same age-appropriate rate that it funds children in all state schools. Crucially – and unlike the assisted places scheme of the Thatcher/Major years – the criteria for allocating those means-tested, state-school places would be determined, and rigorously overseen, by government. The schools would become more open, less socially exclusive, along with a decline in that entrenched sense of private-school entitlement; the per capita resource gap between the two sectors would decline; and much better use would be made of the nation’s educational resources. Teachers’ skills would adjust over time, but once the new structure has bedded in, the required proportion of state-funded places can gradually be increased, as steadily and incrementally the two sectors move towards ever-greater integration.
We do not pretend that its implementation would be cost-free or without resistance. Nor do we deny that it would require serious preparatory work at local and regional levels as well as national. Support from sympathetic elements, including some leaders within the private sector, could be expected, and a few schools want anyway to switch to become state academies or free schools. The density of private schools varies considerably across the country; their age ranges often do not match the normal ranges of primary and comprehensive schools; and they each have their own particular educational character. None of this, though, represents an insuperable difficulty. And as a guiding spirit if this was to be undertaken, we are fond of Goethe’s famous maxim “ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast” (without haste, but without rest).
Can Labour now – two and a bit years after Starmer so effectively conveyed the fundamental unfairness of our two-tier educational structure, and boasting the least privately educated cabinet in British history – move decisively over the issue? Can No 10 use the VAT policy as the first stage of a larger narrative about equality of opportunity, about everyone getting a fair shake of the dice?
It is a truism that this new government urgently needs a more positive, inspiriting, non-technocratic story to tell, a story that goes beyond economic growth and national security, crucial though those are. We live in a society infinitely less deferential than the Britain of half a century ago, infinitely more critical, in the social media age, of how accidents of birth determine the distribution of life’s glittering prizes – and the private-school issue is not only substantively important in any serious pursuit of greater equality of opportunity, but also hugely symbolic.
Late last year, PEPF commissioned a survey by Yonder Consulting, using a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 adults. On Labour’s VAT policy, 54 per cent agreed, 21 per cent disagreed. Asked the larger question of whether it is unfair that paying for children’s education enables better life chances, 57 per cent agreed and 22 per cent disagreed. When the essence of our Fair Access Scheme was explained, including the explicit purpose of promoting social mixing, 49 per cent agreed with the idea and only 22 per cent were against it. Despite the significant proportion of undecideds, there is hope here for building a viable and enduring consensus.
Back in July 1968, as the Public Schools Commission issued its damp squib of a report and the Labour government gratefully kicked the issue into the long grass, the Guardian ran a cartoon showing an elderly, cross-looking man scribbling a letter – “Sir, with reference to your leader on the public-school system’s divisive influence on our society…” – and above him on the wall a calendar. It read 25 July 2068 – a date that in 2025 we are appreciably nearer to than we are to 25 July 1968. Time ticks by. It’s surely, at last, time to start – carefully, realistically, along classic social-democratic lines – healing this ancient and infinitely damaging fault line in our society.
Francis Green is an economist at University College London; David Kynaston is a social historian. Their co-authored book “Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem” is published by Bloomsbury. This year’s NS Debate at Cambridge Literary Festival (26 April) has the motion: “This house believes private schools should be abolished”
[See also: The intolerant age]
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War