The UK’s Labour government has abolished the charitable status of private schools, requiring tax to be added to school fees. As Education Minister Bridget Phillipson put it:
The PR benefits of punishing Britain's elite are always misjudged but this policy will fail even to do that and, worse, strip Britain of a major brand asset.
Why This Won't Help Anyone
Britain’s social norms discourage people from openly defending their own perceived higher status, so the loudest voices of protest don’t come from the private school lobby but from the state sector. The state sector now faces the challenge of accommodating an anticipated influx of 37,000 pupils whose parents can no longer afford private school fees, which is 6% of the current private school population. The nation’s key spokesperson on this issue is Katharine Birbalsingh, often dubbed ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher’ for her rigorous and disciplined reforms in state schools.
Once savvy parents learn how to allocate their resources to maximize their children’s advantage, perhaps spending school fee savings on university accommodation or supplementing unpaid internships, it could trigger an even larger migration to the state sector than the government anticipated.
In other words, the entire policy is disastrous for children from poorer backgrounds, whose already limited resources will now have to be shared with the children of the wealthy.
Class War
There will always be room for at least one institution in the world catering to those who believe it is best to grow up alongside the sons of Dukes and Prime Ministers, where money is no object. This institution exists not in the Hamptons, Hollywood, or Hong Kong, but in the shadow of Windsor Castle. Eton College, for decades the crucible of Britain’s political elite, charges parents up to £58,000 per child per year. By comparison, Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School achieves similar exam results while educating children at a fraction of the taxpayer cost.
The school fees of a tiny power-elite indeed buy a networking premium rather than an academic one, albeit with plausible deniability. Yet the Labour government depends on this tacit understanding, enabling it to trade on class envy while maintaining the illusion that academic credentials define social mobility.
Surprisingly, many families on modest incomes still make enormous sacrifices to send their children to private schools. They often cut back on luxuries, take on debt, or rely on their children’s weekend work to manage tuition fees.
Private schools also serve a wide range of communities, from faith-based and linguistic groups to families connected to the armed forces, where subsidies sometimes help cover costs. In addition, some pupils attend on scholarships awarded for exceptional talent or ability — opportunities that were once seen as the most vigorous justification for private schools’ charitable status. These opportunities may now be under threat.
All these groups form part of the ‘privileged few’ Labour is targeting.
There is a final group worth mentioning: Labour’s policy likely appeals to those who realized too late that average private education does not guarantee entry to the ruling class. George Orwell famously observed that there is no greater class hatred in Britain than that of the minor private-school child towards the major private-school child. When Gordon Brown quipped that the Conservative inheritance tax policy “seemed to have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton,” his remark probably resonated more with his own privately educated inner circle than the wider public.
It turns out you don’t have to be educated at Eton to loathe death duties. In their painfully petit-bourgeois attempt to channel class hatred as widely as possible, Labour fails to see that their pet grievance is part of a significant cultural export. Even the true elites need defending when they won’t protect themselves.
Among the influx of newcomers are a few billionaires and their children, who wish to settle and embrace what it means to be British. What ‘British’ might mean to 160 million Chinese viewers of Downton Abbey, or the 2.5 billion Commonwealth citizens who regard the British Royal Family as their own, is not for any insular government to speculate. Yet not even Britain’s finest scholastic institutions are immune to the modern ideologies that threaten to regulate them.
Britain now risks sacrificing its global standing by dismantling the iron curtain of scholastic elitism on both sides.
Levelling Down
The fish rots, as they say, from the head. Desperate to adopt the sanctimonious egalitarianism of those beneath the social mean, the ruling class has submitted itself to jump through the same hoops as everyone else. Once Britain’s top institutional schools stop catering to the recognized elite, they become irrelevant to the world that once aspired to them.
I fear tomorrow’s ruling class won’t have found their company in England’s dark mills of soulless, compliant technocrats and right-on political apparatchiks, but rather on the cocktail circuits of Singapore, Dubai, and Mar-a-Lago.
But we can thank Eton’s mismanagement for that, not Phillipson’s.
Alexander Shaw
Journalist
