Should meritocrats celebrate Starmer’s VAT raid on private schools?

And how the private sector found itself friendless and unloved

PIMLICO JOURNAL

The VAT raid on private schools has been one of the more classically Blairite fronts in the myriad battles being fought by the Starmer Government against Middle England. Much like the farmers’ protests and the petty attacks on classical education in the state sector, there is something reminiscent of the early noughties in its political fault lines. This is not just because of the class sectarian vindictiveness of the policy, but also because it presents a political divide which can’t be easily subsumed into the typical post-2016 paradigm of ‘right-wing populism’ vs ‘globalism’ and/or ‘Woke’. It harkens back to an era of Dalrymple and Hitchens railing against political correctness and the destruction of middle-class values, concerns over profligate welfare spending, and the ‘hug-a-hoody’ debate.

It should therefore not be surprising that despite having a devastating impact on the less financially secure schools in the private sector, this is not really an issue that has yet won national attention, despite the efforts of both the legacy (The Telegraph) and new (GB News) right-wing media. Most people, even if they do not have an axe to grind against private education, just do not really care.

This is perhaps reflective of the ways in which the right-populist media is still somewhat out-of-the-loop in its political messaging, not really understanding their own social base. Much like the (now gradually discarded) deferential royalism of GB News, the supposedly paradigmatic orientations of the British Right — such as support for private education, policemen, and hawkish foreign policy — increasingly no longer apply. This is not because private education has become a bastion of leftism like the police (although Woke private schools are definitely a problem, as I will explain later). The relative indifference to Starmer’s policy is primarily a consequence of the fact that the great majority of the Right’s social base, even its more affluent members, have effectively been excluded from the private sector for some time. It cannot even be considered an aspiration for the vast majority.

Long before Starmergeddon, private schools consciously chose to price out the English middle — and even much of the upper-middle — class. This was certainly not out of necessity. This occurred long before Brexit, long before COVID, and long before the Ukraine War. While there have been many rationales given for the rapid, massively above-inflation fee increases — a facilities splurge, an arms race in spending between major boarding schools then followed by the rest, an attempt to capitalise on an increasingly large demographic of nouveau riche Asians and Russians, or (most probably) a combination of all three — it is undeniable that it has occurred.

As of 2019, the average boarding school fee in London had reached £40,000 per annum. When looking at the traditional, large boarding schools which dot towns across the southeast, fees are now closer to £50,000 per annum, and after the VAT change will be incrementally hiked to around £60,000 per annum. Fees at prestigious day schools in London are often £23,000 or higher. In 2010, the gap in private school fees and state funding per pupil was about 40%; by 2022, this had more than doubled, to nearly 90%. While there is certainly regional variation, with northern private school fees averaging something closer to the pre-’10s hike, there has been a dramatic financial and cultural shift in the demographics of the privately educated, something that is especially true of the grander public schools (and boarding schools more generally). It’s not for nothing that girls’ boarding schools like Rodean and Benenden are now mockingly referred to as ‘Shanghai High’ by the native super-rich.

While not completely unrecognisable, any 2014-19 leavers will be able to observe differences in the composition of the student body if they were to make return visits. Upper-middle class English people are simply less common. It is beyond the means of most ‘high-earning’ (relative to the increasingly mediocre UK average) professionals and successful small businessmen to send their children to fee-paying schools, at least for their secondary education. After tax, the majority of a salary of £80-120k (roughly £56-76k post-tax) would easily be consumed by a year’s worth of education for two children at a London day school, let alone two children at boarding schools. Moderately successful small businessmen, whose children were par for the course at private schools in the ’90s, have therefore been excluded from the sector for almost twenty years by now. While professionals (and especially professional couples) are in a better position to pay, they can only do so if they are willing to make significant cut-backs. From next year, those doctors and lawyers who are outside the upper echelons of their profession will seriously struggle to pay fees — generously assuming that they are not already struggling — and will thus, slowly but surely, be excluded from the sector. While the headline statistics on attendance don’t show anything so dramatic, it feels almost certain we are now at a tipping point.

If the English bourgeoisie are being driven from private education, then where are they sending their children? And, conversely, who is now going to private schools? And, more fundamentally, why should right-wing people even care? Regarding the first of these three questions, there is a palpable sense of panic amongst many families who were already struggling before the VAT hike, and who now definitely face the prospect of sending their children to state-maintained (which almost inevitably means comprehensive) schools. Their sentiment is completely reasonable. While state schools are relatively less bad than during their nadir in the educational crises of the ’60s and ’70s, when a confluence of left-wing ‘child-centric’ pedagogy and massive behavioural challenges saw ‘comprehensive’ become a byword for low-quality education, they are still often very unpleasant places to be.

The post-lockdown spike in anti-social behaviour, as well as the demographic transformation of urban England — which are linked, but by no means co-identical phenomena — means that upper-middle class students will very often be highly distinctive social (and perhaps also ethnic) minorities in frequently disorderly and sometimes violent classrooms. The sharp-elbowed are already looking at ways to get into the right catchment area for a prized place at a ‘good comp’, a competition that is constantly intensifying. In particular, the constellation of Michaela-style free schools — safe, academically ambitious, and already marketed as ‘private school excellence without the fees’ — are being colonised by independent school refugees. This, it should be noted, is a two-way relationship from which the Michaela-type schools also benefit, as explained in a previous article.

As for who now goes to private schools, one obvious answer is international students. Especially if you went to a boarding school, you may have noticed the increasing numbers of Hong Kongers, Mainlanders, Arabs, Africans, and Russians over the course of the ’10s. While the latter group are (with some schools being exceptions) now less common, the overall trend over the last twenty-five years has been a rapid increase in numbers in both proportional and absolute terms. In the early noughties, there were only 20,000 international students enrolled, increasing to 40,000 by 2015, and standing at 58,650 as of 2020. While COVID put a dent in this trend, this was temporary: it has resumed, and will likely accelerate as more school places become available, owing to the fact that they are now out of reach for even more of the native upper-middle class than before. (Ceteris paribus, the native upper-middle classes are definitely still preferred by most schools to foreigners, as most understand that the ‘Britishness’ of the education is a selling point to the wealthy foreigners themselves, and that having too many foreigners obviously undermines this. The problem is that there just aren’t enough British people who can pay the fees that are required under their current financial model.)

Of course, this is still equivalent to only one-tenth of the overall private school student body; even now, the playing fields of Eton are hardly exclusively populated by the sons of sheiks, oligarchs, and African warlords. For the English remainder, they are comprised of the genuinely ultra-wealthy. Aside from the most senior of doctors and lawyers, and (of course) the children of people who have high-flying careers in consulting and finance, increasingly, those who attend (and this is especially the case for the famous public schools) are the scions of genuinely aristocratic families, or of multimillionaire business owners, or are from families that are only able to make ends meet because of the generosity of wealthy grandparents, uncles, and so on. Those outside of these groups are already harried, and will be squeezed out soon enough assuming current trends continue. While obviously the ultra-wealthy were always a significant element within private education, this is still a historical aberration: until very recently, even boarding schools were never exclusively the preserve of the kind of people who can now afford to expend upwards of £120,000/year on school fees.

Since the destruction of grammar schools, private schools have been a landmark feature of the cultural landscape of the English upper-middle class. That much of the upper-middle classes have been excluded from them is one of the less commented-upon social phenomena of the past decade. But given the array of problems facing this country — institutionalised anti-white discrimination, Boriswave visa-holders, and the weekly deluge of Channel-hoppers — why should ordinary right-leaning people, the great majority of whom could never have afforded private education even before the relentless increase in fees, actually care?

After all, it can certainly be argued that private education provided a means for the upper-middle classes to immunise themselves against this country’s growing social dysfunction. Even if they did not actively inflict this upon them, the upper-middle classes were at least complicit in allowing its rise. The reality which many respectable working class and lower-middle class people have faced for decades in the state sector — either general anti-social behaviour, inflicted on the majority by a small, protected minority and/or the prospect of their children becoming literal ethnic minorities at their school — are now becoming issues which almost all English parents are being forced to face. It could be argued that the fewer escapes there are, the more people with political capital will be incentivised to change the catastrophic trajectory this country is on.

Additionally, some of those with stronger ideological principles will also often take umbrage at the very principle of private education. In this view, the problem is that private education is inherently unmeritorious. While some private schools are academically selective (though many are decidedly not), they have not been meaningfully open to genuinely gifted students from different social backgrounds, and the existence of a small number of scholarships does not change this basic fact. They confer advantages to pupils by dint of their parents’ wealth. This is due to the fact that such schools will normally automatically exclude the most disruptive elements within the youth cohort, as well as because they can hire better teachers and provide students with far more pupil-teacher contact hours. While we can reasonably doubt the importance of this for the most gifted students, less gifted students do indeed benefit from the additional support. For instance, one often unnoticed feature of private schools is their ability to win extensive exam concessions for students through privately-funded SEN diagnoses. As such, a nationalist, and particularly one who is committed to aligning as closely as possible cognitive ability with economic status, might reasonably welcome the end of private education.

My own perspective on private education is somewhat more nuanced. I fully recognise that I was very fortunate to have had an education which allowed me to live in a simulacrum of an England that had already been substantially eroded by the time I was a teenager. It is a moral injustice that most young people can’t experience this. And while I don’t really think that my academic trajectory would have been radically different if I had been in the state sector, this was certainly not true for everyone in my year group, who often benefited undeservedly from an education which they were indifferent to and which was largely wasted on them. However, I would still refrain from celebrating how private education has become even more confined to the ultra-wealthy and international students after the VAT raid.

The great irony is that Starmer’s faux-populist crusade against private education will leave the major public schools, the bête noir of the British Left (and indeed much of the British public at large), marginally less comfortable, but still ultimately secure. They are endowed with centuries of accumulated wealth and extensive property holdings, and a name recognition which will allow them to always recruit students from somewhere, even if that ‘somewhere’ doesn’t happen to be Britain.

In reality, it is the smaller, more provincial, more English, and more politically conservative schools, which will usually cater to Christians and/or the less wealthy members of the upper-middle classes, that will bear the brunt of this attack. It is often in the places where avoiding the local state schools is most understandable — Stoke, Leicester, and increasingly Northamptonshire — where we are seeing closures. It is notable that every school which has closed so far has had some kind of Christian orientation, with the exception of one Jewish preparatory school. Private schools are very far from my ideal, but sadly, the institutions currently disappearing are those which most closely mirror grammar schools in demographic composition, with their cohorts of aspirant but socially-pressed provincial burghers. These have been a lifeline to those who, whether consciously or unconsciously, would prefer not to send their children to radical-left, ultra-diverse comprehensive schools where Eid is remorselessly celebrated at the expense of Easter.

The VAT raid may have accelerated what may have been an inevitable trend regardless. The private sector will become more top-heavy, with the remaining schools being the most exorbitantly expensive, rent-seeking institutions, which capitalise off of the social and educational anxieties of the very wealthiest parents.

These will also be the most performatively Woke schools, in what seems to be a self-conscious attempt by the private sector to stave off the critiques of the DEI Left. As anyone who has attended university in the last ten years will know from the class animus that private education specifically continues to provoke, this has completely failed. Meanwhile, these schools have done absolutely nothing to try to keep their most natural allies outside of those who actually send their children to private schools — namely, right-wing, lower-middle class people with an anti-statist streak — on side. This has happened all the while their upper-middle class consumer base has narrowed. Even those who still send their children to private school are often disgruntled with them due to the exorbitant and poorly-justified fee increases, and are thus less minded to defend them publicly. In three words: they lack friends.

While unnoticed by the GB News audience, after ‘Everyone’s Invited’ and the ‘Summer of Love’, it has been the most grandiose of public schools which have most inverted their values. They keep their blazers and tartan skirts, but jettison anything that could be construed as ‘toxically masculine’ or ‘imperialistic’. If there is any recognition of the traditions that these schools are enmeshed in, it is only to ‘critically examine their legacies’ (i.e., self-flagellation over Britain’s past). A materially cost-free leftism, in which cultural Marxist platitudes are recited in Received Pronunciation in assemblies, is the order of the day. Indeed, my own former school flies the ‘trans-inclusive’ alphabet flag during ‘Pride Month’. The first private school I worked at, a girls’ school, had a portrait of George Floyd in the cafeteria — a particularly grotesque display, given Floyd’s known criminal history of violence towards women.

While this explicitly left-wing political orientation usually does not meaningfully permeate into the student bodies, it does mean that scholarships and bursaries are primarily reserved for those from ‘marginalised’ communities — which, naturally, excludes any precocious middle class (and often even working class) white students. Notice that Eton’s outreach programmes are pretty much exclusively orientated towards urban, predominantly non-white schools.

In summary, schools which are more socially and/or culturally conservative, explicitly confessional, and attended by more ordinary people will be the ones which suffer. The most egregious examples of ‘unearned privilege’ will remain untouched. Meanwhile, all of the problems with state education will continue to get worse despite the influx of these (on the whole) good students into the state sector, because the state sector’s problems simply reflect wider trends of national decline. After all, chucking in a few more good apples can’t somehow unspoil an already-rotten barrel. For the growing number of those on the Right who dislike private education, the sad truth is that there are no direct benefits that can realistically come from any of this. The only possible benefit is indirect: that it may provoke a reassessment of how we run our state sector, though this is not only for the long-term, but is highly uncertain. There is no reason to believe that this is in any way a natural consequence of the change, even if this is not an impossible outcome.

As for what sort of educational programme a revitalised Right should propose as a response to the collapse in the affordability and popularity of private education among the native middle and upper-middle classes? Any serious reform of the state sector requires the reintroduction of selective education, with the aim of using these schools to beat the private schools at their own game, but in a way that is politically and educationally acceptable for the great majority of parents whose children will (naturally) not attend them. This topic will be explored at length in my next article.

This article was written by an anonymous schoolteacher. Have a pitch? Send it to [email protected].

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