“We are not Eton,” Tania Botting, headmistress of Greenfield School in Woking, told ConHome earlier this week. “We don’t wear top hats to school.”
But although true, this is a difficult message to get across. We British are attached to our stereotypes. For many years after Tory women stopped wearing hats, photographers covering the Conservative Party Conference were instructed to take pictures of Tory women wearing hats.
And when fee-paying schools are mentioned, we think of Eton, Harrow and one or two other ancient foundations, and perhaps of the famous photograph, taken 87 years ago outside Lord’s during the Eton-Harrow match, of two Harrovians in top hats being regarded with a certain derision by three boys in everyday clothes.
Independent schools are bastions of privilege and plutocracy. That is the assumption which informs, or misinforms, Labour’s proposal to levy VAT at 20 per cent on school fees.
Labour maintains that parents who send their children to fee-paying schools are rich and selfish, and therefore deserve, and can well afford, to pay an extra 20 per cent.
When Bridget Phillipson, the Shadow Education Secretary, spoke in January at the Centre for Social Justice (see the photograph accompanying this article), she talked of “ending tax advantages for the super rich” and went out of her way to engage in class war against the Conservatives:
“A party and a government whose real beliefs, real priorities, are never clearer than when challenged on the tax breaks for private schools.
“That’s when the mask slips.
“Because it isn’t Winchester, is it, where half the children fail to turn up at least one day a fortnight? It isn’t Charterhouse. It isn’t Eton, and it isn’t Rugby. No.
“For the Tories, the attendance crisis is always, and invariably, about other people’s children.”
No mention, of course, of Greenfield School, which like the vast majority of independent schools is known only in its locality. Greenfield, a day school, has just over 350 pupils, ranging from nursery age up to 11.
The majority of its parents have not had a private education themselves, and did not expect to seek one for their children. Tania Botting said the vast majority of her pupils arrive from the state sector, often because they have special educational needs which are not being met, or for some other reason have become deeply unhappy at whatever school they attend.
“I have had prospective parents who are in tears,” Botting said. Their children do not qualify for an Education Health and Care Plan, or EHCP, which is conferred by local authorities, who impose stringent criteria, for the child’s needs will then be met at public expense.
Christine Cunniffe, Principal of LVS Ascot, an all-ability school for children from four to 18, said about 238 of its 860 pupils have special needs such as dyslexia, but only three of those pupils are officially certified as having special needs.
LVS stands for Licensed Victuallers’ School, and it is run by the Licensed Trade Charity, which dates back to 1803 and also supports two other schools, both for children with learning difficulties.
Cunniffe agreed that it is hard to tell how severe the effect of VAT on fees would be, but in her opinion “it will displace so many children”.
One of her parents, Tony Perry, whose son Norman is at LVS Ascot, is so incensed by Labour’s plan that he has launched a petition against it which has attracted over 100,000 signatures. As The Daily Telegraph reported, he is not quite the kind of campaigner one might expect:
“First off, he’s not even British: he’s actually a Native American from Oklahoma. He also has ADHD, a wife from Moldova and a daughter, eight, who is ‘thriving’ in state school.
“Still, he is – as he says – always up for a fight, especially when it’s against something unjust – ‘which this is’ – and specifically if it involves his boy, Norman, who is 10.
“’I know to some I will seem an unlikely person to be leading this campaign,’ Perry, 46, says from his home in Berkshire. ‘But the fact I am proves that those who send their children to private school are not all the wealthy elite. So many of us are just hard-working parents trying to do our level best for our kids.’
“His son, Norman, he says, is not even a tiny bit spoiled or privileged. He’s just a normal boy – ‘warm and friendly’ – into Minecraft and Roblox. He is also a child who suffers, like his dad, from ADHD and also dyslexia and dysgraphia, which means he struggles with writing.
“’My wife and I knew early on he was struggling,’ Perry explains. ‘He was behind in Year One. He can’t focus or take in instructions. His state school really did try with the resources they had, but more than anything, I was worried he would lose confidence and self-esteem.’”
Parents like Perry are neither fashionable nor super-rich, but find themselves the targets of a campaign which makes a certain kind of unreflective socialist feel good.
Amid the mush of noncommittal platitudes about what a future Labour Government would do, here is a huge and specific tax rise which would hurt the enemy: about which, indeed, as James Heale points out in this week’s Spectator, the enemy will jump up and down, uttering protests which will only confirm, at least to Labour activists, that their party must be on the right track.
Labour has conceded it will exempt from VAT the fees paid by local authorities for pupils with an EHCP. The Independent Schools Council says its members have 7,171 pupils with an EHCP, out of a total of 103,337 pupils at its schools with some kind of special need. The total number of pupils at the 2,500 independent schools in the UK is a bit over 600,000.
At a recent debate in Westminster Hall on independent schools and VAT, Neil O’Brien (Con, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) posed this question:
“I just want to press the Opposition Front Bencher on a specific point. There are some brilliant special schools in my constituency. The Opposition are saying that they will exempt children with an EHCP from their tax, but they are not saying that they will exempt all children at special schools from the tax. Why not?”
Helen Hayes, the Shadow Minister for Children and Early Years, replied:
“There is a very simple reason for that. It is the way we avoid a loophole whereby any school can claim that it is a special school. Without there being an independent test of the places that are provided, any school could claim that it was a special school.”
If Labour does try to introduce VAT on school fees, it will discover there is a much larger number of schools with a good claim to be special than it had imagined. Indeed, pretty much every school is special to some people, and can contend it is meeting local needs which would otherwise not be met, or might only be met at some indeterminate point in the future at the cost of severe damage to the education of the present generation of children.
That is one reason why it is simpler and more equitable to decide that education should be exempted from VAT, the policy long upheld not only in the United Kingdom but in the United States, the European Union, Australia and other countries.
Education is a public good. Whether or not we ourselves become, or are capable of becoming, doctors, we wish to live in a country with medical schools.
We should be proud that our country contains great schools like Eton, and that many other schools in this country seek to emulate the famous schools. The pleasure to be derived from beating the Etonians is considerable.
But we should also remember that parents are on the whole willing, if they can, to make even greater sacrifices to help those of their children who are in some way handicapped. Dogmatic socialists are inclined to disapprove of this instinct, and to suppose, quite unrealistically, that the state can bear the whole burden.
The cruelest delusion of collectivism, the late T.E.Utley once observed, is that compassion can be delegated to the state. I cannot at the late hour at which I finished this article find the reference, so have not put these words in quotation marks, but here is a key insight to which all conservatives, indeed all readers with any insight into human nature, will assent. It is both immoral and unrealistic to suppose that the care of the young, or indeed of anyone, can be left to the state, and the rest of us can forget about it.
Labour maintains that VAT on fees would produce an extra £1.7 billion to spend on state schools. Since the total budget for those schools is currently almost £60 billion, one may doubt whether this extra two per cent or so, even if it actually occurred once the extra cost of admitting private school pupils to state schools is taken into account, would make a significant difference.
Parents who out of taxed income pay school fees are in effect paying twice over for education, and it seems curious, indeed absurd, to seek to discourage them from doing so.
One may note that private schools wax and wane all the time, and only thrive by adapting and innovating. Some of them manage to defy the grind of exams and pursue a wider idea of education.
I do not wish to imply that state schools are bad: many of them are excellent. For the great strides forward made since 2010, see ConHome’s interview with Nick Gibb.
But to discourage private schools by imposing VAT on them is an appallingly illiberal policy, an affront to our whole idea of freedom.
Munira Wilson, for the Liberal Democrats, reaffirmed in the Westminster Hall debate that her party remains opposed to taxes on education, including university education, music lessons and tutoring sessions.
After all, if private schools are to be subject to VAT, why not private tutors? Many a parent who is devoted to the ideal of comprehensive education has paid for private tutoring for a child who has got into difficulties with a particular subject.
This is evidently the right thing to do for one’s child if one can afford it. The charge of hypocrisy only arises if at the same time as one pays for a tutor for one’s child, one seeks to destroy or diminish independent schools.
No Labour MP apart from Hayes turned up to the Westminster Hall debate, for this is an argument they do not like to have. But on other occasions they have contended that pupils educated at private schools end up earning, on average, more money, and carry off a disproportionate amount of the top jobs.
This is true, but the objection might equally well be applied to universities. Should not they pay VAT on their fees too, in order to punish them for fostering future inequality? Once one starts on that line of thought, there is no end of it.
In most cases where children become deeply unhappy at a particular school, it is for their parents to work out what can be done to relieve this suffering, and to see whether a fresh start at a new establishment, more attuned to the needs of the child, might help.
Many parents are prepared to suffer almost any material deprivation, and take on any amount of extra work, in order that their children can thrive at school. Botting remarked that many of the parents at Greenfield live in small flats in the middle of Woking, and spend every penny they can find on education rather than on a house, a holiday or a car
These parents are often immigrants, who have come to this country because they want to give their children the best possible start in life. Is this an aspiration the Labour Party wishes to punish?
The liberties enjoyed by Church of England schools have long since been extended to other denominations and other faiths. The right of parents to bring up their children in whatever faith they wish is, one might have thought, entrenched, and is another of this country’s attractions.
At the 30 Muslim schools represented by the Independent Schools Council, the average fee is £4,800 a year. Does Labour now propose to make life harder for these Muslim parents?
Funding at state schools averages about £7,460 a year. At Greenfield the fees, depending on age, range from £13,794 to £16,200 a year.
For some parents, a sudden steep rise in fees will make private education unaffordable. It is impossible to know how many of them will be forced to take their children away from independent school: estimates range from only three per cent up to 25 per cent.
The impact of charging VAT, and of removing the exemption from business rates enjoyed by the half or so of independent schools which are charities, can be expected to become more severe over a period of years, and will deter some parents from ever embarking on private education.
Greenfield hopes it can manage to limit the initial rise in its fees to 13 per cent. But any parents who have to take their children away, and put them back into the state sector, will find that the schools in many parts of Surrey are full, and cannot offer a place.
A quarter of all independent schools have under 155 pupils. Here the loss of a small number of pupils, or of prospective pupils, could make the difference between survival and closure.
No one denies that this country’s tax system might benefit from a comprehensive reform to make it more equitable.
But if Labour wins the general election, and is foolish enough to devote time and energy to imposing VAT on school fees, the grotesque unfairness of penalising parents of modest means, who are struggling to do the best for their children, will soon become apparent.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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