Sam Bidwell is Director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute.
It was George Orwell who called England “the most class-ridden country in the world”, and how right he was. Our obsession with amorphous class distinctions is still a mainstay of political life, rearing its head in the most unexpected of places.
More often than not, in a post-industrial age, our national debates on class focus on cultural signalling rather than on material conditions – or, as Orwell would have put it, focusing on the soul rather than on the belly.
The latest episode in this particular saga is the war over independent schools. A number of commentators and policymakers have now proposed the idea of levying VAT on private school fees, claiming that such a policy would raise an extra billion or so for the Treasury while giving a bloody nose to schools who have had it too good for too long.
In fact, as recent research from the Adam Smith Institute shows, it is possible that slapping VAT on independent schools could actually not raise any money at all – or even be a net loser for the public purse. A combination of school closures, cost-cutting, and the withdrawal of some independent school teachers from the workforce could see the Exchequer lose anywhere up to as much as £1.6 billion.
With these figures in mind, the idea that hitting independent schools with an additional tax is a panacea for funding our state education system is misguided.
To my mind however, the most worrying outcome of such an education tax isn’t the fiscal impact. As a product of a comprehensive school, what I fear most is the second-order effects that this policy would have on our already struggling state sector. Some families will undoubtedly find that a VAT-driven fee increase is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, pushing them out of the independent sector.
For many state schools, already thinly-resourced and stretched to capacity, a sudden influx of independent school students would be a disaster.
Despite earlier projections from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which predicted that just three to seven per cent of pupils from the independent sector would migrate to nearby state schools, we should note that a 10-15 per cent figure is also plausible. Other analysis has suggested that this figure could be more like 25 per cent.
While it would be incautious to hang our hat on a particular figure, it’s clear that the impact on state schools will likely be far greater than advocates of the education tax are willing to admit. In large swathes of the country, the state sector is already at – or beyond – capacity. Even a relatively small migration from independent to public would mean cramped classrooms and overwhelmed teachers in far too many schools.
That’s before we consider the risk of outright closure from smaller regional independent schools, which lack the abundant resources of Eton et al. Could the state schools in your area afford to take on a few hundred extra students?
It isn’t just about availability of places, either – it’s about quality too. It is well-resourced, middle-class parents who will have the means and motivation to fight tooth and nail for the best school places in any given area. Squeezed out of being able to afford independent school by increasing fees, many sharp-elbowed families will enter an ever-escalating academic arms race, splashing the cash on eleven-plus tuition or relocating themselves to the most attractive catchment areas.
In places like south-west London, we can already see how quasi-selective environments disadvantage working class families, who have neither the time nor the funds to dedicate to this cut-throat collegiate competition, and push up house prices too.
Nor will state schools benefit from an exodus of teachers from the independent sector, either. A disproportionate number of these are so-called unqualified academics, who would not be eligible to teach at the local comprehensive without undertaking formal training.
When independent schools are forced to cut back, it’s teachers in lower-demand subjects, such as classics, who are likely to be on the chopping block. Nor can we assume that an increase in the supply of teachers will be geographically concentrated in areas with the greatest demand.
Once again, performative class warfare trumps the material interests of working people. As satisfying as it might be to give middle-class families a good kicking, doing so at the expense of working-class children is remarkably short-sighted.
Far better would be to maximise the social benefits that independent schools can provide, by incentivising them to widen access, offer more academic scholarships, and deepen cooperation with nearby state schools.
Of course, so doing would mean accepting that plundering independent schools isn’t a silver bullet for fixing structural issues in our education system. In our current political climate, I’m not holding my breath for this much-needed reinjection of pragmatism. As the old adage goes: those who can, do. Those who can’t, go into politics.
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Author: Sam Bidwell
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