Chris Underwood

All of your assertions are wrong. If it were true that independent schooling entrenches economic and social divides, everyone who could afford it would send their children to independent schools to obtain the supposed advantages that you’ve mentioned and the independent sector would be much larger than 7% that it currently represents. The reality is that very many families who can afford independent school fees prefer to use the state system because state schools can and do in many cases deliver a superb education comparable to, or even better than, some independent schools and (crucially) they’re also free at the point of delivery. For those families, the perceived advantages of independent schooling are outweighed by the cost. They would rather keep the money (on average £195,000 over 13 years of schooling at £15,000 per year) and all of the economic and social advantages that such large sums of disposable wealth offer. It’s no good arguing that independent schools entrench economic and social divides in isolation without considering the counterfactual position. You have to allow for the fact that families who could pay for private education but choose not to could, for example, buy a home for each child when they leave school, or pay all of that money into their pensions (plus tax relief), delivering dramatic social and economic advantage in a very tangible way. The inequality exists already; the only question is how it manifests. So, it isn’t independent education that entrenches social and economic divides; those issues are pre-existing and self-perpetuating regardless of the existence of independent education and they would still exist even if we abandoned any notion that parents get to decide what’s best for their own children and abolished independent schooling altogether. The only reasonable way to address the inequalities that concern you is by doing what we can to raise standards generally, which we already do via the state system, rather than attacking those who are already achieving success independently. However, the state system delivers a wide range of standards and outcomes. For some, outcomes are directly comparable with the best independent schools. For others, outcomes are significantly worse. That is not because of the existence of independent schools, but because of a whole range of historical social, cultural, economic and political factors that need to be addressed alongside improving state education. That is where your attention should be focused, rather than trying to undermine those who value education above other factors, to the extent that they’re willing to pay a premium for it on top of their tax liabilities. Contrary to your assertion, independent schooling supports social mobility by offering opportunities to the talented students from lower-income backgrounds that you mention. Axiomatically, students from higher-income backgrounds don’t need support with social mobility; as discussed above, the wealthy can and do look after themselves, whether their children attend independent or state schools. Offering bursary places to talented students who would otherwise not have access to the resources, facilities and so on that independent schools – or the best state schools – can offer is undeniably a good thing and simultaneously demonstrates that ideas of class and elitism are worthless anachronisms in the presence of talent, hard work and merit. If you want to deliver the same level of investment to every state school pupil you would essentially have to double the state education budget. Focusing solely on schools, that means finding another £60billion or so every year. The suggestion that independent schools divert resources and political will from state schools is manifest nonsense. Total DfE spending in England is already over £90billion. Far from taking resource away from the state sector, independent schooling reduces the state’s burden to educate about 550,000 pupils, saving approximately £4.5billion. The sector also delivers billions in tax revenue to HMRC, predominantly through the Income Tax and NIC paid by and on behalf of the staff it employs, and it attracts foreign investment into the UK. All of this helps to support state education and all of that would be lost if we implemented your proposals. Of course, the families who send their children to independent schools still pay all of the same taxes as everyone else, even though they don’t use the state school resources to which they’re entitled, and the money paid in fees is taken from net income which, if diverted into pensions or primary residences, would reduce Treasury tax receipts. Independent schooling actively discourages a sense of entitlement because the families who use it are paying out of their own pockets for the service that they’re receiving. The idea that independent schools foster elitist attitudes is nonsense propagated by misguided class bigots who want to impose their own Marxist view of the world onto everyone else. As I’ve said to many people on this platform who make that argument, independent education is not responsible for your inferiority complex. You need to search elsewhere to understand why you think other people are looking down on you. It may simply be because your ideas are rubbish. The ridiculous notion that the state delivers greater economic efficiency than the private sector barely deserves acknowledgment, let alone a response. The state is famous for being grotesquely inefficient in practice, despite the fact that it ought to be able to leverage its enormous scale to generate clear economic advantages. We would all be much better off by adopting a voucher system for schooling, with the state making a contribution to school for every child and supporting parental choice for all families, dramatically improving the affordability of independent schooling. Indeed, encouraging more families to contribute towards independent education is the very best way of increasing overall investment in education, taking us some way towards that £60billion figure I mentioned earlier. Of course, the Marxists who believe that the state should control every aspect of a child’s education don’t like that idea, even though it immediately renders meaningless all of the hackneyed and unsustainable complaints that you’ve raised. Ultimately, even if all of your concerns were valid (which they’re not), none of them would justify removing the freedom of families to make their own decisions about what is best for their own children because parental responsibility trumps all other concerns. Again, how other people choose to educate their children according to the requirements of the law is absolutely none of your business. By the way, your reference to “public schools” in the context of a discussion about British education reveals that you’re relying on American AI for your commentary and passing it off as your own work, which is lazy and pathetic. If you’re going to stick your oar in on this issue, try thinking for yourself for a change.