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From my blog today:
It was reported on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph that should Labour get elected, Jeremy Corbyn is considering a tax raid on private schools by abolishing their charitable status, rendering fees liable to VAT, and end their discounted business rates. These measures are estimated to raise around £1.6bn, a trifling sum of money in terms of the national budget. This, in our view, is purely motivated by class jealousy and nothing worthwhile to do with education. It would rob the few in order to give a pittance to the many.
We understand that the money raised would be used to fund free school meals for all primary school children. Oh please! Every day, eighty-four thousand guests of Her Majesty receive a ‘breakfast pack’ as well as a substantial lunch and evening meal, at least one of which should, we understand, include a hot offer. If we can afford to do that, we can afford to provide the nation’s primary school children with a free lunch, if the political will exists to do so. One of the virtues of mass catering is that it can be done relatively cheaply. It’s complete nonsense on stilts to suggest that we have to impose a punitive tax on those who can afford to educate their children privately in order to do it.
Another idea Labour is considering is the abolition of private schools and the redistribution of their assets throughout the state sector. If this monstrous proposal comes to pass it will be the biggest State theft of private assets since Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. That caused tremendous poverty and hardship and abolition of private schools would have a similarly harmful effect. Perhaps not all, but a great many private schools assist State schools by putting facilities, equipment and expertise at their disposal. Private schools also take pressure off the State sector by educating some seven or eight percent of the nation’s young people. Some of the most progressive educational thinkers have been found amongst the heads and senior staff of private schools. Furthermore, the State is something of a ‘Johnny come lately’ where the provision of education is concerned, only having been involved as a provider for a hundred and fifty years or so. Churches, charities and philanthropic individuals on the other hand, have been founding and running schools for upwards of a thousand years. It is quite wrong in our view that they should be prevented, for purely ideological reasons, from continuing to just that.
This is Labour education policy all over though and it is, in a sense, only reverting to type. Depending on the vagaries of local geography, grammar schools educated between twenty-five and forty percent of secondary age children until Labour went to war on them during the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, with the remainder attending either technical or secondary modern schools. It wasn’t a perfect system and wasn’t without its unfairness’s and inequalities. There was a feeling, whether justified or not, that some children ‘missed out’ and, although it is less commonly admitted, it is certainly true that some young people ended up receiving a classical education which was of little or no earthly use to them. It was a system which did, however, provide bright children from working class homes with a leg up in the world and achieved much in the direction of aiding social mobility. Since the majority of young people have been educated in schools which don’t select on the basis of ability, that social mobility has slowed down considerably. Labour’s comprehensive innovation may have removed some perceived injustices but it has done rather less for standards.
We cannot turn the clock back forty or fifty years and neither would we want to. Ours is a different world now and education is about different things. However, we would urge Labour to pause for thought over its education policy. It is very easy to destroy something which is excellent but much more difficult to replace it with something of equal quality.
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It was reported on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph that should Labour get elected, Jeremy Corbyn is considering a tax raid on private schools by abolishing their charitable status, rendering fees liable to VAT, and end their discounted business rates. These measures are estimated to raise around £1.6bn, a trifling sum of money in terms of the national budget. This, in our view, is purely motivated by class jealousy and nothing worthwhile to do with education. It would rob the few in order to give a pittance to the many.
We understand that the money raised would be used to fund free school meals for all primary school children. Oh please! Every day, eighty-four thousand guests of Her Majesty receive a ‘breakfast pack’ as well as a substantial lunch and evening meal, at least one of which should, we understand, include a hot offer. If we can afford to do that, we can afford to provide the nation’s primary school children with a free lunch, if the political will exists to do so. One of the virtues of mass catering is that it can be done relatively cheaply. It’s complete nonsense on stilts to suggest that we have to impose a punitive tax on those who can afford to educate their children privately in order to do it.
Another idea Labour is considering is the abolition of private schools and the redistribution of their assets throughout the state sector. If this monstrous proposal comes to pass it will be the biggest State theft of private assets since Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. That caused tremendous poverty and hardship and abolition of private schools would have a similarly harmful effect. Perhaps not all, but a great many private schools assist State schools by putting facilities, equipment and expertise at their disposal. Private schools also take pressure off the State sector by educating some seven or eight percent of the nation’s young people. Some of the most progressive educational thinkers have been found amongst the heads and senior staff of private schools. Furthermore, the State is something of a ‘Johnny come lately’ where the provision of education is concerned, only having been involved as a provider for a hundred and fifty years or so. Churches, charities and philanthropic individuals on the other hand, have been founding and running schools for upwards of a thousand years. It is quite wrong in our view that they should be prevented, for purely ideological reasons, from continuing to just that.
This is Labour education policy all over though and it is, in a sense, only reverting to type. Depending on the vagaries of local geography, grammar schools educated between twenty-five and forty percent of secondary age children until Labour went to war on them during the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, with the remainder attending either technical or secondary modern schools. It wasn’t a perfect system and wasn’t without its unfairness’s and inequalities. There was a feeling, whether justified or not, that some children ‘missed out’ and, although it is less commonly admitted, it is certainly true that some young people ended up receiving a classical education which was of little or no earthly use to them. It was a system which did, however, provide bright children from working class homes with a leg up in the world and achieved much in the direction of aiding social mobility. Since the majority of young people have been educated in schools which don’t select on the basis of ability, that social mobility has slowed down considerably. Labour’s comprehensive innovation may have removed some perceived injustices but it has done rather less for standards.
We cannot turn the clock back forty or fifty years and neither would we want to. Ours is a different world now and education is about different things. However, we would urge Labour to pause for thought over its education policy. It is very easy to destroy something which is excellent but much more difficult to replace it with something of equal quality.
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