Christopher Snowdon

Labour should scrap state schools, not private ones

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has promised that if Labour wins the next election it will use its first budget to ‘immediately close the tax loopholes used by elite private schools and use that money to improve the lives of all children.’ This slab of red meat went down well with the class warriors at the party’s conference in Brighton, where there were doubtless plenty of teachers in attendance, but it wasn’t enough. Labour conference not only voted to withdraw charitable status from private schools, but to abolish them altogether. This was described, rather euphemistically, as ‘integrating all private schools into the state sector’ by Holly Rigby of the not remotely euphemistic Abolish Eton campaign.

The objective of the first policy is plainly undermined by the second. There can be no redistribution from the tax-dodging toffs who are presumed to pay school fees if there are no fee-paying schools. Far from freeing up money to improve the state sector, Labour’s policy will put a further strain on the the education budget. All of a sudden, the government will have to find the resources to educate the seven per cent of British children who currently cost the Department of Education next to nothing. At around £6,000 per year, these 615,000 kids will require taxpayers to fork out something to the tune of £3.7 billion a year.

They will also have to find the money to provide hundreds of extra state schools. It is not clear whether Labour intends to force private schools to be sold off below cost, as it appears to want to do with rented homes, or whether it expects to build the new schools itself. Either way, it will be an expensive business, unless it expects to confiscate them outright, as it has suggested doing with vacant high street shops.

Forcing taxpayers to spend billions of pounds a year to give hundreds of thousands of children a worse education does not, on the face of it, seem wise.

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