An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Keir Starmer insists his plan to place VAT on independent school fees is not ideological. It’s a ‘difficult decision’, he says, but necessary to raise revenue which will be used to hire 6,500 teachers for state schools. He wants the independent sector to ‘thrive’. Few would deny that state schools need better funding, but it
Labour’s proposal to impose VAT on private school fees will, we are often warned, lead to state schools becoming overloaded as parents withdraw their children from the independent sector and try to find alternative arrangements. That may turn out to be true in some areas in the short term, but in the longer term there
Ask a certain type of class warrior about the old boys’ network and they’ll tell you of ruddy-faced men in club ties, offering each other’s offspring summer internships. Or perhaps they’ll talk of thrusting bankers, who as children shared showers and a chilly dormitory, plotting to hire old school friends over more deserving candidates. Wink
Imagine the government pledged to introduce a 20 per cent tax rise on ‘bankers’. Then imagine that, when the details were announced, the new tax made no distinction between HSBC executives and lowly bank tellers on £19,000 a year. Furthermore, imagine that the public debate failed to mention the people who were going to suffer
When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents pore over the university admissions and the A-level grades of state secondary schools, they should ask themselves whether all those results are attributable to the school or whether
The feverishness of the private prep-school market in London has reached such a pitch that children in the nursery class at Eaton House Belgravia are being prepared for the seven-plus from the age of two. ‘Some of them are still in nappies, and some of them still need a nap,’ the headmaster Ross Montague tells
Despite protestations from every quarter, Sir Keir Starmer will press on with his malicious plan to slap VAT on private school fees. I can only assume he’s doing this because he believes an excellent education, stemming from hundreds of years of tradition, is entirely undesirable. Look, there’s no question about it. Our private schools are
The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain. Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a
To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a
When the Cass Review was published in April, many of us working in schools heaved a sigh of relief. For many teachers the muddle surrounding the position of transgender children and those working with them caused serious concern. A maths teacher in Swindon was sacked for addressing a student as ‘she’ and writing her ‘dead
They lurk at the back of cupboards. Some are hidden under beds; others are tucked between books. I have been collecting them from a young age, but I still don’t know what I’m meant to do with them. What do you do with school photos? I suppose I could take pictures of my own school
Elstree, Berkshire Elstree – which educates boys and girls from three to 13 – is nestled in 150 acres of stunning countryside near Newbury in Berkshire. The school, which celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, says that its aim is two-fold: ‘to find out how a child is intelligent rather than how intelligent a child
This is about something that did not happen to me at school, an exam I dreaded, but never had to take. It was the only examination that ever really worried me, and it was called Common Entrance. Do not confuse it with modern imitations bearing the same name. In those days, preparing for it involved
Standing in the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket, I’m overwhelmed by possibilities. This isn’t unusual for me, but normally it’s fuelled by greed, and resolved by buying them all. Today I have to make a choice. I am making an American icebox cake, which requires a lot of one type of biscuits, and the
Porthminster Kitchen sits above Warren’s Bakery on St Ives Harbour, like a paradigm of the British class system in food. This happens everywhere, but it is particularly pronounced in St Ives, which is unlucky enough to be a site of pilgrimage for Virginia Woolf addicts – her childhood holiday home sits above the town, her
Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2023 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from
Shropshire is a strange county, little known by those beyond its border, and perhaps that’s part of its appeal. It not only has no coastline, but no city officially either. Phone cover is shaky and transport links sparse (at some times in the day, only one bus every two hours will leave my market town,
When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps
At long last, the day has come. After nearly two months of summer holidays, institutions beckon their children back for another school year. The television will resume its status as a post-school treat rather than an indispensable tool to fill the dead hours between events. The kitchen will no longer resemble an all-day canteen, and
Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate
Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a
As I have been driving across England’s green and pleasant land visiting friends and family this summer, I discovered that the UK’s phone signal is really, really terrible. I expected poor connectivity on coastal paths in Cornwall, but everywhere I went I experienced problems: network dropouts as I tried to navigate the M1, recurrent outages
There is, reportedly, an official plan in place for the demise of Larry the Downing Street Cat, aka the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Old Larry, originally acquired by the Camerons in the early part of the coalition, has now reached the impressive age of 17, having been born in the dog days of
Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into
In January 2022, the New York Times ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, quoting Martin Amis’s daughter saying it seemed like it was. In the summer of 2023, the Guardian ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Lily-Rose Depp looks great when smoking. Last month, the Guardian again ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Dua Lipa smokes
There are quite a few ‘theories’ (what the middle classes call gossip nowadays) about why Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have sundered their union for a second time. Personally, I’m of the entirely uninformed opinion that one of the contributing factors may have been that Jennifer Lopez – like many a celeb – has her
Tamfana is just the sort of short-priced favourite that I love to take on. Yes, of course she might win tomorrow’s Sky Bet Atalanta Stakes (Sandown, 2.25 p.m.). After all, she was fourth in the Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket in May and, with more luck in running, she would probably have won that day.
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not
We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their