Private schools’ charitable status is great... if you’re a foreign plutocrat
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Version 0 of 1. The middle class is being priced out of private education. That should make you sit up and listen. After all, as Observer readers, you’re probably middle class. Reading a broadsheet Sunday newspaper is a pretty middle-class thing to do, in case you hadn’t noticed, so the chances are lots of the other things you do are middle class too. Unless, of course, you’re reading online, in which case God knows who or what you are. You might be a North Korean secret policeman investigating capitalist decadence, or a mountain-dwelling midwestern libertarian surfing for signs of the apocalypse, or a data-mining bot searching for valid postcodes to inundate with pizza menus. But if you’ve actually purchased a copy of this newspaper, there’s a high chance that you have a middle-class career and values and aspirations which, in the old days, would mean either that you sent your children to private schools or that you didn’t because you don’t approve of them. (The schools, that is, not the children. People who don’t approve of their children are massive advocates of boarding.) Nowadays it probably means that, regardless of your ethical stance, you don’t give private schools your custom because there’s no way you could afford the fees unless you won the lottery – which you won’t because you don’t enter because, as discussed, you’re middle class. Private education, once in a similar bracket to lifetime National Trust membership or owning a few shares, is now in the same basket of goods as a second home on Park Avenue and a Learjet. Even more probably than that you’re middle class, you already knew that. School fees have been rising at approaching three times the rate of inflation for nearly a quarter of a century. So the nation’s rural solicitors and Rotary Club members have had plenty of time to come to terms with the slow withdrawal of the educational privileges in defence of which they so loyally voted Conservative for so long – just as the more left-leaning bourgeoisie has accepted that, what was once a proud, societally minded and altruistic choice, has been reduced to a mere financial imperative. But the fact that it’s old news didn’t stop Baroness Morgan of Huyton trotting it out in front of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference’s annual conference last week. (It seems it’s a conference that holds its own conference – or a conference within a conference, a sort of Itchy and Scratchy Show, particularly in the years it coincides with an epidemic of nits.) She really knocked those prestigious heads together about it: “Privilege is politically and socially toxic now in a way it hasn’t been for many years,” she told them. “It is not only the poor that feel excluded; so do many of the middle class. You cannot afford to be seen as complicit in that exclusion.” But being exclusive is a posh school’s USP! Headmasters don’t much like being told off. Richard Harman, current chairman of the HMC and headmaster of Uppingham school, takes particular exception, telling the conference: “It is time to stop scapegoating and start celebrating our schools and their contribution. Stop using them as lazy shorthand for the social ills of our country.” “Don’t lecture us…” he rebuked private education’s critics while standing in a room full of its supporters, “especially when many of you who do so have yourselves benefited from or use the service we provide. Hypocrisy is out of tune with the times.” I assume that last sentence was a joke. If not, it’s interesting that he considers any criticism of private education, not just by those who send their children to private schools now, but also those who have ever done so or were sent there themselves, to be hypocritical. And, by interesting, I mean fucking outrageous. I went to private school and, according to Harman, that means I owe him my support. My view is that I owe him nothing. My parents paid every bill they were sent in full. My family and the HMC are quits so, if it’s OK with Richard Harman, I’ll say what I think. Which is that, surprisingly, I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for the private sector’s position. When Harman calls on people to celebrate “the fact that a small country like Britain has created some of the very best schools in the world”, when he points out that “the costs of excellence in education are high, and to provide world-class education you have to put the resources into it”, and when he boasts that “there are parents from Azerbaijan to Germany to China looking to get the best education for their child in this country”, I can understand why he feels both proud and frustrated. These schools are good and successful, he’s saying; we teach children – which is a noble thing to do – and we do it to an internationally renowned standard. Why don’t more people like and admire us? Why can’t they at least leave us alone? If there are people all over the world who will pay tens of thousands a year for the education British private schools provide, then isn’t that just a success story that should be praised? It should be, were it not for one problem: Harman’s claim that private schools are “not a drain on the public purse”. Because they basically are. As charities, they don’t pay the same taxes as businesses. The considerable resources that public schools put into justifying their charitable status – for example, £365m a year in support for poorer pupils, according to Harman – is an index of what they must know they gain by being charities. It reveals the scale of the effective state subsidy. This means that, at a time when austerity bites into millions of homes and the solvency of the NHS is parlous, the British state is contributing to the education of the children of foreign plutocrats. It’s no longer merely a boost to the schooling of the moderately well-off British, as it used to be – a state of affairs that itself was unlikely to be nominated for any major social justice awards – but of the international super-rich. Harman says that “attacking the excellence of the education we provide will not solve society’s ills”. He’s right – it won’t. And we shouldn’t attack a good thing done well. But, as the British private sector provides less and less for the British people, I struggle to understand why we should help pay for it either. |