Is 6% too much?

Why a private school tax does too little to address educational imbalances

Freshers week conversations are an interesting phenomenon. Wherever you are and whoever you’re with, the extent of your conversational ability becomes suddenly limited to “So… where are you from?” Sometimes, you’ll push the boat out and ask them what they’re studying (a schoolboy error when you’re sitting next to each other in a History lecture). Then, every so often, someone throws a curveball at you. “What school did you go to?”

When they expect to hear about a school they might know from their cricket tournaments or the Sunday Times League Table, Bishop Heber High School seldom elicits many nods of approval. If only my parents had gone and got their act together, I could have done some serious bonding over a shared love of the Eton wall game or Latin grammar. Unfortunately, this experience is far from unique. Such conversations are probably commonplace in most Russell Group universities. The most recent figures show that some 40% of Edinburgh University’s 50,000 students were privately educated, an enormous number considering they make up only 6% of the population. Fortunately, these universities are at the forefront of tackling social inequality and have taken it upon themselves to develop stringent measures to address this imbalance.

I’m lying of course. Edinburgh’s only step was to instruct those from privileged backgrounds to avoid snobby behaviour, whilst a Professor of English at Oxford University took a swipe at diversity drives because “state school pupils struggle to read long books”.

It has become increasingly evident that universities have been unable to tackle widening admission inequalities. According to the Department for Education, the gap between private and state students going to the top universities has continued to enlarge, with private school students now twice as likely to advance to higher education as their state counterparts. Why then is the government’s decision to charge VAT on private school fees considered so controversial? Well, to be honest, it’s not. 

The sensationalist headlines from much of the right-wing press (I doubt I need to name any names) would have you believe that there were poll tax-esque protests on the streets. However, recent studies have shown that almost 60% of the general public supports the policy, and by the time it was announced in Rachel Reeve’s budget it was mostly ignored as a foregone conclusion, overshadowed by drawn-out semantics over who a ‘working man’ actually is.

So what is all the fuss about? The general claim is that placing a standard rate of VAT on private school fees will result in some mass exodus into an already overstretched state system. If all private school fees were to rise by 20% (plus any subsequent rises in the price of private schools to compensate for their lower uptake in students), some parents would in fact be forced to move their children to a non-fee-paying school. If this were the case, the Conservative Party – in their famously limitless benevolence - have claimed it would disproportionately affect the middle classes, for whom school fees are only possible at their current rate because of what they deem ‘considerable sacrifices’, whilst having very little impact on the wealthiest in society.

Now this argument is fair. Those who will be priced out of the private system will not be the children of Russian oligarchs but rather will be those whose parents have had to cut back on their lifestyle to afford such education for their children. Why though, should we assume that the burden of the 20% would be passed directly onto the parents? Last month Eton announced that they were unable to absorb any of the fee increase themselves despite, in the same breath, celebrating a £100,000 pay increase for its Headmaster. Eton is probably unlike most private schools in the country but this hardly signals an industry strapped for cash.

In the past 25 years average fees have risen twice as fast as average wages, totalling a 265% increase in day schools, with some of the most prestigious ones seeing fees rise above £50,000 a year. Yet this has escaped backlash. Perhaps an increase in fees is only intolerable when it has the possibility of contributing to the education of the other 96% instead of a seventh heated swimming pool.