“Private schools help hoard wealth, power and opportunity for the few.” This comment by an anonymous Labour party source a few weeks ago states the problem in a nutshell. Private schools are out of reach (average fees nearly £18,000 a year) for the great majority of people; their spend per pupil is at least three times more than that of state schools – a grotesque resources gap; and they constitute a highly effective service industry, which not only almost guarantees places at top universities but also provides a network of invaluable connections – together a passport to life’s glittering prizes, with two old Etonian PMs in the last three years the most visible symbol. They are indeed enablers of wealth hoarding, of power hoarding, of opportunity hoarding. They are, in short, an affront to any notion of a just or inclusive society.
Such was the case put forward in our book Engines of Privilege, published in February, a work in many ways born out of long years of frustration at the prevailing political inertness on the issue. We had no expectation that seven months later the Labour party would vote at its conference to integrate the private sector into the state sector. In criticising Labour’s position, the headmaster of Eton, Simon Henderson, this week acknowledged the public mood was shifting on the question, and that a battle lay ahead for the future of private education.
It is a good moment, with the issue suddenly near the top of the non-Brexit agenda, to ask why over the last three-quarters of a century we have made so little progress in tackling what is, in many ways, a very British problem – given that in no other western society are private schools so deeply entrenched or so corrosive in their effects. There have been three potential turning points, but all failed to deliver change: the Tory education minister Rab Butler deftly ensured during the war that the private school issue was excluded from the otherwise historic 1944 Education Act. After the second world war, any reforming zeal on Clement Attlee’s part was emasculated by his umbilical attachment to his old school, Haileybury. And during the 1960s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government initiated a royal commission on the public schools (as they were still absurdly called), whose mouse of a report in July 1968 achieved precisely nothing. The report did, however, prompt a flurry of letters to the Guardian. On 25 July, the letters page featured a pocket cartoon by the paper’s brilliant resident cartoonist, Abu. It showed a rather cross-looking man scribbling a letter – “Sir, with reference to your leader on the public school system’s divisive influence on our society …” – and above him a calendar. The date was 25 July 2068.
It is now nearer to 2068 than 1968, and nothing of real substance has been achieved. But after four decades of virtual permafrost, things are hotting up again. Books (including Melissa Benn’s Life Lessons and Robert Verkaik’s Posh Boys, as well as our own) are starting to confront the issue. Private School Policy Reform (PSPR, of which we are among the founders) is a newly established and politically independent website-cum-thinktank. Labour Against Private Schools (LAPS) is a new and energetic pressure group. And, of course, Labour itself has now voted in favour of radical change. Yet whatever happens politically this autumn and beyond, we as a society are unlikely to make any serious progress on the issue unless we understand why we have so comprehensively failed to do so in the past.
Some of the reasons are obvious enough. Although the private school issue is ultimately about what kind of society we are, it tends in everyday practice to be treated as a narrowly educational matter. At any one time, from the perspective of, say, the education secretary, or the Department for Education, what is happening to the 93% of children not at private schools understandably takes priority. Historically, the key figure here is Anthony Crosland, Labour’s great postwar intellectual. “I have never been able to understand,” he famously asserted in 1956 in his influential work The Future of Socialism, “why socialists have been so obsessed with the question of the grammar schools, and so indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the independent schools.” Yet as education secretary in the 1960s, he pushed the private school issue into the long grass.
There is also what we call the “different planet” problem. In London and the south-east, as well as in such affluent cities as Edinburgh, Oxford and York, private schools may be thick on the ground and the subject of endless fraught conversations. Elsewhere, in large parts of Britain, they are rarer and do not impinge on most people’s daily lives or consciousness. Physical location, similarly, matters in the sense that many of the leading private schools, especially boarding schools, are tucked away in the countryside or semi-countryside – out of sight, out of mind.
Also unhelpful has been what seems to be an intense reluctance on the part of the vast majority of state school leaders to put their heads above the parapet and speak out on the private school issue. During our public encounters with private school heads after the publication of Engines of Privilege, nothing has been more irritating than their line of: “We don’t hear the state schools complaining about us. What they complain about is the lack of funding from government.” Admittedly, it has been a state school teacher, Holly Rigby, one of the driving forces behind LAPS, who has pointed out the demotivating effects of private school privilege. But on the whole the private school leaders are correct: their state school counterparts remain the dog that fails to bark. Is this because they don’t want to be seen as overly political? Because to privilege the private school issue might somehow be viewed as denigrating the state school system? Or, perhaps most likely, because they have a large amount on their plate and just want to get on with it, without casting unproductively envious eyes elsewhere? Yet because of the yawning resources gap they are in effect operating with one hand tied behind their backs, not helped by the debilitating flow of state-trained teachers from state schools into private schools.
This is especially the case given the very effective PR machine that the private sector has at its disposal. The wider economic benefits conferred, all the wonderful partnerships with state schools, the many bursaries open to poor children, the sanctity of parental choice, the irretrievable damage that any reform would do to “the fabric of education in this country” – the daily drumbeat continues from the Independent Schools Council and other seldom accountable industry bodies, complete with a sophisticated and shameless line in “the problem lies elsewhere”, as we have found in our public encounters. And since Sunday’s vote at the Labour conference, the drumbeat has turned into a frenzy, accompanied by a palpable closing of the ranks on the part of powerful allies.
Yet in some of our private meetings with private school leaders since our book was published, we have found them surprisingly willing to move away from a stubbornly defensive mode and to discuss constructively how the sector can actually do what it claims it wants to do, namely to transform the composition of their schools away from social exclusivity and towards social diversity. Have the schools got the financial resources to do this, through a vastly expanded bursaries programme, off their own bat? Or would such a scheme have to rely on state-funded places? And would this involve the state determining who gets the places and a lessening of independent governance? On all this they are more open-minded than we had expected – even if they have not yet fully confronted all the issues that would arise. Though on the essential moral question of whether in a good society it is right for parents to pay vast sums for education and thereby buy positional advantage for their children, we could detect little or no movement.
The media, mostly, do not help. In researching our book, we were struck by the almost complete absence of detailed investigation of the private school sector’s claims and practices. Tellingly, it was not the press, largely hostile to private school reform, that engaged in such work but the select committee on education, which in November 2017 forced the admission that although private schools subsidise up to a third of places (on a far from transparent basis), a mere 1% of places are fully funded. The suspected gaming of the system – whether through identifying special needs (to buy more exam time) that for some reason seem to be more prevalent in the private sector than in state schools, or spending liberally on exam challenges, or maximising informal contacts with top universities – is especially ripe for investigation. The press is lazily culpable of buying into the sector’s propaganda. “Private education is no longer the preserve of the privileged,” insisted the Daily Mail earlier this year in a double-page spread about parents “digging deep” for the sake of giving their children a better education. Yet analysis of government surveys of family resources and spending shows definitively that the few middle-income families with children at private school spend more – not less – on their holidays and other recreational activities than similar families with children at state schools. The only realistic conclusion is that for the most part they are able to draw on a significant degree of non-income family wealth.
What about the politicians? From Margaret Thatcher onwards, the pursuit of greater equality of opportunity (as opposed to equality of outcome) has been proclaimed as lying somewhere near the very heart of the Tory creed. Yet with painfully few exceptions, notably the odd fluttering from Michael Gove, politicians of the right have stubbornly refused to face the stark incompatibility between equality of opportunity and a flourishing fee-paying sector. When this summer we asked a sympathetic Tory backbencher if she could recommend a similarly sympathetic colleague for us to talk to, she could only name one. “They all educate their children privately” and “they don’t actually care about equality of opportunity” are the two most commonly wielded explanations whenever we’ve discussed this with others. But perhaps one day those politicians will take the issue seriously, and at last grapple with the competing demands of liberty and equity.
The greater responsibility, given their larger commitment to the values of fairness and inclusivity, lies with Labour politicians. “That’s a hard one you’ve taken on there,” Gordon Brown wryly remarked to us in 2014 – testimony to the fatalism about the private school issue that had gripped his party even before the coming of New Labour. Too complicated, too invidious, too emotive, altogether too hot to handle. Such, despite the simplicity of the fundamental argument about unfairness, were the default assumptions for all those years, and which are only now starting to change. There persists a great vulnerability, namely the exposure to the charge of hypocrisy against any Labour politician who has been privately educated or, still worse, chosen as a parent to go private. In our view, such politicians, whose general dislike of private education is at odds with their own decision as parents, should be exempt from accusations of hypocrisy unless (which is clearly not the case yet) they are actively imposing denial of choice on parents generally. This is a difficult area, with no clear-cut right or wrong. It has hobbled the left over the issue, with Boris Johnson’s gleefully reported charge on Monday of “unbelievable hypocrisy” merely an opening salvo.
Which brings us finally to left-leaning readers and voters. Some, like us, will have been privately educated and are uneasily aware of the advantages we came to enjoy as a result. Others have been, or are, parents of children who attend private school, and are in all likelihood even more uneasily aware of the gap between values and practice. Yet we all have to live in the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be, and parents will always do what they see as best for their children. But rather than pretend the issue does not exist, however tempting that might be, it would be far better for such parents to support a change to the existing dispensation and a move towards ending – whether abruptly or incrementally is an important but second-order question – our horrible and infinitely damaging educational apartheid.
A mature democracy should be capable of discussing the private school issue in a calm and considered way that transcends personal circumstances. The debate, in short, badly needs to up its game. We have at No 10 an over-entitled PM; but proper entitlement would be to give all of our children, from whatever background, a fair deal.
• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
