194. SHOULD THE STATE CARE ABOUT PRIVATE SCHOOLS? - On the Meaning of Independence

When I think of the discussion going on around independent schools in the UK following the Labour Party’s Budget pledge to impose VAT on them from January and, eventually, remove business rates relief, I often think of a joke I heard comedian, Hennig Wehn, tell years ago.  I have forgotten the whole set-up and punchline, but it was the idea behind it that has always stuck with me: that they don’t have silly charity events in Germany, such as Comic Relief, where people sit in bathtubs of baked beans to raise money to help the hungry, because they, instead, have a properly funded system of social welfare. The idea has stuck because at its heart is an important truth: whenever we pool together either collectively or privately for a charitable goal, it is a symbol of the failure, somewhere, of the state.  Our taxes have been paid, decisions on where to spend that money have been made, and yet this particular problem continues, and remains in desperate need of funds.  Government hasn’t done its job, and private funding has been forced to come to the rescue.  What the state fails to provide must be paid for by other means.

With this idea in mind, private enterprise can represent one of two things: the attempt to fulfil some sort of essential need which remains unmet by the public purse, OR a desire to provide some sort of non-essential, but desirable, service or product to people in a bid to make profit. 

When I see a person without housing and give money to a charity which might put a roof over their head, the state has failed. The charity is an enterprise one hopes would not need to exist were the world better organised. An effective state would lead to the charity’s welcome demise - we would no longer need it.  When I see a cake shop open up on my high street, however, and give money to a business such as that, there is no failure of state.  Someone simply thought they had a product people might like and have the disposable income to afford to purchase. My custom as a consumer confirms their hunch and the bet pays off. However, there is no guarantee of their success. I might not like the cake I buy. I may not repeat my business with the shop. I may review the place poorly online. Bad word of mouth might spread. The business might ultimately fail.

Arguably, therefore, no business has a right to exist. At least in terms of the state. While the state might want a strong economy and desire there to be businesses, that it is your business they desire to exist does not follow. There is no support to be found if your cake shop fails because customers simply do not want what you are selling. That is merely the risk one takes when setting up a business.

So far as charity goes, while the state may benefit from your existence because it means they do not have to deal with the problem you are solving for them, if the state suddenly did take an interest in addressing the issue and invested significant public funds into your cause, again, they would not shed a tear if your charity was forced to close its doors as a result. Neither would you. Your charity would no longer be required and all you should really care about is that the people you sought to help are being helped. Your redundancy in such circumstances might even be celebrated.

Thoughts like this are why I find myself in the interesting position, as someone who works in an independent school, as my colleagues discuss what they see as Labour’s attack on the independent sector.  Many I work alongside or come into contact with on a daily basis are furious at the imposition of an additional 20% on what it will cost to run a private school and threats of further rising costs. As most schools like this fund their existence through the fees that parents pay to send their children there, the VAT, they argue, and any other new expenses they need to pass on to the fee-payers, will price lower income families out of the market and return such schools to being the elite preserve of only the super-rich.  Or, if to spare the parents the additional financial burden, the schools decide to find significant cuts from their operating budgets instead, it will lead to job losses or a lessening of the services provided.  If the higher prices price out those less wealthy families who currently afford a private education by sacrificing things like family holidays or expensive luxury items, it becomes harder to justify the social good of an independent education as a charitable project. If the quality of what the school provides is impacted instead of the fees, then it becomes harder to justify the fees themselves if what the parents are paying for is diminished. Hence the perception of it being an attack. Either approach forces a negative outcome. There is no obvious good way of dealing with the additional tax burden.

I therefore agree with my colleagues that it is an attack. I don’t think there is even a debate to be had about that. It is an intentional and explicit attack, not simply something that feels like an attack.  The Labour education secretary has essentially said she has no sympathy for the plight of independent schools affected by the closing of the VAT loophole and that the money raised by this and other measures will help the government invest in the financially-starved state school sector where over 90% of the nation’s children go to be educated.  Where I seem to be in the minority within the independent school world is that I do not find this attitude to our existence - despite its possible detrimental consequences to my own ability to earn a living - monstrous or bigoted.  I find it not only understandable, but perhaps even justifiable. While colleagues dismiss the policy as some sort of vindictive working-class prejudice against private schools, I keep coming back to what Hennig Wehn said about charity. After all - the reason for the business rates relief and lack of VAT is that independent schools have long established themselves as educational charities. It is the charitable mission argument upon which they base their continued existence. Few independent schools openly trade on the idea of elite privilege for the wealthy. They are not like the cake shop - there to sell high quality goods for a profit. They instead position themselves as serving under-served educational needs - at a cost - currently not catered for within the state sector. The logic, of course, follows that if the state sector can serve those needs instead, then the charity would no longer be needed.

And the logic of such schools’ charitable endeavour needs to be scrutinised. After all, most charities don’t charge those who benefit from their works at the point of use. Yet the bulk of students in the independent sector are fee-paying. Now, independent schools are great if you can afford to go to one.  And I can personally testify that they can be a wonderful place to work.  I have had far more freedom and job fulfilment as a teacher since working in the independent sector than I ever had in the state sector, and have no doubt that our students are getting a better quality of educational experience overall than it is possible to get in any of our local comprehensive schools.  But this is only because the state has failed to fund an education system which is comparable to the sort of institutions private funds have hitherto offered.  Unfortunately though, to those of us currently enjoying the privilege of independent education, either as learners or as teachers, it is not the state’s job to keep our private enterprise alive anymore than it would be the state’s job to shed a tear if new investment in public housing led to the end of several charities dealing with the housing crisis. And if the best way of funding that mission came from funnelling money away from those manifold private housing charities and pooling it into one new pot, then that would, on paper, seem to be a perfectly justifiable thing to do.

At least it would be if the proposed re-funding was guaranteed to work. There does remain an equally justifiable suspicion about the state’s capability of actually providing the social goods they have historically failed to provide and an acknowledgement that success in many of these areas comes from more than just money. Investing in a doomed plan, or a plan with unforeseen holes, is not a guarantee that the new funding will actually solve the problem. After all, one of the big reasons the state education system currently fails students and teachers is that it is run on a highly authoritarian centralised and uniform accountability model which is not suitable for every student (or teacher). If the plan is to invest more in that system of education, and take money from alternatives to it, then important questions need to be raised.

But if we take the idea as pure logical argument, clear that the majority of independent schools in the country are classed as charities, there to plug a gap where the state is failing, then it remains theoretically cogent that if the state decides not to fail in that area any more, and improve the public service the charity if filling, then a charitable mission may justifiably, and thankfully, fall redundant. This is, after all, the situation in countries like Finland, where the idea has long been to ensure high quality public education for all (paid for through taxation) and make the existence of private education unnecessary, at least at the point of cost for a parent. Wherever you live in Finland, the idea is that your school should be excellent. That we in the UK have decided that location and catchment-area can dictate quality of education is a clear historic failure of the state which has led to the enduring need for independent alternatives. Theoretically, if the need disappears because public education becomes fixed, then no one loses out. And, importantly, the state is only required to care about public education and the ways of fixing that. They have no incentive, or moral responsibility, to worry about private charities which help a minority of people if they have a grander public plan to help the many. Helping the many is literally their job, their own justificatory reason for existence.

Consider our cake shop again. If the government, for public health reasons, decided to impose a 20% sugar and eggs tax because it was shown that the population were eating too many cakes and needed to get healthier to improve life expectancy, this would absolutely impact private cake shops. It would absolutely be an attack on them. But it would be one the state might be perfectly entitled to make to serve the interests of the whole population rather than protecting the interests of the minority of cake shop owners and customers across the country. (One might even argue states have a duty to do this on ultra-processed foods we are learning more and more about the dangers of). This does not mean the elimination of independent schools any more than it would mean the elimination of cake shops. But it does mean that such institutions would be forced to justify their continued existence through raising sufficient funds independently to stay alive. The cake shop, for example, might raise its prices by 20% and serve only the wealthiest customers going forward. The independent school might do the same. Or, they might raise prices by 40% and provide subsidies for those who can’t afford full-priced cakes (or education), paid for by the wealthier customers. Or they might make the quality of what they offer so damn good that it is absolutely worth the extra cost and people simply do whatever they can to be able to afford it. (We all seem to be paying whatever extortionate prices Apple, Samsung, and the other phone companies demand for their devices that it seems impossible these days to live without, for example…and those costs have only gone up and up). But, if it turns out no-one can afford it, or no one thinks the price is worth it, it is not the state’s place to worry about that. It is just another closed business on the dog-eat-dog battleground of capitalism’s free-market.

Of course, as I said, this argument is entirely predicated on the assumption that the state really does provide quality education for all, eliminating the need for the existence of independent schools and removing their charitable argument for staying alive. Given what state education in the UK has actually looked like across my lifetime, and the model of state education in ascendance today, this assumption seems questionable. The fairytale idea I (and Hennig Wehn) have propagated is the perfect ideal: no one suffers and the state does its job effectively. But to argue that a better funded UK education system would really put private-school-quality-schools in every catchment area we have only the data of existing state schools to look at. Does that existing model of state education compare favourably to the independent one? Well, having worked in both systems, sadly I don’t believe that it does. The reason I, and many other teachers, work in the independent sector (and why so many of our students are here) is not just about having qualified teachers, smaller class sizes, and nice buildings. It is about that idea of independence. Of being able to model an education freely, based on the needs of the students and interests and skills of the teachers, rather than conform to a state-mandated and Ofsted-inspected cookie-cutter model of one-size-fits-all state schooling. So far as I have heard from the new government in all their talk of better funding for state schools, and recruiting more teachers, the flawed framework of what actually goes on in the classroom, and in the management regimes which dictate what happens within them, has not been mentioned beyond the promise of a future curriculum review. But you can add subjects, and take away subjects, from a curriculum, but if the way those subjects are taught and the ethos of what a school actually is (passing exams, or something more?) is not addressed, then a crucial point of what the independent sector offers has been missed. The charities might fall, but what rises in their place might well not be the solution that was craved. Meanwhile, it is important to remember, nothing in the raised costs of running an independent school will prevent the more elite schools from maintaining their existence, paid for and enjoyed without interruption by the super-rich. So the privileged benefits of private schooling will continue, only now for an even smaller pool of people than before. The small percentage of students currently enjoying those benefits from families on modest incomes will lose out if what they get in its place is missing out on something crucial.

Numbers, of course, are important. From a government perspective the plight of less than 10% is something easily sacrificed for the plight of the 90%. In fact we might think it a scandal if we discovered the government were protecting an elite minority their privileges at the expense of the many. But what I am trying to say in this piece is that the conversation around VAT on independent schools being a conversation purely based around money, costs and affordability, instead of it being a serious public conversation around education and what a good education should look like is a conversation that fails to address what really ails the current state school system and what the advantages of going to, or working in, the independent sector actually are. It is a dishonest conversation. One which helps neither state students nor the privately educated long-term.

While I agree that the state owes independent schools nothing, and the state need not shed any tears in bringing about their destruction - that the state might even be morally justified in doing it from the perspective of what their obligation to the majority of citizens actually is - that that doesn’t mean that we aren’t losing something valuable if the state’s attack is successful. Until we have a clear idea as a society of what education ought to be we cannot meaningfully judge the provision of education as it currently is in either state or private schools, nor have any clear vision of what we wish to fund within the state system to provide something better for all. Independent schools might not be fair, they might perpetuate inequalities, and they might even be actively undermining the collective education of the society in which they operate…but, until we have an agreement on what public education ought to be, it cannot be denied that for those lucky enough to learn or teach in them, independent schools offer a much-needed space of independence in which to experiment with alternatives from an imperfect mainstream state system and show that other approaches to education are possible, for better and for worse. Unfortunately, without having the long and difficult conversation about what education ought to be before acting to undermine them, and talking only about money, we might not know what has been lost if we undermine the existence of independent schools until it is too late.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

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