Standing up for independent schools

On September 29th, the Daily Telegraph printed a letter from me today about the unfairnesses of school funding.

Sir Kier Starmer was once again raising the old idea about taxing independent private schools into oblivion. In my letter I pointed out that MATs and free schools are charities too, and that many of them make more profit with their government funding than independent schools do with what they receive from hard-pressed parents.

In any case introducing corporation tax, VAT and business rates isn't going to help any school, anywhere, whoever owns it. The numbers don't stack up and bankrupting private schools will simply displace a huge number of pupils into the state sector, which will then be overwhelmed.

But the real point I made in my letter was that we need to move past our national embarrassment about how private education can give advantages to children. Instead, UK education strategy should be about levelling up, not levelling down, and to do that we should just find ways of making the best education available to every child.

It's just as ridiculous to say that every state school can be the best in the world at teaching everything as it is to say that every independent school can do that. Specialising and collaborating is far more sensible, far more realistic, and far better value for money.

So the simplest way to achieve this is an integrated funding system that pays whatever school a child goes to, whoever owns and runs it, so that "the right school" becomes more reachable by any child. Then, if a particular school needs a top-up from the parent then either they could pay it if they can, or the school could offer a bursary which would be smaller than at present and hence could be given to more children. Either way, the public money would spread further and be used more effectively.

All that is probably more than our politicians can stomach, but there are ways of re-allocating the education budget that would spread it further, benefit more children, and be fairer to families and to all schools (independent as well as state schools).