Up front, my kids are in private school. The oldest went because we couldn't find a state school that could deal with his Asperger's without dropping him to a bottom set with disruptive pupils far below his educational capacity. We scraped through on the bones of our arse for four years of primary, tried again at secondary for a year, and then went back to private when that didn't work out.
Our eldest daughter, far more profoundly autistic, went to a series of state special schools, and although we had to threaten to go to a tribunal to get her into the one that operated like a school rather than like an internment camp, we had a relatively easy ride with her, and what she got from those states schools was verging on the miraculous - i'm not aware of any private schools that would have offered what she needed. I spent several years as a governor of one of those special schools after our daughter left, trying to give a little something back.
With our youngest two, having seen the difference in approach between mainstream and private, and in a better financial position, we couldn't really justify sending them to a state school - my wife teaches in the state sector, so we know what's going on behind the scenes there. I'm not a teacher, but I work in the education sector, in a multi-academy trust that deliberately adopts schools in deprived areas, feeling that's the area they can make the most difference in.
Which is all to say that I have insights from most of the viewpoints of both state and private, special education and mainstream, educators and parents - the only real gap I have in the equation is on the government side.
I get the idea that private schooling should be taxed - I disagree, on balance, I think that education is a benefit for society at large, but I understand. Even accepting that, though, introducing a VAT increase in the middle of the school year, on such short notice, would be unnecessarily harsh even if the guidance had been thought out in advance, but it hasn't been. It's not malice, it's incompetence.
More than that, though, there are from what I can see two motivations for the hike - there's the idea that rich people are getting something at the expense of the rest. They aren't, they're paying twice, but the implications of a market-driven economy is that in the main that's a choice only those that can afford it will make. The reality is, though, that with the borderline criminal funding shortfall for education - particularly for special education - that this is not the case. The state sector is struggling to accommodate the students it already has, is dangerously overburdening teachers and facilities. I've seen nothing in the spending plans and intents for the education sector that says this money will be used for what it's needed for, which is to fund MORE teachers to allow a better balance between teaching and administration within schools, which will allow schools to retain teachers better and allow teachers to step away from the coal-face and make suitable arrangements and lessons for the full range of their student bodies.
The second motivation, and the one that Labour was particularly vocal about early on in their pitching of this, was the perception of private education into areas like the Judiciary, the upper echelons of the Civil Service, and into creative and sporting successes. And there's a great deal of truth to that - as much as the media focusses on privately educated actors making it big, and the number of privately educated Olympians, the effect in the Civil Service is apparently even more pronounced.
However, whilst the dramatic arts and sport draw from a fairly broad range of private education, the people who end up on the Bench, or in Whitehall, or manning Quangoes and quietly getting directorships of semi-autonomous government agencies only come from a small subsection of private education - the Harrows, and Etons and Gordonstouns. I'm privately educated, but the list of famous alumni of my school has one entry after about 1800, and that's a guy who played rugby twice for England-A. That 'old boy's network' is a serious problem, but this VAT imposition is not even not going to address that, if anything it will make it worse. Instead of the potential for those networks to choose from a few hundred other private schools outside of their preferred half-dozen before they turn to the state sector, they'll have fewer options and are therefore likely to draw deeper from those preferred few. Those elite schools are likely to become, if anything, even more entrenched in the recruitment mainline to the top.
That old-boy's network issue is not something that punishing the private education sector as a whole is going to fix, because those establishments are not vulnerable to financial pressures in the same way as the rest of the sector.
O.
