Labour’s raid on private schools is a malicious assault on education

All across Britain, private schools are closing. Many are small institutions with long, proud histories that have successfully educated children for centuries. As they shut their doors, pupils suffer disruption to their learning and parents struggle to find new school places. Teachers lose their livelihoods, and towns lose not just an employer but, often, an establishment that has been at the heart of a community for many generations, too. Bastions of quality education and sporting, cultural and artistic achievement are disappearing. Yet this is happening with little national outcry.

Since Labour was elected in 2024, more than 100 private schools, educating some 25,000 children, have announced plans to close. Last week, it was the turn of Thetford Grammar School in Norfolk. Thetford claims to have been founded by Sigbert, King of the East Angles, in AD 631. The earliest historical document relating to the school dates from 1114, and it was re-founded in 1610 by an act of parliament. Thomas Paine, an Enlightenment revolutionary and author of Rights of Man, was a former pupil. In April, Malvern St James, a private school in Worcestershire, founded in 1919 by pioneering feminists and the alma mater of Dame Barbara Cartland, shut up shop.

In April, we also saw the closure of St Lawrence College in Ramsgate. Founded in 1879, the college was forced to cut ties with most of its 500 pupils with immediate effect. In February, Moorlands School in Luton, founded in 1891, gave shocked parents and teachers just 30 minutes’ notice that it would be permanently closing. In January, Exeter Cathedral School, the oldest school in Devon, announced plans to close its ‘prep’ provision for pupils aged three to eight. From September, the cathedral’s choristers, educated at the school since 1179, will be taught elsewhere. The closure of specialist choir schools makes it more difficult to use scholarships and bursaries to recruit choristers from poorer backgrounds.

Schools that are closing cite falling pupil numbers and financial pressures. The type of middle-class parents who, a generation ago, could just about cover school fees, began to find this impossible even before UK chancellor Rachel Reeves made them stump up for 20 per cent VAT on top. Added to this, private schools have had to contend with the removal of business-rates tax relief, an increase in the minimum wage, a hike in employers’ national-insurance contributions, and a sharp uptick in costs such as energy bills and pensions.

Adding VAT to private school fees was a flagship Labour policy. It was supposed to raise extra money for state schools, which could be used to employ an additional 6,500 teachers. But this seems unlikely to materialise. It was reported in April that, rather than raising money, the VAT increase had actually cost the Scottish economy £60million as the number of fee-paying pupils fell by nine per cent. Not only did these children need to be provided for in state schools, but 900 private sector jobs also disappeared.

It is not economics but politics that drives Labour’s attack on private schools. Party higher-ups drip with contempt for what they perceive to be sharp-elbowed parents with bulging wallets – who probably vote Conservative anyway – and try to buy advantages for their children. And it is true that in Britain today, elite sport, art and culture, as well as the professions, are indeed dominated by the expensively educated.

But there is another story, too. The schools that are facing closure are not the top public schools – Eton, Harrow, Rugby or Winchester – which charge more in annual fees than most people earn in a year. These schools, handsomely supported by generous alumni and with a plentiful supply of wealthy foreign pupils, will survive. It is, for the most part, smaller, cheaper private schools that are closing. These are schools chosen by aspirational parents who just about scrape together sufficient money to cover fees from one year to the next. Thetford has just 179 pupils, nearly half of whom are reported as having special educational needs or disabilities.

By closing these schools, education becomes more elitist, not less. Privilege becomes more concentrated, not less. Labour’s decision to scrap funding for Latin tuition in state schools similarly puts this subject out of reach of all but the uber-wealthy. Only those determined to wage an infantile class war fail to see this.

If the government wants to strike a blow for educational equality, it should ensure that state schools offer children the chance to learn Latin, take part in foreign trips and museum visits, and have world-class facilities, teachers and coaches. With its VAT increase on private schools, Labour is not just blighting the life chances of some individuals – it is attacking educational standards, aspiration and opportunity. It is destroying institutions that have long been integral to Britain’s heritage.

For centuries, schools that offer quality education have been valued by parents, communities and the nation. Now they are jettisoned for a few extra tax receipts.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.