Shattered Nation by Danny Dorling;

Author:Danny Dorling;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

Privilege

Private schools are not the greatest problem faced by shattered Britain when education is considered. But the preservation of the private education sector after the Second World War was one of the reasons why it was so easy to subsequently shatter the state school system. In recent decades it has been usual for a majority of Cabinet ministers to have been privately educated, but in September 2022 that proportion rose to 68 per cent, making it the least diverse Cabinet by education seen since the 1990s.29

The UK system of education is not only unusual. It is now the most expensive such system in the world, because so much of both secondary and primary state education has been shattered and transformed into privatised or semi-privatised charities and business ventures over the course of the past two decades. It is also unusual because, unlike any other country in Europe, the UK has retained a very large number of private schools from the time before the state became involved in education, and it maintains an environment in which it is relatively easy to open up new entirely private schools.

Among all the thirty-eight current members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only Chile (and only before the uprising of 2019–22) spent more on the private education of a few children than is spent in Britain today. Those with the greatest financial advantages have had the most spent on their schooling. Nowhere else in the affluent world is like this. We do not understand that private schools are not actually good schools – just as private healthcare is not good healthcare, but is simply queue jumping.

Private education can be brought into the fold by ensuring fewer people have the excess income and unnecessary wealth needed to pay for it, and by ensuring that private schools pay taxes like any other business, instead of being treated as charities. The tax concessions given to private schools, and the tax loopholes that allow parents to reduce the cost of sending their children to such schools, need to be stopped. If this were done, private schools would begin to opt to become state-controlled to remain viable. They would not shut. Furthermore, state provision needs to be better funded, and if less money were being siphoned off to support the iniquitous private school system, more could be forthcoming. In England, schools in deprived areas have seen the largest cuts in spending per child in recent years. The most deprived secondary schools saw a 14 per cent real-terms fall between 2009–10 and 2019–20, compared with a 9 per cent drop for the least deprived schools.30 That could easily be reversed if the tax concessions and loopholes to private schools were removed and the savings used to make up the money needed.

The British idea of private education being a privilege that should, where possible, be offered to a few more who might have the potential to benefit from it, reeks of both snobbery and ignorance. To be a snob is to think you are better than other people.

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