To be against private schools, well, chacun a son gout as the enemy say. That parents sending their kids to them also already pay the taxes to fund the state education system is one of those things people like to conveniently forget. But, you know, we must eliminate privilege and all that.
So says a part of Labour. But that’s not all they’re saying either:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] While Labour’s current policies include adding VAT to school fees, the motion urges Labour to “go further to challenge the elite privilege of private schools and break up the establishment network that dominates the top professions”. The motion calls for an election commitment to “integrate all private schools into the state sector”, including the withdrawal of charitable status. [/perfectpullquote] [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It also breaks new ground by wanting to limit university admissions to “the same proportion of private school students as in the wider population (currently 7%)”. Most radically. it also calls for the “endowments, investments and properties held by private schools to be redistributed democratically across the country’s educational institutions”.[/perfectpullquote]Yes, that’s right. They want to go steal all that private property. That computer the Westminster lad is working on should be sent to a kid in Barrow in Furness. Eton’s rowing lake must be bottled and sent to schools across the country. The Latin textbooks should become kindling for disadvantaged primaries – for no one is to study anything so elitist as a dead language.
As so often politics just makes more sense, as with crime, when you follow the money. For that’s what they want to do these Labourites, go steal centuries worth of cash. How unlike spiteful little socialists, eh?
Removing the charitable status of schools, raising VAT on fees and limiting university enrolment to 7% for privately educated students are the marks of the true nihilist. These are the policies of sociopaths, destroyers of excellence and socio-economic vandals, truly only a barbarian could support such an approach.
There is another way, for those ideologically opposed to the Human Right of parental choice in education, ensure that the quality of state education is so good that very few would consider paying; over time the market would shrink to unsustainable levels
I wonder how you would police ‘private education’. Do all Home Educated kids qualify? How many hours of tutoring pushes you over the edge.? Does the fact that you are a poor parent with a scholarship to Winchester mean that your kids can’t have a degree?
Labour are talking about banning home schooling, so that won’t be an issue. Perhaps they’ll also outlaw scholarships, I wouldn’t put it past them.
All by the state, within the state, nothing outside the state. Where have we heard that before?
Grammar Schools were good enough that they took students who would otherwise have gone to private schools -though probably not the elite ones.
I have long suspected that private schools supported the end of grammar schools for just that reason. That they were the bootleggers to the socialist Baptists.
Far better to make the good schools bad than the bad schools good.
It would help with the inequality thing.
Far simpler and easier, anyway. Which for a politician is much the same thing.
Since this type of policy was first aired, in the 1970s, the major Public Schools had acquired land in Ireland and established plans to move there if a Socialist party should attempt to close them down. I’m not sure what impact Brexit will have, but i am sure that the Public Schools will have an answer…