AIBU to feel that the ‘Labour against Private Schools’ campaign is a scapegoat for a lack of vision for educational reform?

[BusyMum1978]

2500 UK independent schools with 615K children attending which is 7% of the population of children in FT education up to the age of 16. A number of articles published this week have highlighted the campaign supported by Labour MP’s, who are calling for a number of measures impacting Independent Schools including their complete abolishment, and for these schools to become part of the state school system. A real hatred seems to be forming, and it feels to me like an easy smoke screen to put up rather than the Labour Party providing very specific policies to show how state funded education will be reformed.

I completely understand the feeling behind the imminent appointment of our 20th Etonian PM - there is urgent reform required in politics to have equal representation which I wholeheartedly agree with. I also understand the recently published stats showing accelerated social mobility for those attending top independent schools. I am not saying that there aren’t areas for improvement- but is the objective to bring more children up, or to bring the independently educated 7% down to make it ‘fair’?

My children both attend a prep school, and they are the first generation in both mine and my husband’s family to do so. We aren’t rich, neither of us have a degree, we own one property. We have -and continue to- work hard and made a choice to invest in our children’s education. We know we are privileged to be able to do so. To hear that MP’s want to wage a ‘class war’ with a family like mine feels inflammatory and yet more decisiveness in an already fractured country.

My children started their education in a state primary school but quite honestly it wasn’t good enough, and our heads were turned by what the private sector had to offer.

It equally broke my heart and inspired me to read The Times article on The Willow in Broadwater Farm school. Schools like this desperately need funding and further support, as do a range of children’s services which were cut during austerity. However will abolishing independent schools help a school like this? Parents who have money will still gravitate to the best areas / schools, and get tutors etc. There are a large number of selective state secondary schools that require heavy tutoring to access.

We need to nurture brilliant young minds in this country, to plug the UK skills gap, and compete in a global market. The independent sector has a valuable role to play.

Progress and globalisation is happening at such a rate that it’s becoming a bit uncomfortable. Many jobs our children will do haven’t even been invented yet.

The independent schools could work more closely with the state sector, but it concerns me that this campaign is chasing an ideal, and if successful would just shift the problem elsewhere.

The brain drain of the 70s from the U.K. was a real thing.

People will move if taxes go too high. Even easier to do nowadays as a lot of people work for international firms.

If we are worried about a brain drain, then we make sure we have decent education in place for all children. Then we have a bigger pool of people to choose from.

Those who make panicky noises about a brain drain are those who don’t want their taxes going up. They think they deserve to earn loads because they’ve worked hard.

But they forget that they didn’t get rich in isolation.

Oliver’s, are you forgetting about the actual mortgage?
We did the beans on toast thing, got the deposit but didn’t earn enough to actually get the mortgage.
It’s not a problem of frivolity. The average house price where I live is 13 x average salaries. Btw, bank won’t lend 13 x salary in case that wasn’t obvious

Amehen we moved to London we didn’t earn enough to buy even the tiniest place.

Can’t remember the exact amounts but the cheapest place was £19000. Total mortgage we could get was about £9000. We raised the balance in 1 year. We were knackered at the end but it got us our first place.

We could only get 2x the main and once times mine. A few years later people were getting 4 or 5 times their salary.

Our mortgage was less than out rent do we managed the mortgage with no issues

Amehen=when

On the tax-induced 'brain drain':
www.telegraph.co.uk/tax/income-tax/labour-will-take-tax-rates-back-1970s/

See especially this passage:
''The Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher cut the top rate from 83pc (or 98pc with the surtax) to 40pc while the Tory-led coalition cut it from 50pc to 45pc. ... Mike Warburton, who was an accountant throughout the period, said: “Unsurprisingly, very few people chose to pay tax at the extortionate rates seen under Labour in the Seventies. Many of the brightest emigrated to the US in the so-called brain drain.“Others simply didn’t bother to work hard or push for promotion and a pay rise on the basis that it didn’t make much difference to their take-home pay," Mr Warburton added. "Those with their own companies decided not to take dividends.... Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe reduced the top rate on earnings to 60pc and then abolished the investment income surcharge. The basic rate was also reduced to 30pc. As a result, the yield from income tax shot up. The top rate then fell to 40pc in 1988, with the same result.”'

As unfair and counterintuitive as it might seem, low taxes for the well off do indeed seem to raise the amount of revenue pulled in as a whole. The moral? Wealth-generators need to be left to do their thing. Fleecing them for short-term gain, and to scratch the itch of the politics of envy, is merely killing the golden goose that lays the golden egg. Anyone with the vaguest appreciation of history cannot but concede that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried.

Abolishing independent schools does not equal more investment in state schools. How ridiculous! What is means is 7% more children to educate/pay for in state schools.

Education needs much greater investment and the government need to make cutbacks elsewhere and invest in it. Everyone is entitled to an education in this country. Abolishing independent schools is just a statement move by labour. It would only add to the pressure and stress to the system by adding another 7%of kids to educate.

We'd go. We hold 3 different passports. Almost all of our friends hold dual nationality as well. People are more mobile than they've ever been. It's ludicrous to think you wouldn't lose a good chunk of net contributors. We'd keep property here but we wouldn't be paying taxes here any longer.

I'm all for paying more tax to fund state schools and THAT is what the policy should be about. It shouldn't be about dragging down the private schools but raising up the state schools.

Haven't RTFT, but these families pay tax towards state schools, but also by taking their children out help to reduce class sizes etc. Why do they think that these people will be the answer to improving schools? Is Mrs Bloggs who works at the supermarket not intelligent enough to? This is a really controlling policy they want to introduce, and I really don't see it having the end that they envisage.

I could afford 20% VAT on school fees particularly as fees might go down as you would no longer have to pay for things like bursaries for the poor etc so the schools could become more exclusive I suppose.... The schools could then claim the VAT back they incur when buying things too so these are not simple issues.

If you abolished private schools around here (outer London where there must be at least in terms of secondary schools 20 state and 20 private schools children can go to including grammars/ quasi grammars, religious and all other kinds) then parents would either home educate, educate children in private boarding schools in Ireland or Scotland or France or just send children to the very exclusive state grammars and posh comps attended by champagne socialists.

What does the phrase champagne socialist actually mean? People who’ve never experienced poverty trying to create a more equitable society?
I guess it demonstrates that the Tories truly believe that they are the party of the rich - because they insult those who are well off and don’t vote for them - calling them champagne socialists?

It is a very old fashioned phrase now but I have not found a better one to call those who go on about being anti private schools but are rich and then pick posh state schools they just happen to live near or fit their religion and who are so well off they can afford champagn. I is the kind of rich London Islington Blair, Corbyn crowd and yes you can lump them both in together- private schools themselves, then found the Left and big issues about where they sent their own chidlren, own expensive London homes most people would never dream of etc. and so rich they can afford to give more of their money away in tax as they are not living hand to mouth.

socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried

And how's capitalism working out for those at the bottom?

The term champagne socialist is a simple attack on anyone who has money but believes in left wing values, its a Tu Quoque fallacy, so is easily dismissed.

Much like many of the rote learned points made by the right wingers on here:

"socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried"

Conflates socialism with communism, it also fails to recognise that all states are mixed economies in which some elements are socialised, and others left to the market. There is no such thing as a free market, and there are no economies that run on purely free market capitalist principles. It also fails to recognise that economies that have great equality, and where the government takes a larger role (i.e are more socialist) ( Germany, Norway, Sweeden etc) are more successful and have higher living standards than those that are run on more neo liberal principles.

But yeah, just repeat your Jordan Peterson bollocks ad infinitum.

" fees might go down as you would no longer have to pay for things like bursaries for the poor etc so the schools could become more exclusive I suppose"

They wouldn't, so little of a schools revenue is spent on bursaries that this wouldn't make a difference. Private schools are already exclusive.

Champagne socialists is a fancy way of saying hypocrite. Like the numerous people I know, living off parents money, wanking on about how great Corbyn is and sending their children to the most exclusive schools.
I suspect what’s going on here is snobbery. They don’t want the oiks like me who pay their own way to be able to send kids to posh schools.

Ps I did criticise the policy upthread, specifically in relation to impact on kids with SN. But you ignored that bit, sion. I can see how it’s inconvenient for you...

chasing flies with a sledgehammer.
Private schools don't automatically mean Eton.
Abolishing private education won't hurt billionaires or royal family or other elites - they will still find a way to stash their offspring away from commoners. And it won't be a brain drain either. But it will be a death blow for small independent and alternative establishments.
Massive inequality within state system is the thing to address.

"Massive inequality within state system is the thing to address."

Which the Labour party manifesto addresses.

Is it hypocritical to take the best education for your child and also want the best education for all children? Especially when the current system is such that the best education is, generally speaking, one that you need to pay for?

To take another analogy. If you are a poverty campaigner, should you only shop in the value range and only buy cheap food?

What I find hypocritical is people claiming that those who are less well off just need to “work harder”, and they too can afford the private schooling and big house etc. While failing to acknowledge that that just isn’t the case at all.

"socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried" Conflates socialism with communism.

Communism has never in fact occurred anywhere, given that this particular Leftist fantasy envisages a socialist workers' paradise where the elimination of the property-owing classes has enabled the 'state' (i.e., central government) to 'wither away' to nothing. The USSR and its imitators in the Eastern Bloc were all therefore socialist dictatorships (Leftists quickly discover the need to coerce the people into submitting to their social-economic experiment - remember Lenin's 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat', or the Berlin Wall, built to prevent East German 'comrades' from fleeing to the capitalist West, a purpose disguised by its ridiculous official title 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart'?).

[I]t also fails to recognise that all states are mixed economies in which some elements are socialised, and others left to the market. There is no such thing as a free market, and there are no economies that run on purely free market capitalist principles.

Yes, the main alternative to a 'conservative' administration in Britain would be a 'social democratic' one. Plenty of them have been successful in Europe. That's what Tony Blair's Labour Party was. Corbyn and his ilk utterly detest Blair's form of 'social democracy' because it's not socialism.

It also fails to recognise that economies that have great equality, and where the government takes a larger role (i.e are more socialist) (Germany, Norway, Sweeden etc) are more successful and have higher living standards than those that are run on more neo liberal principles.

Higher living standards is hard to quantify, but it's certainly interesting that these European countries all have higher suicide rates than Britain:

32. Finland
33. France
34. Sweden
35. Ireland
36. Norway
37. Netherlands
38. Denmark
39. Germany ...followed by:
40. United Kingdom en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

You are conflating communism with socialism, just changing the words to fit your own meaning.

There are ways to measure living standards, but again to fit your own agenda you have chosen one metric, rather than the HDI, GPI or SPI all of which use a greater number of measures combined.

So no living standards arent hars to quantify, just the ways of doing this don't suit you.

You are conflating communism with socialism.

Socialism a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole (i.e., by the government and its appointees, not individuals).

Please tell me what successful state can be accurately described as 'socialist'? You can peruse this list, if you want:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Current

Notice the absence of any of your much-touted Scandinavian states, Germany, Netherlands, etc.

Mr Corbyn's old favourite, Venezuala, is there, of course! (But we don't hear so much about that disaser zone from the British Left, now.)

Please tell me which state is entirely capitalist?

That list is states that actively identifiedas socialist not ones which operate socialist policies.

Even the definition you have linked to says "owned or regulated", can you tell me a state where the means of production, distribution and exchange are not regulated by the government?

Private schools should be abolished. They are everything that is wrong with Britain. Every child should have an equal chance to succeed. This will never be possible with a two tier education system. Imagine if talent and proficiency were the key factors in a person's success rather than entitlement and networking. We'd have a far better society in every regard.