
On 5 July 2024, Keir Starmer’s cabinet took office as the most state-educated in history. Amid the drama of Labour’s election victory, this landmark was noted only in passing. But it is worthy of greater reflection.
For decades British politics had been dominated by the privately educated. Mr Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak attended Winchester College and 63 per cent of his cabinet went to fee-paying schools – nine times the share of the general population. Throughout the long period of Conservative rule, only Theresa May’s first cabinet came close to being representative (containing more state-educated ministers than any since Clement Attlee’s in 1945). She was succeeded by Boris Johnson, who became the 20th Old Etonian prime minister. But now, in a quiet revolution, Britain has a cabinet educated in the same way as most of its population.
Mr Starmer’s government represents a change of policy as well as personnel. At the start of this year, the government imposed VAT on private-school fees. It was a former Conservative education secretary, Michael Gove, who noted in the Times in 2017 that this tax advantage “allows the wealthiest in this country, indeed the very wealthiest in the globe, to buy a prestige service that secures their children a permanent positional edge in society at an effective 20 per cent discount”. From April, those private schools with charitable status will also lose the 80 per cent relief that they enjoy from business rates.
The removal of these tax privileges, as Francis Green and David Kynaston write in this week’s Cover Story, has been accompanied by claims that the middle class is being “priced out” of private education. Yet the reality is that it already has been. Annual average fees are now £18,064 at day schools and £42,000 for boarders – three times higher in real terms than in the 1980s – compared to the average full-time salary of £37,430.
The case for ending the effective state subsidy of private institutions is overwhelming. As the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, noted last autumn, after “inflation-busting” increases in fees, private schools will have to “cut their cloth” in the same manner as their state counterparts.
But the task facing Labour is not only to address what we have called “the 7 per cent problem” – the share of pupils who attend private school – it is to forge a better education system for the remaining 93 per cent.
Against expectations, the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has become one of its most contentious. Criticism has come not only from Tories such as Mr Gove (who has likened it to “Rome’s approach to Carthage – a salting of the earth”). The children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, has accused the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, of “legislating against the things we know work”, while Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh has warned that the government is making a “huge mistake”.
The bill includes uncontroversial measures, such as widening the provision of free breakfast clubs and reducing the amount parents must spend on branded uniform. But the backlash has been triggered by its proposed changes to academies – which now account for 80 per cent of secondary schools. These include ensuring that they teach the national curriculum and only employ those with qualified teacher status. In addition, schools rated “inadequate” by Ofsted will no longer be forced to become academies, and councils will be permitted to open new schools.
The Conservatives’ education record is often overpraised (partly because of the dearth of improvement elsewhere). As the Tony Blair Institute has noted, by allowing almost all state schools to become academies, David Cameron’s government “lost the levelling-up dynamic of the previous academies programme”. As a consequence, the new academies “made relatively little difference to school standards”. Yet England’s performance in the international Pisa league tables for reading, maths and science remains above that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – where the academies model has not been pursued. The changes proposed by Labour have yet to be accompanied by a clear rationale.
There is a case for reforming the academies model to ensure greater accountability – just as there is for ending private schools’ splendid isolation. But what is still missing from Labour is an overarching vision of an education system that delivers both excellence and fairness.
[See also: Labour’s lead on the economy has crumbled]
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War