Labour lacks good ideas for improving Britain’s schools

IN MID-DECEMBER Tim Jonas’s daughter said goodbye to friends and teachers at her private school in Wakefield, in Yorkshire. Mr Jonas, a web developer, says his family can no longer cover the nine-year-old’s fees, now that Britain’s Labour government is adding 20% in value-added tax (VAT). None of the 44 state primaries in Wakefield could guarantee her a place, so she is going to one a few miles out of town. Mr Jonas feels “fairly positive” about the move, now it is under way. But he regrets having to pull his daughter out of a school where she was happy and doing well.

After two years of bitter debate, VAT on school fees came into force on January 1st. For all the heat it has generated, the best bet is that the change will have less impact than diehards on both sides have made out. Yet that ought to worry Labour, which insists that making private education pricier was a good way to spend its first months in charge of schools. A party that once prioritised “Education, education, education” seems to be strikingly short of good ideas.

Fees at most private schools are going up at once, though by varying amounts. Hoity-toity places such as Eton are passing parents the full 20%. Some others say they are making efforts to limit increases, but that they expect to phase in the lot over time. VAT-reclaim rules will permit some schools to make savings (when businesses start charging customers VAT they stop paying tax on some of their own expenses). But even then most schools will have to make spending cuts, or draw on savings, if they wish to keep fee increases below 15%.

The effect on enrolment will take some years to become clear. Although some children are moving already, parents try to avoid withdrawing them in the middle of an academic year, or when they are working towards big exams. The government’s best guess is that private schools’ rolls will eventually fall by 6% or so, putting about 100 schools out of business (Britain has about 2,600, with around 600,000 pupils, 6% of school-age children). It expects both that children will be moved to state schools and that some parents will not choose private education in the first place.

For the moment these guesses seem reasonable. In private, headteachers say they are more worried about a diminishing inflow of new pupils than about an exodus of existing ones. The Independent Schools Council, an industry group, says that the number of 11-year-olds entering private secondary schools fell by about 5% last September, according to a survey of some 700 institutions. It thinks that worries about fees were the main reason.

Parents with children at the very poshest schools will have the least trouble finding extra cash. Smaller, humbler institutions are likeliest to shrink. The changes spell particular trouble for children with special educational needs, predicts Tony Perry of Education Not Taxation, a group that opposes the reform. Their parents sometimes stretch their finances to afford private education, having concluded that local state schools cannot give their children the help they need.

The most important question is whether the levy’s benefits will outweigh its hassles. Labour is probably right that taxing fees is going to raise about £1.5bn ($1.9bn) annually (even if lots of children flee to state schools, parents are likely to spend a chunk of what they save on stuff that is subject to VAT). But even if all that money goes to education, it would raise state-school budgets by a meagre 2%.

Labour’s still-vague plans for improving state schools do not inspire optimism. It has talked a lot about hiring 6,500 more teachers; last summer it said this would be one of its “first steps” in office. But that is only one teacher for every four schools. And ministers have yet to explain how or when this will be fulfilled. England’s schools are short-staffed not because politicians have refused to budget for more people, but because too few want teaching jobs for the pay on offer. Fixing that will probably require raising teachers’ pay far further than Labour looks willing to do.

With inspections, the problem is not foot-dragging but acting too rashly. In September it ordered Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, to stop giving schools overall grades (such as “Outstanding” and “Inadequate”). That delighted teachers, who hated the old system; their opposition had intensified since early 2023, when a headteacher whose school faced a downgrade committed suicide. Yet they may like the new-style inspections even less. Leaked proposals suggest that Ofsted may soon start handing schools scores in up to ten woolly subcategories. The idea seems to be to paint a “broader picture” of each institution’s strengths and weaknesses. But it will mean only more criteria for teachers to worry about, more bumf for parents to sift through and more work for an inspectorate that has long looked short of cash.

Labour’s latest announcements tinker with freedoms enjoyed by schools with “academy” status (some 80% of secondaries and more than 40% of primaries). The previous Conservative government handed these schools more autonomy, hoping this would push up results. But draft laws published on December 17th would give politicians more control over their lessons, and stop them from hiring staff without teaching qualifications (or who are not in training). Talk of requiring academies to respect centralised pay scales provoked particular confusion: Labour had to clarify that schools paying above average were not being asked to cut teachers’ salaries. How any of this will benefit children has not yet been well explained.

“Everyone is scratching their heads,” says Tom Richmond, a policy analyst who has worked in the Department for Education. “We’re seeing lots of announcements—but what we’ve not had yet is a plan.” For good or ill, the Tories’ reforms were driven by a strong “vision” of what high-performing classrooms look like, notes another analyst (who prefers to go unnamed for fear of making enemies in the new administration). “What is Labour’s ‘dream school’?…I don’t actually know.”

For people worried that Labour would rip up the reforms of the past 15 years, drift at the Department for Education is tolerable. England’s schools have been rising up international league tables. Big changes would exhaust teachers at a time when hanging on to them is hard enough. Labour’s base includes plenty of ideologues who would dismantle standards and water down discipline, given half a chance. To its credit, the government seems to have mostly resisted their worst ideas.

Yet threats to young brainpower are mounting. Around a quarter of secondary-school pupils are “persistently” absent, twice as many as before the pandemic; the share who are missing more than half the time is going up. Services for children with special educational needs are in crisis; the rising costs threaten to bankrupt local councils. The fight over private schools has distracted policymakers from more important matters. Time to get back to class. ■

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Correction (January 7th 2025): This article originally listed “Excellent” rather than “Outstanding” as an example of the grades awarded to schools by Ofsted.