Over to David Cameron to call for private schools to be taken out of politics altogether by losing their charitable status and simply being taxed as the businesses that they are.
Even he does not send his children to them. They are now institutions of the global megarich, physically located in Britain by chance and by historical accident.
It is not as if the people who still use them can vote here. Or would notice if the fees went up.
Meanwhile, another "frontier of the State" could be said to have been "rolled back", and another "Labour tax hike" could be said to have been "blocked".
This old stunt is the only thing Tristram Hunt could come up with, when he was asked to at least try and pretend to engineer some difference between his education policy and that of the Government.
ReplyDeleteMore gibberish from another party who do alot of empty posturing because they have nothing serious to say about the dreadful education of the British poor.
Don't blame the private schools for that; they are not the ones who closed down their main competitors the grammar schools (which also taught the classics), and thus destroyed the life chances of children who can't afford to go to them.
Getting rid of their charitable status would turn them into nothing but of the rootless global mega-rich-they should be kept as charitable enterprises and preserved as the vital pieces of British heritage that they are.
As it happens, they contribute far more in tax (and by creating 250,000 jobs and taking 750,000 children out of the state system) than they receive.
They're one of the few public investments that actually provide value for money.
No wonder Labour hates them.
What "dreadful education"? That is just a lie by people who have either never set foot in a state school or are looking for excuses for the failure of their own lives, if not both.
DeleteSpot on. They also think they would have Olympic medals if it wasn't for immigration. They had no interest in grammar schools while they could afford private fees.
DeleteTheir economic system put paid, so to speak, to that.
DeletePrivate school pupils do worse than those from comps once they get to university, and grammar school pupils do worse again.
The media are atrocious. You have to work 10 years or more after university for little or no pay to break in. The people whose parents were rich enough for them to do that go on to depict total rubbish about the state sector.
DeleteWe are six months away from a heavily comprehensive-educated Cabinet, including the first comprehensive-educated Prime Minister, whose comp has already a produced a Foreign Secretary, not the first Foreign Secretary to have been to one.
DeleteAs you say, the only lines of work that are dominated by private schools are the ones that admit by a decade or more of post-university work for peanuts, if that. Nothing that anyone else can afford to enter is like that.
It is time to stop apologising.