Mail Online

KEIR SENT HIS CHILDREN TO ‘STATE PREP FOR MIDDLE CLASSES’

As he threatens 20% tax on school fees...

By Glen Owen and Cameron Charters

THE row over Labour’s ‘class war’ plan to add VAT to private school fees deepened last night after it emerged that Sir Keir Starmer sent his children to a primary school which has been described as a ‘state-run prep school for the middle classes’.

The move to strip private schools of their charitable status – meaning their fees will be subject to 20 per cent VAT – triggered a political storm after it was highlighted in last week’s Mail on Sunday, with experts warning that tens of thousands of pupils would have to switch to state schools because their parents would be priced out.

But critics have pointed out that when they were younger, Sir Keir’s children benefited from attending Eleanor Palmer Primary School, in Camden, North London, where the catchment area was recently down to just 182 yards.

Admission to the school, where his wife Victoria was a governor, has been described as ‘selection by house price’, because properties nearby sell for in excess of £2million. The school has earned a reputation for being a hotspot for pushy middle-class parents. One local said that the catchment area covered ‘roughly the length of Roman Abramovich’s yacht’.

Some say that parents who object to private schooling can ‘play the system’ through the property market to secure an elite state education, with some parents renting rooms above shops so they can apply to send their children to the school.

Labour’s plan to push up the cost of school fees has infuriated the private sector, which says this will lead to scores of schools closing. Supporters of private schools argue that they save the Treasury an estimated £4.4billion which it would otherwise have to spend on state education. They also contribute £5.1 billion in tax revenue.

In 2015, parents criticised Camden councillors for not stopping parents from renting temporary homes to win school places. Writer Giles Coren, whose four-year-old daughter was unable to attend a primary school 200 yards from their home, said: ‘All Labour has found to say about the last two governments is that its representatives went to private school, so are b ****** s.

‘For years we have had an Opposition based on bigotry about background. We’ve all gone along with it.’ In the end, he was forced to send his daughter to a private school.

Robin Walker, the Tory chairman of the Education Committee, said: ‘The biggest disparity in education is between London and everywhere else. So having a proper, fairer funding system would help correct that, but in the meantime it is effectively selection by postcode.

‘Those who can afford to live in expensive areas do end up getting their children to better schools, which is no fairer.’

A Labour source said: ‘The Starmers use the local state school, like most parents. No favours have been called in and they didn’t move to get in. To assert anything like that would be false.

‘To draw equivalence between the luck of living near a good school and the Party position on private schools is nonsensical.

‘Labour is not against private schools. We are against private schools getting a tax break, in the name of fairness.’

‘School selection by postcode is no fairer’

THE Labour Party’s education policy is damaging to the nation and highly hypocritical. It is one of several good reasons for discontented Tories to reject any suggestion that they might lend their votes to Sir Keir Starmer as a protest against their own party’s recent failures.

Let us start with the hypocrisy. Labour’s high command likes to please the party’s class-war Left by making rude noises about private schools. It is a cheap and easy way of keeping the Corbynites quiet. Yet despite having been in power, often with large majorities, for much of the postwar period, it has never significantly curbed private education.

Far from it. Labour’s biggest single education policy, the abolition of state grammar schools, was a huge shot in the arm for fee-paying schools. These had been failing quite badly by comparison with state grammars.

But as the grammars disappeared from most of the country, Britain’s independent schools welcomed thousands of new customers. These were parents so discontented with low standards at the new comprehensives that they were prepared to pay through the nose to do better.

Now Sir Keir is threatening to impose VAT on independent schools, a ferocious use of the tax system. This would not punish the rich. They can shrug it off. But it would hurt those who have sacrificed pleasures and luxuries because they think education is more important.

The plan is crowd-pleasing and dogmatic. By forcing families to send their children to hardpressed state schools, it is likely to damage the state system.

And now comes more hypocrisy. Labour has – in practice – always admitted that private education has important good qualities. Several of its most notable figures – Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Blair – attended such schools. Several Labour politicians of the 1960s era sent their children to private schools. Even now it happens. The maverick Left-winger Diane Abbott sent her son to a private school.

Sir Keir himself, thanks to the system of direct grant schools which his party abolished, attended what was in effect a private school (and has now fully become one), though his parents never needed to pay fees. And now we learn that Sir Keir has been playing the elaborate Game of Homes, by which socialists publicly opposed to privileged private schools wangle their children into exceptional state schools.

This is privilege too. For in this way they can retain their Leftwing purity, but without suffering the low-quality education which many users of the more normal parts of the state system still endure. In this case, the primary school attended by the Labour leader’s children at one stage had a catchment area extending just 182 yards from the school itself.

It has been described locally as a ‘state-run prep school for the middle class’. Their secondary school, similarly, is in an area of North London much favoured by Left-wing grandees. It has seen its catchment area shrink in recent years, inevitably making it more socially exclusive.

This sort of behaviour is not at all unusual among senior Labour figures who somehow manage to live in the often very expensive catchment areas of unusually good London state primary and secondary schools.

Others – such as the Blairs – use religious affiliation to achieve the same result. When Labour’s elite are content to send their children to ordinary state schools without such manoeuvres, we will know that they truly believe in their own education policies.

Until then, Labour should not punish the strivers who, like the socialist upper deck, seek to escape what Labour’s own spin doctor Alastair Campbell once called the bog standard comprehensives of Britain.

News

en-gb

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282003266451805

dmg media (UK)