Voices: Of course private schools should pay VAT – but why stop there?

The Queensmill School in Shepherd’s Bush is but an hour’s drive from Winchester College, Rishi Sunak’s alma mater. They might as well be on different planets. Different universes, even.

Winchester College caters for the ultra-privileged children of the elite. Parents pay a good deal more than the national average wage to afford them an education most can only dream of – and an old school tie that opens the doors of boardrooms, investment banks, the BBC and the corridors of power Sunak bestrides.

Boarders pay nearly £46,000 a year. Day pupils £33,990. As Labour’s Keir Starmer highlighted in the House of Commons, the school’s vast resources enable it to offer a rowing club, a rifle club, an extensive art collection and much more.

The Queensmill – with an “inadequate” rating from Ofsted – has none of those things. Its no doubt hard-pressed staff do their best to provide an education for autistic children.

Inspectors took aim at the school’s leadership for failing to properly vet them with DBS checks. They found a lack of understanding of the latest safeguarding guidance. Procedural snafus were so serious that children could end up getting the wrong medication or the wrong dose.

Having previously been rated outstanding, the school’s head – Aymeline Bel – took to the Local Democracy Reporting Service to defend her school, which had reopened as an academy a few months earlier. She pointed out that it had suffered staff shortages as a result of Covid and Brexit.

You may recall that Sunak is a fan of the latter. Faced with a choice of opening in a mess or not opening at all, the head chose to open. “If it was to happen again we would have made the decision to not open the school until we were staffed,” she said. Tough break for the parents.

Here’s a question: what would its rating have been if it had just a fraction of the staffing and especially the funding advantages Winchester enjoys? If it had some of the tax breaks the latter is able to take advantage of?

Charitable status, for example – which means the usurious fees that facilitate rifle and rowing clubs – incurs no VAT. A nurse in Haringey pays that tax if she needs to fix the washing machine she uses to keep her kids’ uniforms clean. Yet a hedge fund manager a few stops down the Piccadilly line in Mayfair pays nothing on his kids’ school fees.

Charities can also claim generous rebates on business rates. State schools like Queensmill cannot, because they aren’t charities. No, really. What would be the reaction of a financially literate alien visiting Britain for the first time to that? Incredulity, I imagine. Because it beggars belief.

For raising the issue of the unfair advantages Winchester and its peers enjoy, Starmer was accused of “attacking the hard-working aspiration of millions of people in this country” by Sunak.

But the hard-working aspirations of millions of Britain are to be able to send their children to good schools with sufficient funds to be able to provide them with the education they deserve. Those aspirations are not being met, in part because Sunak’s predecessors crashed the economy.

So the prime minister and his parents; Boris Johnson and his parents – in fact, a substantial chunk of the cabinet and their parents – opt out in favour of places with the resources to offer them something better. Places where they won’t have to encounter any of those hard-working people while they’re at it. No wonder Sunak suggested he “obviously” didn’t have “friends who are working class” in a recently resurfaced video.

The arguments against keeping the tax benefits these places enjoy in place are, frankly, risible. Private schools like to argue that the scholarships they offer would be put under threat if they were stripped from them. But these are little more than a PR stunt.

Good for Corbynista teen Hasan Patel, who caused a stir by getting into Eton (Johnson’s old school) a couple of years ago. He didn’t deserve the pile on he was subjected to. It was misplaced. It should have been directed at the school for cynically using him for the purposes of PR.

Handing out a handful of lottery tickets does not justify the state subsiding the system of educational apartheid these schools facilitate. The “community work” they do is no different. If it involves inviting in schoolgirls to get booed by a bunch of ill-disciplined hooray henrys, as recently happened at Eton, it is work we could do without.

What about the claim that a large number of parents would switch to the state sector if their fees went up through attracting VAT? Well, great. An influx of well off, motivated parents would likely be welcomed by their local schools, especially if (like many of us already do) they show a willingness to help out financially and/or give of their time.

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There is a strong argument for nationalising these bastions of elite privilege so the benefits they offer could be shared. We could do perfectly well without a two-tier education system. Why not get rid of independent schools altogether?

As it is, the least they and their wealthy clientele could do is pay their fair share of tax so that schools like Queensmill can better help its pupils achieve. It has done that even with threadbare resources and grave challenges.

The Queensmill is a “straight through” school which takes its pupils at the age of five and sees them through to the end of their schooling. One of its alumni is Stephen Wiltshire, the architectural artist who has become internationally renowned. His work enriches the world.

Winchester has given us Sunak. Eton has given us Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Would that the same could be said of them.