Voices: It’s easy for Keir Starmer to be principled about state schools

Where I grew up, there was one private secondary school, and the kids who went to it were, to my adolescent mind, truly weird. Snooty, posh, talked like mini-adults – and their silly striped blazers were far too easy to mock.

The joke’s on me though, because I bet they all had a better educational experience than I did.

The interminable private vs state school debate has recently been reignited, thanks to Labour leader Keir Starmer’s pledge to end the VAT exemption for private schools. It’s not particularly new – it’s been Labour’s policy for five years now. And let’s face it, there really is zero justification for giving the wealthiest parents in Britain a 20 per cent discount on buying their kids a lifelong advantage through private education.

Nevertheless, the Mail on Sunday appeared determined to expose some hypocrisy, and ran a story at the weekend with the headline: “It emerges that Keir Starmer sent his children to a ‘state prep for the middle class’.” It’s not much of a gotcha, because “outstanding” though the school Starmer’s kids attend may be, it’s still a state school.

But, if we’re being completely honest, there is a difference between an institute of learning that was ruled exempt from further Ofsted inspections in 2011 and dubbed “an absolutely wonderful school – warm, nurturing, extremely well led and managed, with excellent teaching and a very inclusive ethos” – and what I remember from my state education.

Sure, I’m comparing a primary school and a secondary school here, and that’s perhaps unfair. But the terms “warm” and “nurturing” and “inclusive” do not resonate with my comprehensive high school experience in the Midlands.

I remember dirty, underresourced classrooms, overcrowded corridors; a culture where academic achievement and even putting your hand up to answer a question invited hostility and derision from peers, as well as rampant, unaddressed bullying and homophobia.

Teachers struggled to devote time to the kids who weren’t exhibiting quite extreme behavioural issues that marred virtually every lesson and prevented learning from occurring. The bright spots were created by a small number of individual staff members going above and beyond – and often giving up their own time to do so.

My experience was, sadly, not one I’d be happy for any future children of my own to share. And this really does muddy the waters when it comes to the principle of the whole thing, because of course private schools shouldn’t be VAT exempt (and, if we’re really getting down to brass tacks, they shouldn’t exist at all).

Only 7 per cent of the population go to fee-paying independent schools and yet this tiny proportion continue to dominate in high-ranking jobs – including the judiciary, the diplomatic service, the House of Lords and influential roles in the media. In 2019, the Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain survey identified a “pipeline” from private schools to either Oxford or Cambridge and into top jobs. In terms of my own profession, journalism, 43 per cent of the 100 most influential news editors and broadcasters and 44 per cent of newspaper columnists went to fee-paying schools.

This is all well-documented. Private schools are another way of entrenching inequality in a country that’s already awash with it. It keeps the same people in the same positions of power and ensures that nothing ever really changes because it’s all working quite nicely for those at the top, thank you very much.

The advantages that people who attend to fee-paying schools are handed – including small class sizes, amazing resources in terms of technology, musical instruments, sports facilities (and the rest), long-standing “proud traditions” of sending pupils to Oxbridge, the grooming towards self-efficacy and confidence and believing in your own capacity to succeed – are undeniable. I was astounded by the pomposity of the poshest kids in my university seminars because they really seemed to believe that their opinions mattered and were worth voicing.

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We should stop letting people with the most money gather up the best of everything for themselves and their children. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, bestowed a gift of more than £100,000 upon his old school – Winchester College – which costs £43,335-a-year to attend. It’s just one big circle of the rich feeding themselves and those like them all the best bits from the table, and it’s simply not right.

Maybe this is the “politics of envy” talking – but wouldn’t base jealousy be understandable in this situation? When a small section of the population can buy the best education for their kids (and we know, from all the research available, that this funnels said children into some of the highest paid and most influential positions in society), it feels rather like a rigged game that everyone’s aware of, but nobody is saying out loud.

Well, I think we should say it: because there’s no moral case for private education – outside of that very real parental impulse to do the best thing you can for your own kids.

And it must be much easier to stand by your belief that all kids should go to state schools if – like Keir Starmer – you live a stone’s throw from an “outstanding” one. Or if – again, like Keir Starmer – your state grammar turned into “one of the leading independent schools in the country” while you were attending it.

If your experience with comprehensive education has been bittersweet or outright damaging, the issue can feel more complex.