Chaotic and noisy classrooms of 60 children free-flowing in shared spaces. No wrap-around care for working parents. A windowless isolation room for children who had misbehaved.
As I toured local state schools for my son, a few years ago, these are all the features I was disturbingly told about. I felt anxious and uncomfortable seeing this in action – and I certainly couldn’t see how this set up would work for our family.
I knew then that I needed to look for another option. So my husband and I enrolled him in our local independent prep school – and we’ve never looked back.
We even enrolled our daughter in the same school two years later.
But now it feels like Labour’s war on private schools by introducing 20% VAT is penalising us for wanting the best for our children.
Rachel Reeves recently said: ‘There’s an obsession with the 7% of children who are in our private schools. I’m more interested in the 93% of children who are in our state schools.’
When I read this, I felt angry, disillusioned, alienated, and othered.
While I understand that state schools are significantly under-resourced, this doesn’t need to be a competition. Children are not statistics, they are individuals – each with their own unique stories.
Comments like this only divide communities by pitting us against one another. Isn’t it in Rachel Reeves’ job description as an MP to be equally concerned about the education of all children in the UK?
To me, this is the definition of reverse discrimination.
I was born in the UK but grew up in Canada, where I went to a state school. My husband grew up in an inner city neighbourhood in Bradford and fortunately secured a place in a selective secondary school.
We were both the first in our families to go to university – both children of immigrants. As a result, we did not grow up with privilege, connections, or large inheritances.
I earned my PhD after moving to the UK and now work as a clinical psychologist in private practice after leaving the NHS a year ago, while my husband’s a lead software engineer for a US-based company.
For us, education was the solution to upward socio-economic mobility, and that is precisely why we chose to prioritise the same for our children.
Today, both of my children – ages six and eight – attend our local independent prep school, where they are each thriving in different ways.
My son receives differentiated learning in his classroom, which simply means that the teacher is able to give different versions of spelling and maths tests. This allows him to stay engaged in his learning, instead of becoming bored and disruptive.
In contrast, my daughter has a mild language delay that causes her to struggle with keeping pace in the classroom so she has weekly one-to-one interventions with a teaching assistant to help bring her up to speed (without the need for a formal Education and Health Care Plan, which local authorities can create in state schools).
Alongside this, we get weekly email updates from the school on the outcome of her intervention sessions and monthly meetings with her teacher to exchange feedback on how she is doing academically and pastorally.
Both of my children are happy to go to school, participate in a range of onsite after-school clubs or attend after-school provisions to suit families with two working parents.
In essence, they are thriving in smaller classes and personalised learning. The teachers have autonomy to teach in the way that suits the needs of their classes and have capacity to be responsive to issues that arise.
I first heard about Labour’s plan to introduce the 20% VAT on independent school fees last year. I immediately felt concerned about the imposition of this tax on private education, so my husband and I opted not to give our vote to Labour in the General Election as a direct result of this policy.
I believe it is reverse discrimination because the Government seems intent on completely ignoring our concerns and is very deliberately demonstrating a biassed view of the role of independent schools and the families that use them.
The thing is, my children’s school is a small local independent prep school with tight budgets and does not have an endowment fund or large cash reserves to fall back on. There are no sporting facilities or flashy buildings.
In fact, our school fees increased by 7% last year and a further 7.5% this year. Another 20% on top of yearly increases will be unsustainable for many middle-class families, and have a detrimental impact on children in assisted places.
Our school has already told parents that it cannot ‘absorb’ the VAT and will likely pass on all 20% of it to parents, some of whom are professionals already making significant sacrifices to pay the school fees.
This is certainly true for our family too.
If we were not paying school fees, we would have bought a much bigger house in a top state school catchment area and taken several luxury holidays per year. I would have left the NHS much earlier than I did and would have become a stay-at-home mother, thereby reducing our taxable income.
At the end of the day, we will do what is needed to keep our children in their current school where they are happy and thriving. So I will transition from part-time to full-time work, which will mean I have less time available to support my daughter with her learning needs.
Thankfully, we are in a relatively fortunate position for now – we can afford to keep our children in their school, but both my husband and I have discussions about moving to Canada in the future if our attempts to better our family’s quality of life are no longer achievable in the UK.
There is no question that state schools need support for children to thrive. But so do children in independent schools, who also have an equal right to an education that allows them to reach their full potential.
This type of reverse discrimination from Labour on this issue is disgraceful.
Many schools like my children’s one will become collateral damage in the quest to tax education at 20%. But apparently that is OK, as they are only the 7%, according to Rachel Reeves.
What a sad society we have become if compassion for children’s education and mental health is only reserved for a select percentage of the UK population.
This article was originally published October 10, 2024
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