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By Juliet Jacques

In 1992, my parents entered me for the ten-plus entrance exam for our local private school, Reigate Grammar. I passed and was old enough to be aware of considerable resentment towards me at my state school for doing so, but not class conscious enough to understand why, and especially not why certain teachers had an issue with their colleagues giving extra tuition to the few of us who sat the test. I didn’t care; I understood enough to know that I had a golden ticket.

Reigate Grammar was a new world. I had walked to my middle school, Sangers, in Horley; now, I had to get a coach to a different town, laid on by my new institution. I had worn a red jumper over an open-necked shirt to Sangers; now, I had a blazer with an insignia (a castle with “RGS” underneath it) with a navy-blue and white tie.

The grounds were huge, linking to a church where we had assemblies every Friday; the sports facilities were at a separate location, which meant another bus for PE lessons. (To my horror, we played rugby union rather than football, and several teachers sneered at my favourite sport.) There were various extracurricular activities, which were either mandatory or encouraged: a weekly debating society and annual speech competitions; keeping a journal of what we read in our spare time; giving readings (of our choice) at house assemblies; doing a sponsored activity for charity once a year; and doing the Duke of Edinburgh Award or joining the cadets.

I tried and hated most of these, preferring to focus on the core curriculum. I was poor at maths and not great at science, but good at history, French and English, and best at art, making me a fine but not outstanding student. This – combined, I suspected, with my reluctance, if not refusal, to play rugby – meant I was not offered a bursary when, during my second year at Reigate Grammar, my parents realised they couldn’t afford the fees. I had to leave and moved to Oakwood, the only comprehensive in Horley, at year 8 (aged 12), rejoining the children I’d known at Sangers, having to explain that I had dropped out of the school for smart rich kids because my family didn’t have the money.

I gradually realised that while Reigate Grammar had been preparing its pupils for public life, the comprehensive was simply trying to get us through our GCSEs, struggling to get its pass rate closer to 50%. We took 8 at Oakwood rather than the Grammar’s 13; I dropped my favourite subjects, art, drama and music, because people around me – my parents and other pupils – kept telling me I should take exams that would help me to “get a proper job”. We had use of a new sports centre, open to the public outside school hours, but otherwise, the facilities had clearly received far less investment than they had where I had just left. The starkest illustration of the gulf came in a history class in year 8, when we were given a worksheet to complete. I thought we’d done it before, but our teacher, annoyed, insisted we hadn’t. I realised I had, two years earlier, and that from here, we were only going to fall further behind those who could pay for their education.

These experiences, more than any others, were what made me a lifelong socialist, and 20 years after I began at Oakwood, a critical supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. I was especially intrigued by its party-conference vote in September 2019 to remove the charitable status of private schools, which gives them at least 80% relief on business rates. Eton, for example, was originally founded by Henry VI to provide for “70 poor boys ... to be housed and educated free of charge” (according to its website) and has since educated 20 of the 57 British prime ministers since 1721, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson. It saves more than £500,000 a year through this tax loophole, which the @AbolishEton campaign, started on Twitter in 2019 and supported by Labour MPs Ian Lavery, Clive Lewis and Ed Miliband, was keen to close. That year, then-shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, said that the party wanted to redistribute private schools’ endowments, investments and properties to the state sector, limit universities to admitting the same proportion of private-school students as in the wider population (around 7%) and set up a social- justice commission to integrate private schools into the state system. The intention to close the tax loopholes, charge VAT on private-school fees and establish the commission made it into the 2019 manifesto – which I thought was a solid basis for a rebalancing of British society along more equitable lines.

The media monstered the private-schools proposal, along with everything else we hoped to do, and the 2019 election was a disaster. Corbyn resigned and Sir Keir Starmer KC, the Old Reigatian and former Director of Public Prosecutions, lied his way to the Labour leadership by promising to retain key aspects of the policy programme, inevitably dropping them once elected. I was surprised, then, when Starmer announced his plan to retain Corbyn’s private-school taxation policy (while insisting that he did not want to abolish independent schools), and less so when I saw fierce attacks on his position on the cover of the Daily Mail. I would be most shocked if this proposal makes it into Labour’s next manifesto, given how spineless the current leadership has proved whenever criticised by the right-wing media, and even more so if they actually follow through with it in power. But it does (just about) keep the question open: what would it mean for the United Kingdom to get rid of selective education, as Labour’s education secretary Anthony Crosland hoped to do in the 1960s with the introduction of comprehensive schools?

The more realistic such a proposal became, the more hostility it – and those trying to enact it – would likely encounter in the media. Professor of social mobility Lee Elliot Major, writing for Prospect about the class composition of the media industry in June 2022, cited the percentage of privately educated journalists as 54% – not surprising in an industry that often requires a lot of unpaid work (including internships) to access, and in which reputations are frequently made through regular freelance gigs that are secured through personal contacts rather than formal interview processes. This goes some way towards explaining why British journalists tend to side against anyone who tries to tackle the country’s serious and growing inequalities – witness the monstering of RMT leader Mick Lynch in the Sun and the Mail, and Jeremy Corbyn across the board – and particularly why they are so defensive of our school system, being ready to turn on Corbyn’s establishment-approved replacement as Labour leader when even a significantly watered-down lessening of its privileges is proposed. But the consensus on the Labour Right (which was Crosland’s faction) has always been that selective schooling should be discouraged. In a typical compromise, the Blair government banned the establishment of new grammar schools in 1998. Theresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all pledged to overturn this when campaigning for the Conservative leadership, although May did not, and Sunak (whose alma mater, Winchester, currently charges £33,990 a year for day students) supports the expansion of existing grammars but not the opening of new ones. 

Abolishing private and selective schools might put us on course, eventually, towards a society in which there is not a political class who tell themselves – and, more importantly, everyone else – that they deserve to be in charge, having been bred for it at a young age. It might also help to create a media that better represents its society, and more rigorously holds that political class to account. In the long term, it would be a crucial act – along with abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords – towards creating a more equal society. It could only be an effective measure if taken as part of an effort to reduce inequality through progressive taxation that would help pay for better facilities, equal access to standardised extracurricular activities, and highest quality teaching (with the same type of qualifications offered universally, as GCSEs currently are) to disincentivise wealthier parents from using private tuition.

Gargoyles of Fettes College chapel, by architect David Bryce. Fettes College, built between 1864 and 1870, is where James Bond was educated, and where he – according to 1964’s You Only Live Twice – “founded the first serious judo class at a British public school”.

This would mean moving away from a key plank of neoliberalism – the advocacy of “choice” as a justification for allowing the market to run riot with privatised services while the state runs anything it still has to own into the ground. Among other things, this has given us: water courses pumped full of sewage; skyrocketing energy bills to heat unaffordable (and often poor-quality) homes rented out by buy-to-let landlords; four-figure university tuition fees that reproduce the schooling inequality at the higher-education level, with staff constantly on strike over casualisation, high workloads and low pay; and a railway network run by a dizzying array of different companies (including other countries’ nationalised rail operators) whose lack of direct competition allows them all to make a huge profit from exor bitant fares, which can only occasionally be circumvented by a bafflingly complicated advanced booking system, which had it been invented in Ceaușescu’s Romania would still be the object of derision. The Education Act passed by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1980 created the “assisted-places” scheme that gave public money to pay for a limited number of children to go to private schools, and removed local education authorities’ obligation to provide school meals and milk. Thatcher’s Education Reform Act 1988 legislated for parental choice over which schools their children could attend, instead of automatically being assigned to their local school, feeding into the creation of a ranked system rather than one that prioritised the proper funding and provision of services for all.

Critics of the plan to get rid of private and selective schools say that people will not want this choice taken away now that they have it, and this is a compelling point – but not one, in my opinion, to match the argument that the existing system is fundamentally unfair. A world in which all pupils have access to the standards and facilities currently only available to those who can pay would be one in which all children might realise their creative potential, and study more widely (without feeling they have to drop subjects such as art, music or drama because they are not “economically useful”) until the age of 16 at least, providing a more rounded education and keeping their future options open for longer. It would allow schools to become more rooted in their local communities, with a far wider cross-class (and, likely, multi-racial) set of pupils than the average state or private school. This would ultimately produce a more meritocratic and ultimately democratic society, in which no class of people felt that its members were being bred above all others for government or other influential positions in media, law, finance and elsewhere. Imagine how our last decade might have looked had we not been ruled by privileged “public” schoolchildren, many of whom were taken out of their families for eight months of every year and raised in an environment in which personal advancement and career fulfilment were prized above principles of collaboration or solidarity, making connections – to people and to institutions – long before puberty that would determine not just their university experiences and adult careers, but the nature of the society they govern. And imagine how much better our culture might be if it were not dominated by entitled rich kids with a vested interest in not criticising existing social relations...

“Choice” would be less of an issue if no school suffered from underinvestment, good meals were provided, and teachers everywhere were given standardised training; the exchange would likely be worthwhile. This would mean raising income taxes to pay for the 7% of pupils reintegrated into the state school system, and raising those schools’ standards after years of austerity and decades of under-funding, which I feel is preferable to the compromise of revoking private schools’ charitable status and adding VAT to their fees. Changing public opinion on this – and many of the other injustices and inequalities in British society – will not be easy with the media-political establishment that we have, as we have seen in recent years. Talking about this subject, a friend with a young child mentioned the folk wisdom that there is no conservatising force like having children – which I don’t – and certainly, there are people who oppose entrenched systems of privilege in theory but in practice, send their children to private schools for fear of them missing out on opportunities later in life. Nobody should have to feel the fear that I felt as soon as my parents told me I would be leaving Reigate Grammar: we should be arguing that the abolition of private schooling is not an issue of economics but of social justice. We cannot create a more equitable society when such disparities are built into the system and so the children who are educated by it. ◉