On the day 19 years ago when I accepted a job offer from the Daily Mail – which meant a hefty increase in my salary – I took the youngest of our four sons aside and told him that I could at last afford to remove him from our local state school and send him to Dulwich College, the illustrious public school where we had sent two of his older brothers.
In robust language, he let me know that nothing on earth would induce him to move from the state sector to a single-sex private school stuffed with filthy rich, arrogant, posh twits (in fact the noun he used had an ‘a’ in it, in place of my more printable ‘i’).
Actually, he could hardly have been more wrong about Dulwich – alma mater of Nigel Farage – few of whose pupils were at all posh by the standards of other great private schools.
Then, as now, they tended to be the sons of aspirational small businessmen, dentists, teachers, bank clerks, civil servants, corner-shop owners and the like.
Indeed, when our two oldest were there, I counted several dozen boys on the school roll who bore the surname Patel – hardly a name that reeks of landed wealth – with not a Cholmondeley-Cavendish-Grosvenor in sight.
Many or even most of these boys’ parents had to make great sacrifices to scrape together the money for the fees, even though these have always been comparatively modest at Dulwich, thanks to subsidies from the estate of the Elizabethan actor and impresario, Edward Alleyn (1566-1626).
In our case, we managed it for our oldest two by constantly increasing our mortgage, while Mrs U took a job driving double-decker buses around London for two-and-a-half years when the money ran out.
She often had to get up at four in the morning to start work, poor woman, arriving home exhausted in the evening.(She handed in her notice on that happy day when I accepted the Mail’s offer – and our youngest declined mine to send him to Dulwich.)
But then our youngest’s prejudice against private schools and their pupils was and is far from unusual.
For the fact is that Britain’s class system – fast decaying, but still surviving – has bred a great deal of ill-feeling over the years.
The worst sort of dimwit Hooray Henry still looks down on people who went to state schools, while there are a great many state-educated pupils, like our youngest, who look upon the products of the private system with contempt.
Indeed, class hatred and resentment are among the few forms of bigotry that have yet to be banned by law (but I mustn’t go putting ideas into the minds of the thought police).
If my guess is right, Sir Keir Starmer’s aim in launching his 20 per cent VAT raid on private school fees was chiefly to make political capital out of those feelings, since the politics of envy have always played well with a certain section of Labour’s core voters.
But of course he didn’t put it like that in his party’s election manifesto last year.
Oh, no, the point of the raid was not to kick the aspirant middle classes in the teeth.
Far from it. The purpose of making Britain one of the very few countries in the developed world to slap a tax on education was purely to benefit … education!
The money raised by imposing the new taxes, said this utterly discredited document, would be spent on 6,500 new expert teachers, increased teacher and headteacher training, delivering work experience and careers advice for all young people, early language development in primary schools, Ofsted reform, over 3,000 new nurseries, mental health support for every school and Young Futures Hubs (whatever they may be).
True, admits the Government’s website, the consequent increase in fees may mean a few pupils will have to move from private schools into the state sector.
But, it says, there will be no more than 35,000 of them – or 0.5 per cent of the pupil population – for whom there will be plenty of room at the local state primary or comprehensive.
How’s it all going, so far?
Well, only seven months since the VAT raid came in, and three months since the removal of schools’ charitable business rate relief, more than 30 independent institutions have already announced closures or proposed closures, displacing at least 3,350 pupils … and counting.
All have cited the pressures of the new taxes as the principal reason for their decision. Of course, some of those 3,350 children so far displaced may move to other private schools.
But to give some idea of the impact on the Treasury, the Guido Fawkes website calculates that if all were to move to the state sector, where it costs councils an average of £8,210 a year to educate a child, the total bill to the taxpayer would be £26.5 million.
In one case alone, it emerged this week, state schools in Kent received almost 100 inquiries from parents in the 48 hours after Bishop Challoner School was forced to shut its doors, after it lost more than a third of its pupils to the tax raid.
Indeed, it’s become ever harder to argue with Neil O’Brien, the Shadow Education minister, when he says the likely costs to state education make a nonsense of Labour’s claim that the raid would bring in up to £1.7 billion a year.
‘The number of children being forced to move schools and away from their friends is much larger than Labour predicted,’ he said, ‘wiping out the supposed tax revenues.
‘The Chancellor said every penny would go on state schools. The Prime Minister said he’d spend the money on housing instead. And given that the number of teachers in state schools is down under Labour, we can see it was all just a pack of lies.’
I can say two things with certainty. One is that if this tax raid had been brought in when I was a reporter on a modest income, and Mrs U was a London bus-driver, there would have been absolutely no way we could have kept our two oldest boys at one of the best schools in the land.
The other is that, yes, Dulwich College and other great private schools in the premier league for academia, sports and the arts are likely to survive.
But their character is sure to change.
With fees that will inevitably rise beyond the reach of the aspirant just-about-managing – and less cash available for scholarships for bright, poorer pupils like our boys – they will increasingly become the exclusive preserve of the seriously rich.
Indeed, the day may be approaching when our youngest son’s prejudice against private schools and their pupils may contain more than an element of truth.
