The VAT ‘raid’ on private schools has finally made me proud to have voted Labour

I went to private school with the prime minister’s wife, but the government policy of adding a 20 per cent levy to pupils’ fees – which came into effect today – is the only way to rescue the failing state system, says Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Six months after the government’s historic landslide election victory, its controversial plan to put VAT on private school fees has come into effect.

Following the donorgate scandal and the decision to cut winter fuel payments – one of several unforced policy errors by Labour – it may be one of the last remaining reasons I have to feel proud about having voted for Keir Starmer.

The prime minister was elected after arguing that a 20 per cent levy on the independent sector was needed to salvage our desperately underfunded state education sector. The long-term failure to invest by Conservative-run administrations since 2010 has meant school spending per pupil has fallen in real terms over a decade by almost a tenth. Today, four out of five school leaders say they lack the funding required to simply maintain their schools.

According to his chancellor, “ending the VAT break for private schools would mean an additional £1.7 billion a year that can go towards our state schools, where 94 per cent of this country’s children are educated”.

Not me – I was fortunate to attend a fee-paying school, the same one as the prime minister’s wife. And yet putting VAT on school fees is a policy I wholeheartedly support.

Given the opprobrium that the idea – the “VAT raid” – has received before it came into effect on New Year’s Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a minority view. But, according to a poll commissioned by the Private Education Policy Forum (PEPF) think tank, more than half of the population, some 54 per cent, support the idea of getting rid of the anomalous tax break. Just 22 per cent are against it.

In 1990, Victoria Starmer and I were at a private secondary school in north London at roughly the same time: when I started, I was 11 and she was 16. I can’t say I remember her clearly, but I do have a recollection of Vicky Alexander, as she was then, an older girl with good hair.

Even back then, I couldn’t understand why our school – any school – had charitable status. Its charity number was printed on the back of my school report, which is how I knew about it, and which always struck me as odd. Once the VAT furore blows over, let’s see if Labour can be persuaded to overhaul that, too.

We all know why most parents pay private school fees: going to one confers an unfair advantage. Only 5.9 per cent of children in the UK are privately educated, yet they make up a whopping 65 per cent of those who go on to become High Court judges. You ought not to be allowed to buy that kind of headstart in life, but you can.

Working in the media, I routinely encounter lots of other people who went to private school. According to charity the Sutton Trust, 43 per cent of the UK’s 100 most influential editors and broadcasters were privately educated. The ones I meet always argue that they don’t think their education was any better than the one they would have received at a state school.

Having attended a state primary, a private secondary and then a state sixth form, I’m not so sure: the class sizes were small in my private school, and I learnt Latin and Ancient Greek.  Whatever reservations I might have about my schooling, I knew that my teachers had the bandwidth to invest in me.

The hothouse approach worked for many, but backfired in my case; I have fewer GCSEs than Wayne Rooney. My poor exam results also meant the bursary that gave me discount fees was removed, so I had to join a state sixth form. It changed my life for the better, and made me love learning again.

But all of this is thumpingly trivial when compared to why the money from the private school tax is so desperately needed: the budgets of state schools are perilously stretched as schools have become the largest provider of charitable food, given how many pupils need this resource.

Gordon Brown has written of a primary school in Merseyside where a teacher uses her own money to hand out toilet rolls every Friday to the children in her class. It feels absurd to even point out that this is the true national disgrace.

As a childfree woman, I don’t really have skin in the private schools game. I have every sympathy for those parents who feel compelled to move their children to state schools as a result of the rise in fees, and the upheaval this will cause to their families. While private schools are under no obligation to pass this VAT increase on to their customers, in reality, almost all will.

A Treasury impact assessment last year suggested that parents at the UK’s 2,600 private schools would not be hit with the full cost of the tax hike; rather, they would only end up paying, on average, 10 per cent extra.

However, one newspaper’s analysis of almost a thousand private schools in England, Scotland and Wales now paints a different picture, with the average rise in fees put somewhere around 14 per cent.

Except Adcote School in Shropshire, that is – a notable exception, which will be absorbing the tax rise entirely, running a motorway billboard advert boasting: “VAT? What VAT?”

According to estimates from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, as many as 40,000 pupils could be forced to drop out of private schools as a result of the introduction of VAT. But it seems hard to argue with the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who said: “We need to prioritise investment in our state schools… tax breaks for private schools are a luxury we cannot afford.”

Surely, it is time to concentrate on the 94 per cent of children in state education, rather than the very few outside it?