With Labour voting for their abolition, are we finally seeing a shift in public mood against the institutions at the heart of our unjust society?
“Private schools help hoard wealth, power and opportunity for the few.” This comment by an anonymous Labour party source a few weeks ago states the problem in a nutshell. Private schools are out of reach (average fees nearly £18,000 a year) for the great majority of people; their spend per pupil is at least three times more than that of state schools – a grotesque resources gap; and they constitute a highly effective service industry, which not only almost guarantees places at top universities but also provides a network of invaluable connections – together a passport to life’s glittering prizes, with two old Etonian PMs in the last three years the most visible symbol. They are indeed enablers of wealth hoarding, of power hoarding, of opportunity hoarding. They are, in short, an affront to any notion of a just or inclusive society.
Such was the case put forward in our book Engines of Privilege, published in February, a work in many ways born out of long years of frustration at the prevailing political inertness on the issue. We had no expectation that seven months later the Labour party would vote at its conference to integrate the private sector into the state sector. In criticising Labour’s position, the headmaster of Eton, Simon Henderson, this week acknowledged the public mood was shifting on the question, and that a battle lay ahead for the future of private education.
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