Labour lacks good ideas for improving Britain’s schools

IN MID-DECEMBERVATVATVATVATVAT Tim Jonas’s daughter said goodbye to friends and teachers at her in Wakefield, in Yorkshire. Mr Jonas, a web developer, says his family can no longer cover the nine-year-old’s fees, now that Britain’s is adding 20% in value-added tax (). None of the 44 state primaries in Wakefield could guarantee her a place, so she is going to one a few miles out of town. Mr Jonas says he feels “fairly positive” about the move, now that it is under way. But he regrets that he has had to pull his daughter out of a school where she was happy and doing well.After two years of bitter debate, Labour’s decision to levy on school fees comes into force on January 1st. For all the heat it has generated, the best bet is that the change will not have as much impact as die-hards on either side of the argument have made out. Yet that ought to worry Labour, which insists that making private education pricier was a good way to spend its first months in charge of Britain’s schools. Half a year after taking office, a party that once prioritised “Education, education, education” seems to be strikingly short of good ideas.Fees at most private schools are going up immediately, though by how much differs quite a lot. Hoity-toity places such as Eton are passing parents the full 20% levy. Some others say they are making efforts to limit fee increases, but that they expect to phase in the full increase over time. -reclaim rules will permit some schools to make savings (when businesses start charging customers they stop paying tax on some of their own expenses). But even then most schools will have to make spending cuts, or draw on savings, if they wish to keep fee increases below 15%.The effect on enrolment will take some years to become apparent. Although some children are moving already, parents generally try to avoid withdrawing them in the middle of an academic year, or when they are working towards big exams. The government’s best guess is that private schools’ rolls will fall by around 6% over the long term, putting about 100 schools out of business (Britain has about 2,600 private schools educating around 600,000 pupils, about 6% of all school-age children). It says this will happen both because children get moved to state schools, and because some parents will choose not to sign up for private education in the first place.For the moment these guesses seem reasonable. In private, headteachers say they are more worried about a diminishing inflow of new pupils than about an exodus of existing ones. The Independent Schools Council, an industry group, says that the number of 11-year-olds entering private secondary schools fell by about 5% last September, according to a survey of some 700 institutions. It thinks that worries about fees were the main reason.Parents whose children attend the very poshest schools will have the least trouble coughing up extra cash. Smaller and humbler institutions seem most likely to shrink. The changes spell particular trouble for children with special educational needs, predicts Tony Perry of Education Not Taxation, a group that opposes the reform. Their parents sometimes stretch their finances to afford private education, having concluded that local state schools cannot provide their children with the help they need.The most important question is whether the reform’s benefits will outweigh its hassles. Labour is probably right that taxing fees is going to raise about £1.5bn annually (even if lots of children flee to state schools, parents are likely to spend a chunk of what they save on stuff that is subject to ). But even if all that money goes to education, it would raise state-school budgets by a meagre 2%.Labour’s still-vague plans for improving state schools do not inspire optimism. It has talked a lot about hiring 6,500 more teachers; last summer it said this would be one of its “first steps” in office. But that is only one teacher for every four schools. And the government has yet to explain how or when this will be fulfilled. England’s schools are short-staffed not because politicians have refused to budget for more people, but because too few want teaching jobs for the pay on offer. Fixing that will probably require raising teachers’ pay far beyond what Labour looks willing to do.When it comes to inspections, the problem is not foot-dragging but acting too rashly. In September it ordered Ofsted, the schools inspector, to stop giving schools overall grades (such as “Excellent” and “Inadequate”). That delighted teachers, who hated the old system; their opposition had only intensified since early 2023, when a headteacher whose school had been downgraded committed suicide after an inspection. Yet they may like the new-style inspections even less. Leaked proposals suggest that Ofsted may soon start handing schools scores in up to ten woolly subcategories. The idea seems to be to paint a “broader picture” of each institution’s strengths and weaknesses. But it will mean only more criteria for teachers to worry about, more bumf for parents to sift through and more work for an inspectorate that has long looked short of cash.Labour’s latest announcements tinker with freedoms enjoyed by schools with “academy” status (some 80% of secondaries and more than 40% of primaries). The previous government handed these schools more autonomy, in the hope this would push up results. But draft laws published on December 17th would hand politicians more control over their lessons, and stop them from hiring staff without teaching qualifications (or not in training). Talk of requiring academies to respect centralised pay scales provoked particular confusion: Labour had to clarify that schools which pay above average were not being asked to cut teachers’ salaries. How any of this is going to benefit children has not yet been well explained.“Everyone is scratching their heads,” says Tom Richmond, a policy analyst who has worked in the Department for Education. “We’re seeing lots of announcements—but what we’ve not had yet is a plan.” For good or ill, reforms by Britain’s previous (Conservative) government were driven by a strong “vision” of what high-performing classrooms look like, notes another analyst (who prefers to go unnamed for fear of making enemies in the new administration). “What is Labour’s ‘dream school’?…I don’t actually know.”For people worried that Labour would rip up reforms of the past 15 years, drift at the Department for Education is tolerable. England’s school system has been rising up international league tables. Big changes would exhaust teachers at a time when hanging on to them is hard enough. Labour’s base includes plenty of ideologues who would dismantle standards and water down discipline, given half a chance. To its credit, the government seems to have mostly resisted their worst ideas.Yet threats to British brainpower are mounting. Around a quarter of secondary-school pupils are “persistently” absent, twice as many as before the pandemic, and the share who are missing more than half the time is going up. Services for children with special educational needs are in crisis; the rising costs of providing them threaten to bankrupt local councils. The fight over private schools has distracted pundits and policymakers from more important matters. Time to get back to class.