32 Britain The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019
1B
oth thefirst prime minister (Robert
Walpole) and the current one (Boris
Johnson) were educated at Eton College. So
were 18 others in between. Annual fees are
£42,501 ($52,508), which cushion an en-
dowment of £436m. One in five pupils is
the son of an Old Etonian. Around one in
four will go to Oxford or Cambridge.
Founded in 1440, the school has three the-
atres and three museums, as well as a row-
ing centre. When a campaign within the La-
bour Party to shut down private schools
came to choose a slogan, there was an obvi-
ous choice: “Abolish Eton”.
On September 22nd Labour Party con-
ference attendees united around the rally-
ing cry, passing a motion proposed by the
campaign. It commits the party to three
policies. First, it will withdraw charitable
status and other tax privileges from private
schools. Second, it will ensure that univer-
sities admit the same proportion of priv-
ate-school pupils as exists in the wider
population. Third, private-school assets
will be “redistributed democratically and
fairly across the country’s educational in-
stitutions”. Sol Gamsu, a sociologist at Dur-
ham University and an activist behind the
campaign, hopes that a Labour govern-
ment would enact the policies in sequence
over two to three years.
Private schools may be unusually vul-
nerable now. At a time of political crisis,
“the fact that those responsible were edu-
cated at Eton is a great help for us,” says MrGamsu. Long beyond the reach of most, in
recent years private schools have become
still more of a luxury. According to Lloyds
Private Banking, the average annual fee for
day pupils last year was £14,289, up from
£9,579 a decade earlier, an increase 19%
above inflation. Less than 7% of children in
England attend a private school, although a
slightly higher proportion do at some point
in their education. Research suggests the
fees buy only a small boost to exam results:
an upper estimate, which controls for
things like family income, is 0.6 of a grade
at gcse, the exams sat at 16. But there is
some evidence that they have a bigger im-
pact on outcomes in the job market. Old-
boy networks help (see next story).
The campaign was supported by senior
figures in the party, including John Mc-
Donnell, the shadow chancellor, Angela
Rayner, the shadow education secretary,
and Ed Miliband, a former leader. The La-
bour manifesto in 2017 had already com-
mitted to charging vat on fees, which
would raise them by up to a fifth. That idea
has fairly wide backing. Michael Gove, a
Conservative cabinet minister, has com-
plained that the current system “allows the
wealthiest in this country...to buy a pres-
tige service that secures their children a
permanent positional edge in society at an
effective 20% discount.” The motion also
commits Labour to making schools pay
business rates.
To make these tax changes, Labour
would have to strip private schools of their
charitable status, which more than half
currently enjoy. Doing so would require
primary legislation, and could get messy,
since the government would want to find a
way to exempt those that provide specialist
education, such as to disabled children.
Barnaby Lenon, chairman of the Indepen-
dent Schools Council, notes that even if the
tax plans went ahead they would amount
to a survivable inconvenience to the bigger,
better-known schools, including Eton.
Still, the number of private-school pupils
would fall, and some schools, mostly pre-
paratory ones (which take pupils until age
13), would probably go under.
This would nevertheless be a long way
short of the schools’ abolition. Ms Rayner
said she would set up a review into how to
integrate private schools into the state sys-
tem, but stopped short of explicitly back-
ing the other two proposals—university
quotas and redistribution of schools’ as-sets—required by the conference motion.
Universities would be furious about the
imposition of limits on the number of priv-
ate-school pupils they could recruit, and
might find ways to get around it, including
rejecting state funding. The wording of the
motion is sufficiently vague that some La-
bour policy types think Ms Rayner could
get away with pushing universities to make
more use of “contextual admissions” (ie,
requiring lower entry grades of children
from state schools).
Then there is the nuclear option. Na-
tionalising private schools would be ex-
pensive, both in purchasing the schools’
assets and in educating 600,000 or so extra
pupils. The Headmasters’ and Headmis-
tresses’ Conference, a group of elite private
schools, has vowed to fight in court any at-
tempt to do so, with the sector arguing that
nationalisation would contravene the
European Convention on Human Rights,
which guarantees a parent’s right to choose
their child’s education.
Nor is it clear this is a fight the party’s
leadership wants to have. Despite his sup-
port for the campaign, in a private meeting
Mr McDonnell opposed plans to national-
ise private schools, and a number of unions
are worried by the proposal. A poll by You-
Gov found that the public opposed aboli-
tion by two to one. So a less radical ap-
proach may emerge when Labour’s
manifesto for the next election is drawn
up. But, as the schools are aware, Labour
would not need to nationalise them to
make their life a lot more difficult. 7BRIGHTON
The Labour Party says it will scrap private schools. Is it up for the fight?Abolishing EtonA row going on down near Slough
Suited and looted?I
n a boardroom 23 years ago, Gareth
Lloyd-Jones was feeling the heat. After
nearly 100 meetings around the City, he
was no closer to floating his company on
the stock exchange. Then, from among the
steely faces, a young man stood up and an-
nounced that he would invest. “When you
were at Rugby you were a great runner, and
anyone who has that level of fitness I’m go-
ing to gamble on,” he declared. Mr Lloyd-
Jones was taken aback. “I didn’t even know
who he was,” he admits. “But I thought,
‘Well, this is interesting.’”
Today, as president of the Rugbeian
Society, he is overseeing a technological
upgrade aimed at making such connec-
tions less coincidental. In July the club
launched an app that allows alumni to seek
everything from interns to fellow wine-en-Public schools turn to the internet to
give alumni a leg-upAlumni clubsThe new old-boy
networks