BY JOE NUTT
About a month before Keir Starmer’s now self-evidently delinquent version of the Labour Party secured the mother of all Pyrrhic victories in the general election, I published an essay in The Critic explaining how they would immediately dedicate their energy to attacking private schooling, just as Blair had done with fox hunting. I predicted that they would face a legal challenge rooted in international human rights legislation. I didn’t expect that to happen only three months later, but it has. In fact they are facing at least two.
What genuinely surprised me however, is just how much I underestimated the incompetence that lay behind this anti-educational, flagship policy. An educational policy doesn’t result in good schools closing down, good teachers and other school employees losing their jobs, and children having their educational and social lives disrupted to such an extent, it damages their future prospects academically and possibly in adult life, before it is even implemented. But that is what has also already happened. Labour do not have an educational policy, they have an anti-educational policy.
I also didn’t predict that Northern Ireland, Scotland and even France would express dismay at this attempt to single out private schooling for punitive VAT taxation, but they all have. That they have done so is not just revealing but absolutely damning.
Bridget Phillipson, the woman appointed by Keir Starmer to run all things educational in the UK, joined the Labour Party aged fifteen. That alone should ring alarm bells for any parent who has successfully nurtured their own children through adolescence, safely into genuinely independent adulthood, because successful parenting isn’t about cloning anything so dismally trite, as one’s personal party politics. She then went from Oxford, where she chaired the University Labour Club, straight into a ‘job’ at her mother’s charity. A role as a ‘refuge manager’ which, given that she was first elected as an MP aged 26, we can only assume she held for a couple of years after university. That suggests she has never, in her entire adult life, applied for, and been selected for what most people would recognise as a job, never mind faced the fierce competition in the labour market many of us have. Quite the place from which to pontificate vociferously about changing “all” children’s lives, as she is so fond of doing on social media.
That Keir Starmer believed nonetheless she possessed sufficient knowledge or credible experience to run one of the most important roles in government, is an example of a dictum genuinely experienced educational professionals will recognise all too well. Weak leaders always appoint even weaker lieutenants.
It is unthinkable that someone so clearly poorly qualified for a role would not seek policy advice from credible professionals before designing policy. If that had been done, then Labour would have had a much more accurate grasp of the likely effects of their intention to force private British schools, uniquely in the entire educational world, to pay 20% VAT for their services.
The question anyone who thought of themselves as a serious educational journalist should have been clamouring for an answer to was, who gave her advice? Because whoever it was, they designed policy for a fantasy schools landscape entirely made up of super rich institutions, providing a service for super rich parents, that simply doesn’t exist. Except of course in the minds of the pathologically spiteful and envious.
The real schools landscape in the UK is extraordinarily more complex and varied. It is in reality skewed very much towards small, locally supported schools, often with a focus on religious faith or special educational needs. Hence the objections from Northern Ireland’s Education Minister where the proposed changes would impact, for example, a dozen grammar schools which have prep departments for younger children and boarders. French ‘private’ schools in the UK that are part funded by the French government, have also voiced their objections. Any credible, genuinely experienced educational adviser would have been able to explain what the UK schools landscape really looked like to an inexperienced minister. The crucial question which needed answering as a matter of urgency was, who, precisely did she take advice from because such glaring professional incompetence would see you fired in the real world?
However, I’ve seen enough of the UK’s educational media over many years to know that no one there would do the work necessary because cosy sycophancy is their default when it comes to the Labour Party. Quite something when you’ve also witnessed first-hand the sheer excitement they exhibit from what they call scalp hunting; their deliberate, concerted and frequently successful efforts to dethrone standing Tory Education Ministers.
That opinion was vindicated yesterday when the online news outlet Guido Fawkes revealed that the sole author of the report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies into private schools, Luke Sibieta, has been close friends for years with the Labour minister responsible for its implementation, Matthew Pennycook. Penycook was Sibieta’s best man at his wedding. Philipson has cited and relied on this weak and widely criticised report repeatedly.
But this story now has sweeping consequences way beyond Phillipson, who should self-evidently resign. It signals the end of Starmer’s government and for one, hugely significant and irreversible reason which most voters won’t appreciate.
All governments rely totally on businesses to deliver the multi-million pound contracts they formulate as a result of policy. The professionals working for those businesses are professionally trained to follow strict rules about honesty and fairness that government itself insists are followed, to avoid fraud and corruption. The Labour Party has, by its commissioning and use of the IFS report, made it crystal clear to all those professionals, what it thinks of those rules.
One other thing I got wrong about Phillipson was failing to predict that the first major announcement she would make was to trash the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act. In my defence all I would offer is that any Minister of Education who is not committed to free speech is clearly a minister of something else entirely, because if education isn’t fundamentally about nurturing freedom of thought and therefore speech, what on earth is it? This too, is now facing a legal challenge.
I’m far from the only one to be drawing attention to this government’s striking predilection for incompetence. But in the case of education and specifically schooling, urgency is a matter of duty. Children in school don’t get many second chances. Unlike Bridget Phillipson, most children don’t have parents able to offer them a job. We need to know precisely who else, besides the economic alchemist at the IFS, Sibieta, who claimed this policy could raise £1.6 billion, advised Phillipson, because education policy design doesn’t magically float off any economist’s spreadsheet, as Guido Fawkes’ own research has shown. But above all, Phillipson needs to go now, before she does even more damage to our precious, and world famous schools landscape.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and a collection of essays, The Point of Poetry. His latest book, Teaching English for the Real World was published by John Catt in May 2020.