Bridget Phillipson's class warfare hat-trick
Three errors in four words....that tell us everything about Labour's education policy.
It’s a bit childish, and I’m probably picking on some 22 year-old Labour Party copy-writing intern who wants to be the next Michael Foot. But I’m also picking on “Education for Everyone” which seems to be Bridget Phillipson’s mantra. You’re going to hear a lot of it over the next few months.
There’s a few serious points underlying my mirth.
It’s logically illiterate. “Excellence for everyone” is the blankest of contradictions. To excel is “to surpass others or be superior”. You can call for high standards, you can level-up, you can level-down….but we can’t all excel., nor can all schools excel. If you want equality, don’t talk about excellence.
It’s economically illiterate. They say they are going to fix the problems of some families at under-performing schools by spending money here, there and everywhere, which they think they’re going to raise by singling out parents paying for boo-hiss private schools, including many families earning much less than Bridget and banker hubby.
Where we could excel is as a country, by international standards. Perhaps we shouldn’t start by harming and risking the closure of some of our best and most globally-competitive schools, and making those that remain even less accessible? Perhaps excelling as a country isn’t best achieved by setting us against each other?
It’s literally illiterate of course, “Education Must For Everyone” (sic) completing the hat-trick in just one four-word clause.
Economically illiterate
If Phillipson was any good and if she actually cared about education rather than class warfare, she’d wield Occam’s Razor:
If spending £1.6bn is so important, surely you wouldn’t tax a strongly positive externality with a state-obliged supplier? Any A-level economist knows you would:
take the much less risky, less complicated, less harmful, approach of paying out of general taxation, so that affluent families tending to benefit from high-performing
freetaxpayer-funded schools and affording tutors and music lessons contribute as well. In that context it’s a trivial tax increase…nobody would even notice. Better for revenue, and fairer in every sense.or tax something with inelastic demand and a negative externality, such as booze. The UK raises £13bn on alcohol duty and seemingly £4bn on alcohol VAT so that’s a 9 per cent increase.
If improving schools is the objective, surely you’d look and see what works elsewhere?
Wouldn’t you, for example, go and see Katharine Birbalsingh whose Michaela Community School is a top performer at GCSE and, based on the Progress 8 “value-added” metric is the best school in the country for two years in a row. If you did you might, of course, walk away thinking it’s not about money, and perhaps has something to do with Birbalsingh’s small-c conservative values. Boo-hiss. Can’t have that.
Or, you might go and visit some of our relatively affordable private schools, such as the Independent Grammar School Durham which charges fees, apparently, of £3,900 a year. Not a typo - per year, not per term. That’s around half of the cost of state schools, and parents seem to like it. According to OFSTED: “Typically, most say that they ‘can’t recommend the school highly enough’. Boo-hiss. Can’t have that either.
I’m going to keep peeling back the layers of Bridget Phillipson’s policy. Look through the bad economics and false promises and all you’re left with is class warfare. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are selling us.