In Australia, where I live these days, around 1/3 of children go to fee-paying schools. Many Australian families are able to afford these fees, because they are subsidised by the government. In short, the government takes the view that if these schools did not exist, then the government schools would have the burden of educating these children, and so it is only fair to contribute to their costs. There is a pretty broad consensus, I think, that these independent schools do a pretty good job, and generally speaking do a better job than the state schools.
In the UK, in contrast, only around 1/10 of children go to fee-paying schools. School fees are much more expensive, and few people can afford to pay them out of their taxed income. It is not particularly contentious to note that there is, on the whole, yawning gulf in the UK between the standards of the independent schools and of the state schools.
A sensible move in the UK would be to follow Australia’s lead providing government funding for private schools on the basis that the more children who go to private schools, the less the demand on the state schools. A really sensible move would be to couple this with scholarships, so that the most able children from every background have the opportunity for their exceptional talents to be recognised and nurtured. Instead of that, the new Labour government is proposing to impose a 20% tax on independent school fees. There are three inevitable consequences of this disastrous policy:
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