Fair Taxation of Schools and Education Standards Committee

David Johnston Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. First things first, let me say that I went to the comprehensive school at the end of my road, which had a 21% GCSE pass rate in the years I was there. That was before the inclusion of English and maths, and had they been included, it would probably have been a school with a single-digit pass rate. I do not have any children so I am not sending any children to a private school.

I think we obsess too much about private schools in this country. They provide an excellent standard of education and that appeals to parents in not just this country, but internationally. I think some of these schools do lots to justify their charitable status whereas others do not do enough and should be doing more. I think that our leading professions should not contain a huge proportion of people who are privately educated, given that such schools educate only 7% of the country. But that is as much about those professions as it is about the schools.

So I do not stand here as a great advocate or champion of private schools, but I know that the people who have engaged in this debate have made a strong case that this policy from the Labour party would not save any money to be distributed elsewhere—it might even cost the state more than it is being charged at the moment. Sir Peter Lampl, from the social mobility charity the Sutton Trust, has said that if we want to increase the inequities inherent in the public school system, we could not devise many quicker ways of doing it than this. Many people have commented on the complications it might provide for other areas of education that are also not being charged these taxes.

I also know why the Labour party is doing this. It is doing it because it fires up Labour Members, although it does not fire them up as much as I thought given the empty Benches opposite. They think it is a way of also getting at the Prime Minister, the leader of our party. That is curious, because when we go through the history of the Labour party, we see that only three Labour leaders have won an election in the post-war period and two of them were the products of boarding schools. When we go through the key figures in the Labour party, over and again we find that they were privately educated. I am thinking of people such as Gaitskell and Foot, and the Leader of the Opposition went to a school that became a private school. So although private schools have not played any role in my life, where would the Labour party have been without the alumni of our private schools? Labour would have won even fewer elections.

We talk about this policy, but my main problem with it arises not because I am a great defender of private schools, not because it will not save us that much money, and not because it might make the problem worse or make the Labour party’s electoral history worse. My problem with this policy is that we have waited three years for education policy from the Labour party and this is what it has come up with. If we want to talk about records and 13 years of Conservative government, I will gladly stand by this party’s record on education in those 13 years. I know that the Minister of State, Department for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb) is going to set it out in great detail when he sums up.

If we want to talk about records, let us talk about the Labour party’s record on education in the past three years. The Labour party wants us to forget that everyone elected on that side of the House stood on a manifesto to abolish standard assessment tests, academies and Ofsted, all of which have done a huge amount for disadvantaged children in this country. Labour Members want us to forget that when schools closed and their allies in the National Education Union said that teachers should not teach a full timetable or routinely mark work in this period, the Labour party said nothing about that. It said nothing about that when it produced a 200-point checklist for schools to reopen. Labour Members want us to forget how long it took them to say that schools are safe. Does everybody remember that? Every Front-Bench spokesperson used to say, “Come on, Leader of the Opposition, come on shadow spokespeople, say that schools are safe and that children can go back to them.” It took them so long to do so. We wait three years for policy and this is all that the Labour party can come up with. I did not believe that this was the only policy, so I went to the party’s website, because I thought that other education policies must be on there, but the website is bare. The only thing remotely relating to education is about breakfast clubs in primary schools. I support breakfast clubs in primary schools; the schools I was a governor of had them and they are very effective, but that is not a big enough policy for the whole of our education system. We have undertaken big reforms in this period and we have still face big challenges, some of which are decades old and some of them post covid. We need more than this, so I thought I would look at the Leader of the Opposition’s speech from last week. Both he and the Prime Minister set out what they wanted for the country in their speeches last week. The Prime Minister referred to education 12 times in his speech last week. Tony Blair used to say, “Education, education, education”. I counted up the number of times the Leader of the Opposition said “education” in his speech last week setting out for the country what he wanted to do. Guess how many times it appeared? The answer is: zero; it did not appear once. Not once in a speech telling the country what his priorities are and what he is going to do for the country does the word “education” appear. And zero is precisely what the Labour party has to offer the country on education.