Brian Monteith: A real chip off the old-style Labour block

INSTEAD of stripping schools of charitable status, Neil Findlay should consider giving it to state schools, writes Brian Monteith

Private schools give far more to the state than they take from it.

What is it about Labour politicians that makes so many of them chippy? Why, if people are providing a public service, helping others less fortunate, do they want to put obstructions in the way and, most illogically of all, prevent any assistance that goes to the less well-off?

Bigoted? Most certainly. Divisive? Of course. Ignorant? Obviously. Do they care? Apparently not.

There really is no point in being diplomatic towards Labour politicians such as Neil Findlay, the Labour list member for Lothian who wishes to see independent schools lose their charitable status, for the tender and polite enunciations such as those of the Scottish Council for Independent Schools simply fly above such people’s heads.

Clearly, Findlay is not out of step with the way his leader Johann Lamont wishes to take Scottish Labour, for she is content for him to be vice-convener of the Scottish Parliament’s education committee.

I may be wrong, of course: maybe Findlay has been speaking out of turn and Ms Lamont has no axe to grind against Hutcheson’s Grammar or the High School of Glasgow even if Mr Findlay has it in for George Heriot’s and Stewart’s Melville. But just in case, let me explain why being against independent schools, and in particular opposing their retention of charitable status, is bigoted, divisive and ignorant.

It is a myth that independent schools are subsidised by the state because they receive, like most charities, relief on their rates bills (worth less than £4 million a year). In fact, the reverse is true. The independent sector saves the state at least £200m every year, and here is how. The average cost of educating a pupil in Scotland is £7,243 per annum, which means that to educate the 31,000 pupils currently at private schools would require the Scottish Government to find £217m. For Edinburgh alone, it would require £44m and that’s without building at least three large schools to accommodate the pupils.

There would be no additional tax revenue, for the parents of pupils at independent schools already pay their council tax and their other taxes that fund education – before paying their school fees also. As such children do not take up a state school place, their parents’ taxes subsidise the education of other children who go to state schools, like mine did, thank you very much.

Of course, if there were no fee-paying schools then these parents would do one of two things: they would send their children to the state sector and this would increase the cost to local councils; or failing that, they would send the apples of their eyes to private schools elsewhere, possibly in England, or further afield, and the parents would most likely relocate there, too.

There would be no saving to the local authority, but there would be a loss of tax revenue and other economic activity as such high-achieving and aspiring parents left Scotland. There would be no improvement in educational attainment for children being taught in the state sector, for the main difference is not in facilities and resources but in the ethos that schools have from being independent and being able to be themselves. In fact, there would be more state pupils chasing scarcer resources and, if you believe it is resources that matter, then education’s standards could thus be expected to fall.

The answer to the appeal and success of independent schools is not to deny them their charitable status but to spread the benefits of becoming a charity to the state sector.

Allow state schools to set up a trust and become governed by a board of trustees. But most of all let state schools have the discount available on their rates bill and keep the money. If we think charity shops in Stockbridge and Byres Road worthy of a rates discount, why deprive it to our schools? This could encourage a renaissance in community involvement in education as more people would seek to put something back into the schools that gave them their chance in life.

Why will Labour not consider such a revolution? It is not because the party is the most conservative institution in Scotland, although it is certainly worthy of that label, but because it cannot accept the idea of schools being independent of the state, of being nonconformist, of doing their own thing.

If charitable status was stripped, as Neil Findlay so compassionately advocated, independent schools would either go to the wall or become purely commercial and profit-driven with more expensive fees to meet their higher costs. They would probably disburse fewer bursaries and become more elitist in the process. The Neil Findlays of this world would not rest, feeling their job had been done, but would rail against the remaining elitism in a smaller number of schools and seek to have them banned altogether, citing the abhorrent activity of making a profit from relieving children from ignorance.

Such attitudes do not stem from practical or progressive reforms of education, they are simply prejudices against people with the temerity to avoid the strictures of the state education system and all because their money gives them the freedom to do so. It ignores the fact that such parents are paying for the education twice over, that they are subsidising the education of their neighbours’ children or that they have often made great sacrifices to send their children to an independent school.

It is simply bigotry against those who have achieved a modicum of wealth, betrays an ignorance of the facts and a divisiveness that would even countenance making the education of everyone the poorer. I thought Labour had left such Neanderthal politics behind but obviously not. No wonder some people are tempted to succumb to nationalism as the harbinger of change in the idyllic hope that independence would finally kill off Labour.

Such a pity then that it would only come back in a different guise under the benevolence of comrade Sturgeon, but that’s another story for another day. 
• Brian Monteith is policy director of ThinkScotland.org