Schrodiger's Schools

The Telegraph wants you to believe Labour’s VAT policy has unleashed some sort of educational Ragnarok, as if gentle little prep schools were happily skipping through sunlit meadows until Rachel Reeves came over the hill with a flamethrower. The numbers tell a very different story.

Private-school closures have been happening for over a decade, at a steady rate of roughly 70 to 80 a year. Not occasionally, not as an aberration, but every single year since 2013. That was under the Conservatives, when VAT wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as school fees. If the sector is now pretending that closures only began when Labour arrived, it’s either wilful amnesia or outright dishonesty.

Look at the data. Between 2013 and 2023, around 847 independent schools closed. That’s an industry quietly shedding four per cent of itself annually while nobody in the Tory press batted an eyelid. Why? Because it didn’t suit the narrative. Those closures were blamed on demographics, birth-rates, Brexit, staffing shortages, rising energy costs, pension contributions, insurance hikes, and fee inflation pricing out the middle classes. In other words, real-world pressures.

Then Labour announces VAT on fees and suddenly every prep school with a dodgy balance sheet and a leaking roof is reborn as a heroic martyr of socialism. The Telegraph can barely contain itself, breathlessly reporting each closure as if Reeves had personally padlocked the gates.

The problem for the story is the data. The first year with VAT in place doesn’t show a spike at all. If anything, closures so far sit below the long-run average. Even Schools Week, which has no dog in the fight, has noted that only a handful of schools can credibly blame VAT as the primary cause. The rest were struggling long before the policy was announced. Many had already filed their notices. Some had lost pupils for years. A good number were simply too small to survive demographic change.

It’s the classic trick: take an existing trend, ignore a decade of evidence, blame Labour, shout “raid”, and hope the readership doesn’t look up the numbers.

If you want a genuine scandal, it isn’t that small private schools with fragile finances have finally tipped over. It’s that the state sector has been hollowed out for fourteen years while the same newspapers defended every tax break, privilege and loophole for the wealthiest. They now cry crocodile tears for schools with 60 pupils while never once acknowledging the thousands of state schools that have been fighting overcrowding, crumbling buildings and real-terms budget cuts.

Labour’s VAT change didn’t cause a crisis in the private sector. It merely exposed one.

And the real irony? The money raised will be used to stabilise the state schools that educate 93 per cent of Britain’s children. If that offends the Telegraph, it says far more about them than it does about Rachel Reeves.