To: Education Minister and Shadow Education Minister
Private and State: Make Education Spending Fair
Make it education policy that, within 20 years, every child will have the same amount of money spent on their education, by capping what private schools can charge and increasing the amount we spend on state education so that all children have the same chances. I would start with a target of £9000 per year.
Why is this important?
It is utterly immoral that one child can have more spent on their education in one year (£24000 at the most expensive public schools for non-boarding pupils) than is spent on another child for the whole of their secondary education (it can be as little as £4000 a year).
I went to one of those expensive schools (albeit back in the 1970s) and have worked all my professional life in the state system. The unfairness of a society in which one school can barely fix a roof while another is busy putting in a second theatre or an olympic swimming pool. Why on earth do we tolerate it?
It doesn't have to be this way. Finland, one of the top performing education systems in the world, has no private schools at all. For many successful systems private schooling is very unusual. We may not be able to shut private schools, but who could resist the moral case for a system where all children had the same money spent on them, to give them all the same start in life?
