Dear fee-paying parents (if I may),
Forgive me for addressing you as one large, homogenous group. It sounds terribly pompous, doesn’t it – in the style of one of those endless missives St Paul kept sending to the Corinthians. Frankly, I think he should have put a sock in it after penning number one, giving us the best wedding reading there is and leaving it at that. But I’m getting distracted.
Much like the Corinthians, you might well be thinking, ‘Just sod off – you don’t know us’, and you’d be right. Though what I do know, as a former prep-school mother myself, is there are at least as many types of fee-paying parents as there have been education secretaries in the past ten years (also ten, in case you’ve lost count).
For some of you, I know Labour’s imposition of VAT on fees has been a minor irritant, equivalent to a fly landing on an elephant’s rump, in that awkward spot where it can’t quite flick it off with either tail or trunk. But then there are the fee-paying parents of children with Send profiles who feel they’d be toast in the local primary; parents who live in a black hole for decent state senior schools; parents on two PAYE incomes with a mortgage for whom there’s always too much month at the end of the money. I’m talking about those who’ve really had to dig deep to fund the increase.
It has been hugely decent of you to cough up the extra 20 per cent so that state-educated children like mine might benefit from the 6,500 new teachers Bridget Phillipson promised would be coming their way, thanks to this windfall. We are terribly grateful. Please know that. Perhaps, when trying to get back the deposit for next year’s summer holiday, you might even have felt the teensiest flicker of a rosy glow at all the good works your munificence will be funding.
It wasn’t about class warfare, Bridget assured us, nor calling in the equivalent of a drone strike on smaller fee-paying schools – even as she declared that state schools need teachers more than private schools need ‘embossed stationery… new pools… [and] AstroTurf pitches’. There was just one problem. Her policy, as some of us suspected, was bollocks.
Take my children’s charming village primary school. We were so impressed that we whipped all three out of their prep and adjoining nursery to send them there. Three largely happy years later, they have lost two teachers, meaning that Years 3 to 6 are now taught in one giant class. Other teachers have been signed off with chronic stress; one has left the profession altogether. It’s the parents who keep it going, fundraising, applying for grants for everything from musical instruments to trips to resurfacing the play area. One woman even gave up part of her maternity leave to complete an art project with the Key Stage 2 children, which would otherwise have had to be abandoned. We don’t really mind mucking in to ensure that our children have a bit more. It’s all a bit like the ‘Big Society’ David Cameron (remember him?) was touting a while back.
But oh dear, Bridget. Like Rachel from Accounts, maths hasn’t been her strongest subject. As Kemi Badenoch pointed out recently, Bridget was nearly 2,000 short of her pledge to hire 6,500 more teachers before losing her brief. Silly Bridget even forgot to ringfence the estimated £1.8 billion raised by her VAT raid for new teachers. Whoops! She really is spectacularly careless, isn’t she? I bet your children all checked the answers on their SATs papers far more carefully than that, didn’t they?
My children have lost two teachers, meaning that Years 3 to 6 are now taught in one giant class
So, dear fee-paying parents, I’m afraid that you, along with us, have been well and truly shafted by Labour. We’re all in this together (Cameron again). But Andy Burnham has been as busy with his new broom as a state-school mum on the classroom cleaning rota – and Bridget and Rachel have been swept away.
I don’t know whether the new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, is much cop at maths, but she has a delightfully free and easy, 1970s Steiner school attitude to spelling and grammar. She feels that it’s ‘Draconian’ to have ten- and 11-year-old children spelling correctly such ‘obscure’ words as ‘knight’ and ‘disappointed’ when they should be focusing on, apparently, ‘creativity’. Whether this creativity she has in mind is interpretative dance or freeform nose flute jazz, I’m sure there’ll be a parent somewhere with that in their skill set who’ll sigh and resign themselves to giving up yet more of their time.
So comfort yourselves, dear VAT-paying parents on your uppers, that at least you won’t have to deal with this twaddle. As for the new Education Secretary, she’d do well to remember that, as they say, grammar is the difference between knowing your shit – and knowing you’re shit.
Big kiss, Flora
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