Kristina Murkett

The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’  It is of course true that private schools are under more financial pressure than ever, and are making cost-cutting decisions that may add to teachers’ workload: one in five private school teachers say they have had colleagues made redundant since VAT on school fees was introduced, while 26 per cent say that their school has frozen recruitment.

Parents of young children should be happy: since September 2024, those with an income of less than £100,000 a year have been eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week once their child is nine months old. From September this year, that will increase to 30 hours a week.  However, once again, it seems that the government has promised the moon but in realiy only paid for a small asteroid. Nurseries claim that the scheme is financially unsustainable because the funding was set before significant rises in their costs as a result of Rachel Reeves’ budget. Increases to national insurance payments and the minimum wage mean that the sector will now be paying 11 per cent more in wages and staffing costs from April, or about £2,000-2,500 per staff member.

When it comes to behaviour policies, schools have fallen into two extremes. Across the border in Scotland, schools practise ‘restorative justice’: a relationships-based, non-punitive approach that favours constructive conversations over traditional sanctions. On the flip side, academies across England are adopting an authoritarian, zero-tolerance approach, where detentions are given for minor infractions and routines are enforced with military precision. Yesterday, one school in Harlow hit the headlines for giving detentions to top set pupils who score less than 90 per cent in maths tests: another controversial academy policy flown under the banner of ‘high expectations’. Being educated is not about giving up joy but finding joy in new things Clearly, the latter works.

The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after an external review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the curriculum and that ‘high-brow pursuits’, such as ‘visits to museums, theatres and art galleries’, might be replaced with more ‘relatable’ activities such as graffiti workshops.

In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents were prepared to pay the price because they decided it was still worth being late. This experiment demonstrated the limit of economic incentives without other social motivations: something which seems very timely as we return to the debate around whether parents should be fined for taking their children on holiday during term-time. For Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

This morning, students up and down across the country will anxiously open up their GCSE results, with local papers publishing photos of glowing over-achievers and other heartwarming success stories. The national media will, in all likelihood, focus on the number of top grades, and how this fits into recent trends concerning grade inflation as exam boards try to re-stabilise results post-Covid.  Yet this hyper-fixation on the number of 7s, 8s and 9s (the equivalent to an old-style A or A*) means we tend to overlook something much more important: the long tail of underachievement in England.

As part of the ongoing review into the primary and secondary school curriculum, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced that children in England will be taught how to spot misinformation and extremist content online, so that students can arm themselves against ‘putrid conspiracy theories’. In the wake of weeks of rioting, with children as young as 12 and 13 now in court for their involvement, this announcement seems like a sensible idea, but it is not necessarily a straightforward one. You simply cannot embed critical thinking without establishing a firm foundation of factual understanding first Children and teenagers are excellent targets for fake news, but they are notoriously bad at spotting it.

Following the announcement of Rachel Reeves' spending cuts on Monday, the Treasury confirmed that VAT will be applied to private school fees from January 2025. Although the debate on whether to charge this tax on private schools has raged for months, this is still earlier than most of the sector expected. ‘Anti-forestalling’ measures will be introduced so that any advance payments for the January term are, from this week, also taxed. This means parents can no longer avoid the extra 20 per cent by paying fees upfront. Perhaps most importantly, Treasury documents have also confirmed that ministers expect the new tax to drive some private school parents to the state sector: the first time Labour has acknowledged this in writing.