ANDREW NEIL: The faculties minister is simply getting began. Her bare class envy will wreck Britain much more than Reeves’ taxes

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson will soon be to English schools what Chancellor Rachel Reeves already is to the British economy: a wrecking ball.

The economic damage Reeves has wrought in six short months is well-documented, the destructive handiwork of Phillipson less so. But it will be apparent for all to see in the coming year.

Suffice to say that Labour‘s best known education policy – slapping 20 per cent VAT on private school fees, starting Wednesday – is far from the worst she has in store, though it is bad enough. Especially since it’s not clear Phillipson knows what she is doing.

At the weekend she was boasting that the VAT hike was popular even with middle-class parents because it would mean more ‘pushy’ parents who had been priced out of private schools demanding ‘better from state schools’. But her department’s own assessment of the policy concluded that ‘very few families will move out of private schools’.

Both claims can’t be true. Either large numbers of parents will be forced to pull their children out of private schools, in which case there might indeed be an increase in voices pressing for higher state school standards; or not many will make the switch, in which case there won’t.

If Phillipson had displayed such muddled thinking in a school essay you’d like to think her teacher would insist she redo it.

The education department, of course, has to argue there won’t be an exodus from private schools, otherwise its sums don’t add up. Phillipson claims VAT on fees will generate £500 million for state schools this year, rising to £1.7 billion a year by the end of the decade. Cash spending on English schools is currently close to £60 billion; £500 million is barely a rounding error.

Even an extra £1.7 billion is hardly life-changing. Labour says it will be used to hire 6,500 more teachers. There are already 470,000 teachers in English state schools. 

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson claims VAT on fees will generate £500 million for state schools this year, rising to £1.7 billion a year by the end of the decade

An extra 1.4 per cent – or a third of a teacher per school, if it happens – will have a marginal impact at best. Parents already enduring some hardship to meet school fees may find 20 per cent VAT the last straw. Some less well-endowed private schools will struggle to survive.

Both developments would result in a large influx of pupils into state schools. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons it could be 40,000, undermining the net financial gain Labour hopes to make from its churlish policy.

Phillipson was boasting at the weekend about ‘ending the tax breaks enjoyed by private schools’, which reveals her ideological mindset.

Not levying VAT on school fees is hardly a tax break. It is simply part of an international consensus that you do not tax education. No civilised country does. Bar, as of this week, Starmer’s Britain, in which narrow class envy trumps global standards.

Taxing school fees would not matter so much if Phillipson declared she intended to double down on the reforms of recent decades which have resulted in English state schools soaring up the international league tables.

But nothing could be further from her mind. All the signs are that she intends to halt the reform programme in its tracks and even reverse it, replacing the quest for excellence with a return to mediocrity, which will hit poorer pupils’ life chances most of all.

School reform was one of the few success stories of the last 14 years of Tory government. Its origins go back to the Thatcher years in the 1980s, fostered further during the Blair-Brown ascendancy and given rocket boosters when Michael Gove became Education Secretary in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010.

The reforms transformed English schools. I say explicitly English schools because the Left-wing devolved governments of Scotland and Wales had no time for them.

Whereas in England there was a flourishing competition for excellence between new academies, free schools, local authority schools and the remaining grammar schools, the devolved nations stuck with what were once memorably called ‘bog standard comprehensives’.

The economic damage Rachel Reeves has wrought in six short months is well-documented, writes Andrew Neil

That was bad for Scottish and Welsh pupils. But it did allow for some instructive comparisons, which Phillipson is determined to ignore.

The global comparisons tell the story. In maths, reformed England had risen to 11th place in the international league table compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, by 2022.

Meanwhile, unreformed Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average. Wales which, like Scotland, rejected the English reforms, suffered the biggest fall of any country in the OECD table between 2018 and 2022 in maths, science and reading.

As England moved up to an impressive fourth place in the International Reading Literacy Study of 43 countries, the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) report, probably the highest-regarded global comparison, showed the performance of Scottish pupils in steady decline this century.

In 2022, twice as many Scottish pupils failed to reach Pisa ‘level two’ in maths as they did in 2006; the number of high achievers (scoring levels five or six) fell from one in eight to one in 12.

Fewer than 50 per cent of Scottish teenagers in secondary four (aged 14 to 15) can manage a pass in maths. As an astute observer of Scottish schools has said: ‘No objective analysis can sustain the myth that Scottish pupils now learn better than their contemporaries south of the border.’

Consider the import of that statement. It is the first time it can be said with accuracy in recorded history. It is the ultimate accolade for the Gove reforms in England. It is the shame of Scotland, where education used to be prized. No longer. When Scottish schools started plummeting down the global league tables then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s response was to withdraw co-operation from them.

Phillipson has learned nothing from this. Her review of the curriculum is led by Professor Becky Francis, a gender and equality academic (naturally), who has attacked the current ‘obsession with academic achievement’. She is sympathetic to the usual education ‘experts’ who want less rigour and more easy-going teaching, with visits to graffiti workshops replacing museum trips.

All of which reflects Phillipson’s mindset. When invited to praise the high-performing Michaela Community School, an academy in Wembley, in the Commons recently, she refused to do so. This despite the fact that, under the peerless leadership of Katharine Birbalsingh, working-class pupils of all creeds and colours go in great numbers to our finest universities. Remember that silence next time Phillipson claims to favour meritocracy.

A dull egalitarianism is more her style. She plans to force academies to follow her new national curriculum and to work more closely with local authorities on admissions and teacher recruitment, thereby undermining the autonomy that has been crucial to their success.

Rather than giving free rein to aspiration Phillipson strives to undermine it in the most petty ways. This month, her department announced the end of funding for teaching Latin in state schools. The cost was only £4 million.

It’s all a harbinger of worse to come. The pursuit of excellence will be replaced by grinding uniformity, the encouragement of reaching for the sky by what was once described as the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’.

It is a grim reminder that the Starmer project has far more in common with Labour’s failed socialism of the 1970s than the Blair-Brown New Labour years – and that a Left-wing education minister on a mission can do even more long-term damage to our country than a Chancellor.