Over £14.5million of taxpayers’ money was spent on sending the kids of diplomats to top private schools last year as they hiked their fees.
Senior Foreign Office staff were given generous allowances so their children could take places at schools including Eton.
The Tories have opposed Labour’s plan to end tax breaks for private schools, claiming it would make the fees unaffordable for many. But they have been happily increasing the amounts that diplomats can claim as schools have chosen to ramp up their charges in the past few years.
The maximum allowance for a senior boarder has risen from £31,710 to £40,278 in the last five years. The most that can be claimed for a junior boarder has gone from £27,873 to £35,403 over the same period, a 27% hike that reflects the increase in fees at the top private schools over recent years.
Last year was the first time on record that fewer than 500 pupils benefited from the perk, but the overall cost of the scheme for taxpayers hit a 10-year high of £14.5million last year – enough to have paid for 5.73million free school meals.
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The average claim per pupil under the “Continuity of Education Allowance” rose to a record high of £29,537 in 2023/24, up from £26,848, an increase of almost exactly 10% in the space of one year. This was around four times the average level of funding per pupil in state schools (£7,460) over the same year.
Sevenoaks School in Kent remains the most popular choice for diplomatic offspring, receiving a total of £635,346 in fees for the education of 19 children in 2023/24. Second most popular was Oundle School in Northamptonshire, where fourteen pupils had their fees subsidised by £480,247. Seven sons of diplomats were educated last year at Eton College at a cost of £265,186.
The long-standing Continuity of Education Allowance allows Foreign Office staff to send their children to boarding schools, so that they are able to travel overseas at short notice, or take a posting in a country where it is deemed unsafe to be accompanied by their children.
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Labour expects to raise over £1.5billion by ending the VAT and business rates exemptions for private schools. The money will be used to pay for 6,500 expert teachers, improve training for headteachers and create 3,300 nurseries in primary schools to boost the availability of childcare.
Critics have suggested this will lead to more children moving into the state system, but Labour has pointed to how private schools have chosen to significantly increase their fees without a corresponding drop in the number of pupils.
A survey conducted by the Independent Schools Council in January found the average fee for a day school has jumped 8% to over £18,000 a year. The average cost of a place at boarding school now stands at over £42,000 a year.
Figures from the Department for Education show that as of this January, the number of pupils in independent schools in England was 593,486, up from 591,954 the year before and an increase of 24,150 on 2020-21.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies also has debunked Tory claims that Labour’s plan would lead to an exodus of pupils into the state system. It found that removing the tax breaks would have a limited effect on the numbers choosing private education.
In the last 14 years there have been 380 state school closures which include 139 primary schools, 99 secondary and 39 special.