93% club beware! The 7% are fighting back
Ryan Handley • UK • 3 minute read
Image: Kazimierz Mendlik / WikiCommons
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Kate and William beamed with pride, waving young George through the bastion of inherited privilege that is the Stuart gates of Eton College. Meanwhile, the coins in the pocket of a council-estate kid set off the metal detectors bordering the entrance to the holding pen of Dagenham’s most troublesome. At George’s school, 99.2% of students achieve strong passes in GCSE Maths and English. For the poor Dagenham kids' school, the pass rate falls to less than 50%. Just 66 miles between them, yet they may as well be two worlds apart.
But, to an extent, we can be proud to call ourselves a meritocracy. We’re a country where anyone from anywhere can be anything: where the son of a toolmaker can lead a broken Labour Party to a historic landslide majority; where a headstrong 16-year-old McDonald’s crewmember can climb her way to the top of one of the world’s oldest and most successful political institutions.
'Chumocracy'... has rigged the odds against state-school pupils
We can take great pride in these British success stories. However, we will never accomplish a purely meritocratic utopia until we achieve a state sector that gives every one of its students, regardless of their background, a standard of education that every parent aspires to provide.
Recognising the need for action amidst growing educational inequality, on New Year’s Day 2025, the Labour government introduced the standard 20% rate of VAT on private schools. The decision boosted investment into state schools by an extra £1.7 billion, but also controversially forced an exodus of over 30,000 pupils from the independent sector, leading the Leader of the Opposition to brand the former Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson as a "spiteful class warrior" – a title Bridget now embraces and puts "at the heart of her work" as Minister for Women and Inequalities in Burnham’s cabinet.
Abolitionists such as author and journalist Robert Verkaik have long argued that measures such as these should be the first of many in order to achieve the ‘slow and painless euthanasia (of our) apartheid education system’, because eventual abolition of the private sector is, in his opinion, what’s necessary to extinguish the elitist ‘chumocracy’ that has rigged the odds against state-school pupils when it comes to succeeding in virtually every top institution.
Image: Uxbridge High School Academy Trust / Flickr
But are we sure that, in the battle for an ‘excellence for everyone’ education, we ought to draw the battle lines in such binary terms as ‘state’ versus ‘independent’?
The parents of private schoolers think not, and they’re fighting back.
The Association for Families of Independent Schooling (AFIS) argues that organisations such as The 93% Club and Sutton Trust reduce public discourse around what is 'a highly complex educational and social ecosystem into a morally intuitive binary': the 93% versus the 7%. AFIS argues that this is a disingenuous framing of the inequality in education, and urges progressives to rethink social mobility and look ‘beyond binary school labels’, hitting back at the misleading characterisations of independent schools such as the Eton comparison I made at the start of this article.
In the fight for a meritocratic Britain, they argue that the battle lines shouldn’t be drawn between the state and independent sectors, but instead that the split is between the ‘advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’ – a divide existent across the entire education system, including within the state sector.
There is evidence to substantiate this counter-argument from the 7%, especially when considering, for example, the regional divide in this year’s A-level results. The gap in top grades between London and the North-East this year ‘has grown to an alarming 9.6 percentage points’, which is the largest disparity seen between regions since the Covid-19 pandemic. The blame for this divide cannot be placed at the gates of Eton, but instead on successive governments that have failed to allocate the proper funding to state schools in these areas, which is necessary to provide the same opportunities and infrastructure afforded to those who attend independent schools.
We must find a way of achieving the former without paying the political price of doing the latter.
We eagerly await hearing whether the 7% will be successful in their battle... not to be taxed
Some within the 7% are therefore fighting back against the 20% VAT decision by the Labour government and its suggestion that they should be the ones who pay to close the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
The Supreme Court will hear the case of religious private schools (which were not exempt from the tax) and their fee-paying parents this December, after their appeals to the Divisional Court and the Court of Appeal were dismissed earlier this year. In the judgement from the High Court, the judges observed that an outright ban on independent schools would likely breach the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, but that what’s dubbed by critics as the ‘abolition through the back door’ approach of taxation is within the Labour Government’s ‘broad margin of discretion’ when it comes to balancing the interests of the many in the state sector (who will benefit from the extra funding) and the needs of the few in the private sector who will be ‘adversely affected by the policy’.
We eagerly await hearing whether the 7% will be successful in their battle to protect what they see as their fundamental human right not to be taxed on their investment in their child’s education. However, whatever the Supreme Court’s verdict, and whether or not the 20% VAT on private schools is ultimately legally justifiable, is it not common sense that, in our moral mission to meet our meritocratic objectives, our society would achieve a great deal more from raising the bottom than we would from the deterioration of the top?
We must find a way of achieving the former without paying the political price of doing the latter.
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•Published: 13/10/26
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