No its not - I agree its the state's job to provide an appropriate standard of education to anyone who wants to access it - similar to health care and the NHS. If the government increased the standard of education within the public sector perhaps demand for the private sector might drop. What the state cannot do is dictate to its citizens how they spend their money - surely.

We're almost there. I'm thinking that public sector education should be improved to a level that makes private education unattractive. As before, we need to see what the best countries (Finland, Switzerland etc) are doing and adopt some of their methodology.

I'm enjoying the gradual Damascene conversion of Sal Paradise as it unfolds, in an achingly modern way, on social media; it's quite poetic.

If you allow that thought to expand to its logical conclusion, you'll be one step closer to enlightenment; free you mind comrade...

No.

Once you understand why people send their kids to private school then you begin to understand why the public sector can never compete. There are plenty of private schools where the standards of education are below that of the better public sector schools yet they are still full!!

What is interesting when debating with the those on the left like yourself is you allow your ideology to restrict your thought processes to such a simplistic point that the real point is easily lost on you. As you have illustrated above.

Almost there...



...but like a neophyte hurdler taking its first tentative jumps, he pulls away at the last moment.

As Paul Weller sang, "What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?"

Although I'm a lefty I agree with Sal on this. I don't agree with Labour's war on private schools. If you have public provision of things like education and healthcare, and private providers enter to add to the supply then as long as they are properly regulated then I think they can co-exist. I would still have higher taxes on the wealthy so they will be contributing to the education of others at the same time as paying school fees.

In the Thatcher and Major eras they used to have an Assisted Places scheme. In our area, we didn't have state grammar schools, it was all comprehensives and all the grammar schools in the area were private. But if a child passed the entrance exam for a private grammar school and their parents income was below a certain threshold, the government would subsidise or completely fund their fees. The grammar schools at the time would have something like 40% children on some form of assisted place and maybe 25% on full fee subsidy. It meant that there was a social mix in the schools. Also it was a good form of social mobility (admittedly only for the children who were able to pass those entrance exams at age 11), because you would have kids from less well off backgrounds suddenly having access to the good schools, good facilities of the better off.

It's not a perfect solution and I can see why it had its critics but I thought that was an avenue for social mobility for a generation of people who grew up in the 80s and 90s that got shut off after Blair came in.

99% of people paying to educate their kids privately will be paying income tax through PAYE and council tax so they will be contributing to the education without accessing it and most will be higher rate tax payers so they will contributing above the average too.

Why should many private schools be registered charities.

They shouldn't - it's an act of fraud on a massive scale, but the Charity Commission is completely toothless.

Completely agree - they shouldn't - I expect that will change by the time of the next election