A blueprint for meritocratic educational reform after Starmer's VAT raid
Small-r republican education in the new Britain
My previous article (‘Should meritocrats celebrate Starmer’s VAT raid on private schools?’) outlined the decline of the private sector amongst the middle and upper-middle classes. To recap briefly: private schools had already wilfully priced out a large part of the upper-middle class by the beginning of this decade. They are now increasingly the preserve of the domestic ultra-wealthy and international students. The VAT raid, rather than being a wrecking-ball against bastions of social snobbery and privilege like Eton and Harrow, has actually merely accelerated this trend: it has forced already-struggling parents out of private education and, in the process, has destroyed close to a dozen minor provincial faith schools. Assuming current trends continue, private education will only be accessible to those in the very highest income brackets by the end of this decade. The combined effects of the fee inflation arms race and Starmer’s VAT raid will leave what remains of the private sector with no organic social base to defend it. Whilst deeply damaging for the reasons outlined previously, this still nonetheless presents an opportunity for reformist right-wingers, at least in the long-term.
For the avoidance of any doubt, none of my gloomy comments about the closure of provincial private schools should by any means be read as a paean to private education. Even beyond undermining the very principle of meritocracy, people are right when they say that they serve to further the general decline of the country by providing a simulacrum of English society before the Millennium for those who can afford it. This has disincentivised political dissidence amongst those with the most political capital by offering an easy escape from the dysfunction of comprehensive education, leaving the lower-middle and working classes to bear the brunt. Additionally, most of the major schools, which by the end of the decade will be charging upwards of £60k per annum (boarding) and close to £30k per annum (day), are definitely Woke. Whilst not really sensed by the often socially deferential GB News, or even by the likes of Peter Hitchens, the major public schools are not interested in preserving high culture, let alone our traditions. They are imbued with hard-left attitudes towards British history, and have maintained a reactionary and unthinking attachment to the now passé causes of critical race and gender theory.
We are at a turning point in English educational history. The upper-middle classes are now stuck between a rock and a hard place. For most, private education is either outright unaffordable, or demands unreasonable cutbacks from what would traditionally be seen as the basics of an upper-middle class lifestyle. However, the alternatives are grim, and constitute a moral harm to the conspicuously gifted. Comprehensive schools vary greatly, both socially and academically, but anti-social behaviour, and sometimes serious violence, is becoming more and more common. No-one reasonably wants to send their children into the same classrooms inhabited by aspirant drill ‘artists’, even if they feel like they cannot openly articulate these concerns.
While it’s easy for state school teachers on the receiving end of verbal abuse (speaking from personal experience) to feel sorry for themselves, the real victims of comprehensive education are the isolated students from what remains of Middle England. They find themselves amidst a cohort of culturally alien, socially indifferent, and often outright hostile peers. They are subject to the sensory violations of shrill, screaming children, projectile chairs, and increasing anti-white ethnic chauvinism, as well as all of the most stupid and aesthetically repulsive cultural trends of modern Britain.
I am personally of the view, after having worked in a number of them, that comprehensive schools cannot be ‘fixed’. This is because they are fundamentally an insane, politically-driven experiment in social engineering which places the interests of gifted children, and in fact even ordinary children, behind the goal of cross-cultural ‘exposure’. Apparently, the main goal of schooling in Britain is to ‘level’ children (notice that school uniforms, whatever their other merits, are often justified in the same way). There is no pedagogic rationale whatsoever for mixed-ability schools, let alone mixed-ability classes. The usual defence presented is that there’s no recorded impact on those who already scored well in exams, while there is a positive impact on those who scored poorly. It should be noted that it is ironic that left-wing teachers, who usually reject the monistic fixation on exam results as the only criterion of measuring success, should offer this line of argument.
While it is true that bright students are frequently able to get ahead anyway, even in extreme situations, this should still be far from any normal person’s ideal. Even if one’s exam results are stellar despite it all, the long-term negative impact of the experience simply cannot be ignored. This goes far beyond the fact that in all but the very best comprehensive schools, the gifted will never be able to explore much beyond the curriculum, given that the focus of most schools will be controlling behaviour and getting the worst students to pass, not getting the best students to reach their maximum potential.
More fundamentally, even in the rare cases where this kind of teaching is provided, comprehensive schools fail when it comes to preparing a gifted pupil for leadership. From abundant personal experience, it seems clear that the privately-educated are more socially confident and more articulate than an equivalently intelligent state-schooler, with all the massive benefits this entails, both to the individual and to society. It is likely that the biggest reason for this is not teaching, nor some kind of inherent sense of ‘superiority’ (or ‘inferiority’) owing to one’s class status, nor even typical, ‘character-building’ public school preoccupations like cadets, house sports, debating societies, and so on, but rather the inherently demeaning character of comprehensive education in 2025.
So if comprehensive education can’t be fixed, what’s the solution? One proposal is the introduction of ‘school vouchers’. This system, popularised by Milton Friedman, would see the privatisation of the provision of education, but with the state still giving out the funding. Analogous to the models of healthcare provision seen in many European countries, it aims to improve the delivery of public services through the introduction of market incentives. The government would issue means-tested vouchers to parents, who would then be able to use the funds for whatever educational purposes they see fit.
This model has a certain appeal. A privatised education system would see — within reason — social sorting, with parents given choice over where to send their children and schools given far greater choice over who they admit. For our purposes, it is true that less able and/or disruptive students would congregate towards institutions comprised of fully means-tested voucher pupils, with middle class and the only partially-subsidised students more often going to relatively inexpensive private schools. The upper-middle class remainder would shift back towards the traditional independent sector. Obviously, the largesse of the vouchers would be context dependent. Presumably, they would be issued by expanded local authorities, factoring in the availability of private schools in any given area. But broadly speaking, a fully means-tested voucher would be equivalent to the average funding per child per annum in the current state system, which is roughly £8,210.
To steelman such a system, we could assume that partially subsidised middle income parents couldn't be outcompeted by fully subsidised lower income parents, with vouchers being weighted so that relative purchasing power is broadly the same. While the figure of £8,210 seems minimal for private education, it could also be assumed that there would be a broader range of fee pricing within a heterogenous independent sector.
However, there are numerous drawbacks to privatisation which would make it a less than ideal solution. Fundamentally, it’s questionable whether market principles can really operate in the context of education, in which parental (consumer) choice is limited by considerations of pupils’ existing investment in schools. Privatising underperforming comprehensives wouldn’t necessarily improve their outcomes, particularly if they are unable to recruit better (which almost always means more affluent) pupils. Financially incentivising schools to recruit or maintain less able and/or more challenging pupils through a voucher system could actually see privatised schools aim to keep these cohorts. We already see this in practice with pupil premiums, from which schools can receive additional funding for pupils eligible for free school meals.
More fundamentally, this would still not be a unified, national system. It would still be vulnerable to all the critiques of the system we have today. Wealth would still be substantially rewarded, rather than just merit. Even aside from the huge array of price points that would likely be offered, we would probably also expect the emergence of a variety of important discrepancies in educational provision across the country, as failing schools in some regions go bankrupt.
I am instead of the view that state-maintained schools, rather than being semi-marketised, should be civically-orientated institutions of state embodying (small-r) republican principles. They should inculcate new generations of Britons with a love of country, and should reward merit, not wealth. While libertarians might like the idea of a hundred flowers blooming, there are numerous reasons why — particularly in the current political context — a right-wing government should exercise greater dirigiste control over education.
Any serious proposal must recognise that the state-private bifurcation which emerged in the wake of the destruction of the grammar schools was immoral, anti-national, and anti-meritocratic. This recognition should lead to a focus on radically restructuring the state-maintained sector from above. Eventually, we should create a new kind of tripartite system. The three types of school would be roughly as follows: selective schools, which would roughly correspond to historical grammar schools; rebranded secondary moderns, housing the great majority of students; and finally, reformatory academies, which would be borstals-cum-military schools.
Selective schools could be created by coaxing or requiring current free schools or academies in certain local authorities to adopt selective entry requirements. More germanely, it will also be done by mandating the gradual absorption of meritocratic scholars into private schools, with the aim that these individuals would eventually, over a number of years, comprise the large majority of students in such institutions. Around 15% of the cohort should be admitted to these schools. Attempts to expand the cohort of selective schools much further should be resisted, primarily for the reason that they would lower the quality of the secondary moderns. Eventually, we should replicate the norm in most other developed countries that elite schools are selective state schools, not private schools (with the private sector instead mostly just filling niches like foreign language education or faith schools).
Entry to selective schools — rather than being based off the broadly unpopular, one-off ‘11-plus’ examination, taken at a time when children are objectively at a relatively early developmental stage — should be based on two stages of potential entry: the ‘13-plus’ (the traditional age of entry for most public schools) and the ‘16-plus’. Both examinations should come in the form of a variety of g-loaded tests. GCSEs, which primarily reward the memorisation of huge reams of content, should be abolished. Correspondingly, this would also mean that the primary school leaving age would need to be raised, and that all pupils, barring those removed for disciplinary problems, would need to spend the first two years of KS3 in a comprehensive setting.
The most important thing to emphasise about the rebranded secondary moderns is that they are not intended to be trade schools. Even if denuded of the brightest students, they should still aim to provide an academically robust education, with streaming for at least all core subjects being mandatory. While — organisational and financial resources permitting — some amount of technical training should ideally be available to those who want it, this will not be the central focus of these schools, and no attempt would be made to shoehorn unwilling students into this. Maintaining some degree of rigour in traditional academic subjects is essential to building the legitimacy of the new, tripartite system among the general public.
Finally, the reformatory academies. These would exist on a far larger scale than today, where such institutions are only resorted to in the most extreme cases. The intention is to absorb the worst offenders from the secondary moderns, thus greatly improving the quality of education for the less intelligent but respectable pupils who are intended to populate them. Even in the most demographically challenging schools, the behavioural problems that exist are caused to an extraordinary extent by a relatively small number of children. Removing them would instantly transform most schools. That we do not currently do so demonstrates the perverse, minoritarian logic that dominates the state sector even after decades of reform.
While people bemoan ‘soft teachers’ for failing to discipline feral chair-chuckers, most overlook the role of the Coalition Government in preventing state schools from excluding those who make classroom teaching an impossibility. The introduction of independent review panels, increased oversight of the use of exclusions by Ofsted, and the emphasis that any exclusions must align with the legal provisions of the ever-looming Equality Act 2010 — all these played a role in inhibiting the ability of teachers to deal with the worst pupils.
Affirming that reformatory academies are wholly integrated into the general educational system, and that they are also available as an option for those who stop short of arson and rape, would decisively end the sadistic social experiment of placing normal students alongside those who are, often congenitally, anti-social. Meanwhile, the discipline and structure of the reformatory academies holds the potential to turn some — though certainly not all — of the worst students into productive members of society, something that is highly unlikely if they remain at normal schools. The very real threat of being sent here should also by itself help improve behaviour, at least to an extent.
The Right must realise that selective education will never be a ‘populist’ political project. It is a frequent misconception in right-wing folk historiography that the destruction of grammar schools was unilaterally and suddenly imposed on the country by left-wing ideologues. In fact, many middle class parents, including those who voted Conservative, welcomed it. The tripartite system outlined above, because of the multiple (and later) entry points for selective schools, will hopefully avoid one of the more reasonable criticisms that the ‘11-plus’ faced: namely, that it pre-emptively bifurcated students into ‘scholars’ and ‘duds’. It would provide enhanced opportunities for gifted students irrespective of their background, while also ensuring that students who didn’t pass examinations would still have access to a safe and rigorous education.
Such a reset would also provide an opportunity for much-needed increased oversight of what is propagated in schools. As noted, beyond the primary goal of the propagation of meritocracy and general academic excellence, a secondary (but almost as important) goal will be to instil patriotism into new generations of Britons. Even leaving aside the inherent problems that Britain’s demographics pose in achieving such a goal for now, given the current curriculum and personnel of the state sector, this is obviously unrealistic without fundamental institutional change. For all of the well-founded criticisms of a school like Michaela by a previous Pimlico Journal contributor, it can at least be said that they are basically ‘Goveite’ in politics. In even this they are an extreme outlier, including among neo-disciplinarian schools.
How a future reformist government could overcome the issue of left-wing hegemony throughout the educational sector, both state and private, is not widely-discussed in right-wing circles at present. Schools and teachers are currently free to engage in egregious left-wing partisanship. While a small minority of these loud partisans may be interesting, quirky people who students (even those who disagree) look back fondly upon, the vast majority are simply bores who students are in no position to challenge. On balance, then, it is beyond question that teachers should be restrained in their ability to air their personal political views.
At the level of the management, there’s the expected: the habitual promotion of Pride and Black History Month, school assemblies dedicated to celebrating the financially fraudulent leadership of ‘Black Lives Matter’, and so on. To combat this, some of the opening salvos of the Second Trump Administration’s war on Woke could easily be adopted. Simply legislating against left-wing symbolism in all schools, as well as against the promotion of anti-British ideologies (rather than ill-defined ‘partisanship’, as is currently the case) would act as a totemic deterrence to many senior leadership teams who are terrified of potential defunding. Once again, Conservatives like to complain about left-wing institutional bias, but have missed many easy victories because they have refrained from explicitly prescribing what can and what cannot reasonably be construed as ‘bias’.
As for what goes on in the classroom, below the level of the management? This is much more tricky. Much left-wing indoctrination is not promoted by the schools themselves, but is actually ad hoc teacher proselytisation, unchecked by any external supervision. Even where this is not prescribed by the curriculum, teachers will regularly and actively mischaracterise our history, and only in one direction: Nelson was a ‘slaver’, Amritsar was a ‘genocide’, and the Crusades were an entirely unprovoked attack on a hitherto peaceful Islamic world.
As the row in a East Sussex school in 2023 shows — in which a student successfully challenged left-wing partisan promotion of gender ideology — the natural rebelliousness of adolescents could be channelled into a system of cost-effective monitoring. Having a hotline to report ideological bias would have a chilling effect on those supposed ‘educators’ who choose to abuse their authority.
These, however, are stop-gap measures. In the long-term, there needs to be a serious reckoning with the fact that education draws in largely left-leaning individuals. While it would go some way to establish institutional structures more sympathetic to the Right, as well as ensuring legal protections for right-wing (normally Christian) teachers who fall foul of their direct employers, far more needs to be done. Teaching needs to be a job which is attractive to people of a conservative and/or nationalist political persuasion.
There is no fundamental reason for why this cannot be the case. In most newly-forged developmental nation-states in Eastern Europe, teaching drew in right-wingers invested in inculcating the youth with a love of fatherland. There will need to be a conscious drive to recruit a different demographic to that which principally populates teaching today: namely, the young, predominantly male, and actively anti-Woke. No doubt, students would be more receptive to and more inspired by such figures. The army is one obvious place to turn; another would be those seeking an exit from the professional and/or corporate world for whatever reason.
To conclude, the British education system has been unjust in its often arbitrary social division of the country. Culturally very similar students, of similar academic capabilities, have been subject to widely different educational experiences due to sometimes minor differences in financial circumstances.
This is not a left-wing diatribe against economic inequality per se, but rather a defence of the middle class against a residual misperception of where their real material interests lie. We should have an education system which is safe, free, and academically ambitious relative to every student’s abilities. It should also be one which rewards merit, not wealth, and which will prepare a future generation of patriotic British leaders.
My sincere hope is that a reformist Britain, with a reformed education system, will weed out the myopic and neurotic paradigms of mutual snobbery and class ressentiment, and will finally put to rest the class conscious identity of post-war Britain.
This article was written by an anonymous schoolteacher. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?