Could we be nearing what the social historian David Kynaston calls “a long overdue historic moment”? Kynaston, a private school critic, says: “The temper of the times is anti-elitist. We have yet another old-Etonian prime minister as well as a cabinet two-thirds privately educated, and the resources gap between the highly funded private sector and the starved state sector has become grotesque … the current dispensation is morally rotten.”

This sense of having reached a tipping point is echoed in far less likely places. Patrick Derham, head of Westminster, one of the country’s leading private schools, wrote recently that the tragedy of Grenfell Tower highlighted “the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. It made me feel even more uncomfortable about the job I do.”

Angry or discomfited rumblings on the state-private divide are hardly new. It is the stuff of our endlessly discursive yet oddly static political culture. But what marks out 2019, shaping up as one of the most remarkable political years of my lifetime, is the establishment of two new groups committed to serious reform of the private sector.

Much of Britain's bitter division began in school Read more

Next week the Private School Policy Reform (PSPR), a thinktank and platform for comment and debate, will launch in Manchester, the idea of education journalist Jess Staufenberg. Privately schooled herself, Staufenberg has long been uncomfortably aware of the discrepancy in resources between state and private sectors. But there was a more pragmatic reason for this project. “As a journalist, writing about private schools, or trying to test findings from the Independent Schools Council, I realised that there was no organisation or thinktank to go to that would talk about the sector from the other side.”

Sensing a gap, Staufenberg approached a number of writers, including Kynaston and Francis Green, authors of the recently published Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, and Robert Verkaik, who published his book Posh Boys in 2018. All three agreed to co-found the group. They were joined by myself and Mike Trace, a former government adviser on social exclusion.

Staufenberg is keen to emphasise that PSPR, while clearly pro-reform, is not a campaigning organisation but is “in for the long haul” to inform opinion. One of the most important functions of the site will be to research, assess and discuss options for reform, beginning with a detailed policy paper, to be released next week, listing six possible routes to change and calling on the main political parties to declare their support for one or other option.

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With election fever in the air, the response will be interesting. It is possible the government could opt for something radical from the PSPR menu or, more likely, create its own mad, faux reformist dish: every private school to be made a free school, perhaps? Stripping the sector of business rate relief is plausible, given Michael Gove’s declaration in 2017 that private schools are “welfare junkies”.

Meanwhile, Labour looks ready to end an uneasy silence of four decades, thanks to the recent formation of another group, Labour Against Private Schools (Laps). Backed by the Corbyn-supporting Momentum group, Laps has adopted a strong populist tone with calls for radical reform and the in-your-face hashtag #AbolishEton. (#EtonMess pops up from time to time too.)

The group emerged out of a public event in June organised by the Trafford Labour councillor Steven Longden, who described it as “the first meeting on phasing out private schools ever to be held in the House of Commons”. A few weeks later he was joined by the teacher and activist Holly Rigby, the activist Rob Poole and the Durham academic Sol Gamsu, to set up Laps. The organisation has won support from MPs across the party, including the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, its former leader Ed Miliband, and the business select committee chair Rachel Reeves.

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In July, Laps organised a letter of support from hundreds of Labour councillors, and will now set up meetings around the country to examine the interrelation of the state and private sectors in local areas. It also plans to bring a motion to this year’s Labour conference calling for the full integration of state and private schools, including nationalising the endowments of the hugely wealthy public schools.

Labour’s leadership is sympathetic. McDonnell has backed the Laps campaign and tells them he believes an “integrated education system” could well be a popular policy with the public as the country heads into an election.

This would represent a dramatic break from the New Labour/Adonis years, when Labour took the view that private schools were not a problem to solve but a model to emulate, and that they should be encouraged to shore up their ailing state counterparts through sponsorship or extending public benefit as a result of charitable status.

For Gamsu, too, that approach belongs to the past. His research has explored the way education fits into the broader structures of class and capitalism and he is keen, he says, to “push the Labour party into a position where they have seriously to take on elite culture and power in Britain”. This would involve integrating private and state sectors along Finnish lines, and also reforming further and higher education as part of the creation of a more democratic and accessible National Education Service.

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Interestingly, the most strident opposition to reform of private schools might come from within the state sector. Influential Conservative-supporting free school founders, such as Katharine Birbalsingh and Toby Young, boast that their meritocratic approach, modelled on a traditional curriculum and strong discipline, is giving the private sector a run for its money. They see no need to lay a glove on the private schools.

But this argument could be turned on its head. If everyone across the political spectrum now accepts that most children, particularly those from less well-off backgrounds, can do equally well academically what, bar snobbery and entrenched habits of segregation, is stopping our children being educated together? And shouldn’t state schools have the benefit of the broad curriculum and creative pursuits that are fast becoming the province of private schools alone?

Ultimately it’s a question of modernity: the need for this troubled country finally to tackle harmful, outmoded social hierarchies through a common system of genuinely public education. Private school reform is decades, if not centuries, overdue. The moment might finally have arrived.