This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Labour activists are aiming to capitalise on Boris Johnson’s likely election as Conservative leader with an aggressive campaign against his old school, Eton, and other elite private schools in England.

The group, Labour Against Private Schools, is circulating a motion for the party’s conference in September that would commit a Labour government to stripping fee-paying schools of their privileges and integrating them into the state system.

The campaign is to be publicly launched on Tuesday using the @AbolishEton Twitter handle, and is backed by a number of Labour MPs including the former party leader Ed Miliband.

Those behind the campaign say Johnson’s elevation means he will be the second Old Etonian to be prime minister within four years, while Jeremy Hunt was educated at Charterhouse and the Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage, went to Dulwich College – proof that private schools remain a powerful force in British politics.

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Holly Rigby, a state school teacher and coordinator of the campaign, said: “There is no justification for the fact that young people’s opportunity to flourish and fulfil their potential is still determined by the size of their parents’ bank balance.”

A research by the Sutton Trust and the social mobility commission found that more than half of Britain’s senior judges, top civil servants and Foreign Office diplomats were privately educated, as well as substantial numbers in the media, arts and sports.

Rigby said previous Labour governments had squandered their opportunities to tackle the class divisions in the education system. “It’s about time we finished the job,” she said.

The campaign against private schools claims support from MPs across the parliamentary Labour party, including the shadow Treasury minister, Clive Lewis, and the former teachers Thelma Walker and Laura Smith.

“Private schools are anachronistic engines of privilege that simply have no place in the 21st century,” said Lewis. “We cannot claim to have an education system that is socially just when children in private schools continue to have 300% more spent on their education than children in state schools.”

Annual fees to attend Eton, a boarding school, are £40,000, while fees for day pupils at Westminster school are close to £29,000 a year.

The group plans to circulate its motion to local constituency Labour parties and win their backing for it to be adopted at the national conference in Brighton later this year. If adopted, the motion’s proposals would be included in Labour’s next general election manifesto.

While Labour’s current policies include adding VAT to school fees, the motion urges Labour to “go further to challenge the elite privilege of private schools and break up the establishment network that dominates the top professions”.

The motion calls for an election commitment to “integrate all private schools into the state sector”, including the withdrawal of charitable status.

It also breaks new ground by wanting to limit university admissions to “the same proportion of private school students as in the wider population (currently 7%)”. Most radically. it also calls for the “endowments, investments and properties held by private schools to be redistributed democratically across the country’s educational institutions”.

Such a programme would face significant legal obstacles, and the proposals make no mention of the hundreds of private schools catering to pupils with special needs or alternative provision, or small faith schools, with none of the resources enjoyed by prestigious schools such as Westminster.

Mike Buchanan, executive director of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference representing public schools, said independent schools played “a vital role” in the nation’s education system, and would cost taxpayers billions of pounds to replace.

“These excellent schools are creating life-changing free places for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and expanding daily their mutually beneficial partnerships with state schools.

“I invite politicians of any party to talk with me about how we can do even more together to extend such opportunities across the country and, in particular, to the most disadvantaged,” Buchanan said.

The last Labour government lost a legal challenge over the charitable status of fee-paying private schools, but the issue was reignited by Theresa May’s government in a 2016 education green paper, although that attempt was later abandoned.

The motion’s proposals would only apply to schools in England. In Scotland, the SNP government has already removed the entitlement for private schools to pay reduced business rates.