Labour threatens to cut £700m tax breaks for private schools

Private schools will be forced to pay business rates unless they develop a "formal partnership" with a state school under new proposals to be announced by the Labour Party.

Independent schools are given around £140m a year, or £700m over each parliament, in tax breaks because of their charitable status.

Labour wants to take these tax breaks away unless private schools meet a new "Schools Partnership Standard". This would mean providing qualified teachers in specialist subjects to state schools, helping state schools students into top universities, running joint extracurricular programmes and sharing sports facilities with local state pupils.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Daily Telegraph says the "class war" proposal could add £200 a year to the cost of private education.

Writing in The Guardian, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt says the plan aims to break down the "Berlin Wall" in our education system.

"The division between state and private education damages our society, stifles opportunity and, by wasting talent, inflicts damage upon our economy," he says.

"If we are to prosper as a country, we need to be more equal. Some private schools want to overcome this corrosive divide of privilege, but most do not. It is time to stop asking politely."

Hunt, who was educated at a private school before reading History at Cambridge University, points out that private schools educate only seven per cent of children, but their students take up almost 50 per cent of Oxbridge places.

The Guardian describes Hunt's plans as "an assault on the privileges of the elite".

However, Barnaby Lenon, the chairman of the Independent Schools Council, tells the Telegraph it would be a "very ineffective tool to improve social mobility in any meaningful way".

He says that 90 per cent of independent schools are already involved in "meaningful and effective partnerships with state schools and their local communities" and that "one-size-fits-all regulations" would not take into account the diverse nature of the sector, which includes many small local schools.

Lenon added that independent schools generate £4.7bn in tax and save the taxpayer a further £4bn by educating children out of the state school sector.