The right wing case for private school abolitionism

Seize the estates

Marlborough College, Wiltshire

A teacher at an independent school writes:

The recent suicide of John Wright, a dismissed physics teacher at Marlborough College, came as little surprise to those acquainted with the contemporary British private school system. Fired from his decade-long position, the primary cause of his defenestration was an offhand comments about no “gums, no gays” made on a school trip to Singapore. Of course, chewing gum is a statutory offence in the country, as was homosexuality until 2023. However, an off hand joke turned out to be career ending in the context of the militant political culture of Britain’s major public schools. I can imagine the type of student, and also the members of the SLT, who persecuted a classroom teacher to the point of death. The school has fallen back on claims of having followed normal safeguarding procedures and have also alluded to other allegations of “inappropriate conduct” from other students.

No doubt they would have been aware that what has been described as a summary dismissal would have been life destroying for a middle aged teacher, who had invested his life into the school and the neighbouring town (the school is contained within Marlborough itself). Boarding schools are uniquely immersive professional environments, probably only comparable to life in the military. A teacher who lives in and works at one will have their entire social network bundled into them. Perhaps their partners will work there and their children might attend as students. To be exiled from this life is to be ripped from a cloistral support mechanism which pays your council tax, utility bills and ultimately your pension. For someone who is older and who has invested their life into the profession, it is a type of social death sentence.

I was interested to read a similar account from the Daily Telegraph in which a house master likened his former employer to a cult. Its an apt analogy, not just because of the similar levels of restrictions on autonomy, but also because they have the capacity to be vindictive against individuals who violate their norms. While the anonymous author in question was not subjected to a conventional cancelling (his wife raised what she perceived to a malpractice at the school), pupils, often a vanguardist minority, are willing to weaponise accusations against teachers who they deem to have made (sometimes political) transgressions. Indeed, there actually exists an anonymous reporting app which allows students to launch allegations against staff members and each other.

This makes for a toxic combination, because the elision between life and work inherent in the boarding school environment lulls people into a false sense of security. Adults might make off hand comments they wouldn’t in other working contexts. Additionally teachers have extensive pressures placed on them by schools and parents (the latter of who have essentially outsourced the raising of their children) to produce high performing academic outcomes, but with pupils for their part often unmotivated in the absence of immediate familial pressures. It is understandable under these circumstances why teachers can be short with objectively lacklustre and often not very bright children when their professional success depends upon the grades they produce.

The type of social contract which once underpinned these institutions, in which teachers would effectively surrender their lives to their work in exchange for a secure existence, has been undermined by the soft Stasi culture encouraged by safeguarding obsessed SLTs. This has also been compounded by the significant (pre-VAT and inflation) hiking of fees, which have left the remaining professional upper middle class pursuing ever diminishing returns from the private educational system. Its understandable why a couple who now spends 50% + of their joint income (bear in mind that the average boarding school per annum fee is £50,000 and rising often to £60,000) would be demanding. But on the part of parents, there’s also often a failure to recognise that teachers, often challenged in a variety of academic and pastoral fronts, have limited abilities to produce miraculous changes in their children’s character or fundamental ability. However, the fear of parental litigation has produced a corresponding culture of hyper invigilance, in which teachers and heads of department are expected to monitor student academic performance relative to their baselines, which are of course measured using psychometric assessments very similar to IQ tests (in spite of the professed egalitarianism of these schools, they accept when push comes to shove that intelligence is 1) a real, monistic property and 2) is quantifiable).

To be clear, this is not primarily a rant about private schools from a standpoint of professional grievance. The overall point is to disabuse anyone of any romanticised notions of what independent education is like, which they might have derived from Decline and Fall or even from memories of their own schooling. Peter Hitchens for example has been particularly militant in his defence of the independent sector against would-be abolitionists, but I doubt he’s been seriously exposed to the interior of one since the early 1960s (excepting his own children). The autonomy which such schools afforded to the future administrators of Empire, and the correspondingly essentially laissez-faire attitude which pervaded these places (and which modern day detractors alleged bordered on the abusive) is long gone.

Similarly the entire gambit of the mainstream right wing media ecosystem from GB News to the Telegraph has been broadly deferential to private school, seeing the introduction of the VAT to fees as an example of left wing predation on Middle England. However this affection is unreciprocated. These schools underwent the maelstrom of ‘everyone’s invited’ and BLM in the early 2020s. For American readers, the former was a secondary education focused analogue to “Me too”, in which a number of unspecified allegations were published against a variety of independent schools for begetting “rape culture”.

This has resulted in schools, ever conscious of their reputation, engaging in internal signalling against “toxic masculinity” (a term which semi-frequently appears in assemblies) and a broader culture which problematises maleness as latently aggressive and predatory. And while BLM’s epicentre was geographically far flung from rural Hertfordshire and Berkshire, it prompted pushes to “decolonise” curriculums in overwhelmingly White boarding schools (indeed a petition was circulated to this effect amongst my own school’s alumni). For example, the woke “superhead” of Eton, Simon Henderson, promised to do so in 2020. The former headmaster of one school I worked at openly announced that he had read the book “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a term he used to describe Western anxieties about high birth-rates in the Third World.

The embrace of explicitly left wing ideological partisanship within the independent sector since the late 2010s has been one of the more uncommented upon phenomenon in recent years. It is also a contradictory situation, because whilst these bodies have a statutory commitment to impartiality, they are imbued with politically biased propaganda and missions. For example, at least one major historical boarding school has an outreach program which sees students sent to work with the border abolitionist group Care4Calais in the “jungle”. Guidelines for students (obviously targeted at primarily legally minor female students) tells them to dress “appropriately” as they will be working with Muslim migrants. Additionally, students are explicitly told not to talk to any journalists who have been approved by either the school or Care4Calais. Posters celebrating the project present ‘student’ perspectives describing how it challenged “misleading” narratives about migration in the media.

You might think, particularly given the latter example, that these PR schools aren’t very politically savvy. Certainly its not a good look for securitised country estates, which are the preserves of the ultrawealthy, to agitate for policies which physically endanger working class communities. However, their leaderships have hitherto been immunised from any consequences for their actions. They can afford to signal left, in spite of the fact that their clientele are basically indifferent if not actually hostile to left wing causes de celebre. Status conscious parents will still send their kids to these places and they can therefore not worry about any fallout from their desperate desire to be seen as not “racist” or “homophobic”. Of course much of this desire, more conspicuous than in the state sector, is driven the close proximity to “oppressive” epochs in British history and also the school’s relative racial homogeneity. This has resulted in the perverse situation in which the places which beget great generals and imperialists now fly trans inclusive pride flags, black nationalist tricolours and have “directors of EDI” earning presumably triple figure salaries.

Some might comment that this does not matter, and that this is simply a manifestation of an already passe woke zeitgeist. While there is some truth in this, in so far as these places feel like they’re stuck in 2020 Groundhog Day, we should be concerned that major educational institutions are regurgitating reactionary ideology. Not only is it objectionable as a matter of principle that young British boys and girls are being served up reheated intersectionalist slop. At least some people will actually leave these places with left wing ideas into senior professional positions. And even if Woke indoctrination is ultimately largely unsuccessful, a normatively left wing educational environment still has an inhibiting effect on the dissemination of right wing ideas within these schools. While some students will wholesale reject the politics thrusted upon them, the baseline for what is an ‘acceptable’ right wing opinion has been dramatically shifted to the left. Male students will sometimes tepidly voice support for Reform, but only do so on the basis of opposition to illegal migration or as being a preferential option to the Labour Party. I doubt this is a true expression of their real preferences (students who live in West London adjacent to social housing are regularly exposed to the reality of racialised criminality) but they feel like they cannot express their full sentiments for fear of institutional and social sanction. It is imperative that any future right wing government create an environment not just permissive but actively supportive of patriotic beliefs.

I do not, for the record, think private schools can or should be redeemed. Their ideological drift is reflective of the wider structural changes they have undergone. The emphasis on potential harm reduction at the expense of wider social trust, the therapeutic importance placed on the supposed harms of verbal expression contained within the culture of ‘safeguarding’ is implicitly left wing. The wider partisan orientation of these places naturally stems from these novel but increasingly foundational assumptions. More fundamentally these places wilfully embraced a price race driven in part by infrastructure projects designed to attract overseas. They have cut themselves off from a large part of their potentially supportive natural constituency. The future of the independent sector is quite dim, and in spite of the bemoaning of Labour policies, it is primarily a self-inflicted predicament.

So how should a Reform government approach the issue? Richard Tice has already committed the party to reversing the VAT charge on fees and even to offering tax breaks to support parents sending their children to them. This would be profound error and an unwarranted act of generosity to organisations totally underserving of it. Rather, a future government should weaponise financial incentives as a means of rewarding schools which align with a Meritocratic agenda. Firstly, the Independent Schools Inspectorate should be taken over directly by the Department for Education (which will have to undergo total personnel replacement) and will seek to substantively enforce the provisions of the Education Act of 1996 which prohibits the promotion of political partisanship. It would also be given authority to issue one off fines to schools falling short of expected standards. To be clear political impartiality does not just pertain to advocating for a vote for a particular party. It obviously includes the promotion of ‘Pride’ and ‘Black History Month’, as well as general narratives that Britain is or has been a ‘’structurally’‘ oppressive society.

It also includes the omission of certain facts, such as discussing the Rotherham rape gang crisis without reference to its racialised nature, or far example the supposed victimisation of minorities without reference to attacks on White people on either side of the Atlantic. For example, a history curriculum which discussed Civil Rights in the absence of the racial victimisation of White people in integrated high schools, or the KKK without referencing black nationalist serial killer gangs would result in a fine being issued. Similarly, a PHSE curriculum which discussed Stephen Lawrence but did not discuss Richard Everitt would result in sanctions being issued, as would references to ‘toxic masculinity’. It is of course impossible to systematically provide an account of what political partisanship might look like in every given situation, but the aim of this policy would be to have a disquieting effect on schools, forcing them to be more reserved in their promotion of certain ideological world views.

Finally, private schools should only have the VAT removed if they agree to ear mark a certain % of spaces for students admitted on academic scholarship. In an ideal world, this would be drawn from the top performing cohort of students taking some form of g-loaded cognitive assessment, which might be the same public examination used to assess people for selective secondary state maintained schools (which would also be available in evert county). However, in the absence of this being immediately achievable, schools should be required to administer some form of IQ testing for general applicants. Schools which refuse to administer this system will be subject to an escalation in VAT fees, until they either agree or go bankrupt. Schools which do agree will receive tax relief proportionate to the number of scholars they accept relative to their overall student body. The aim would be increase the proportion of scholars admitted every year, so that within the course of a decade, the large majority of students will be from selected backgrounds, with the government gradually taking on the financial burden of sustaining what would effectively be national academies of merit.

We should not be sad that privately funded education is a dying feature of England’s educational landscape. These places have never truly been the source of this country’s greatness, and to the extent that they have been, it was at a time when they more genuinely deserved the title of ‘public schools’. Private schools today stand as Woke, overendowed neurotic bastions of undeserved privilege, which allow the upper-middle classes to defect on their compatriots. We must end the social bifurcation of national schooling, and in doing so cleanse the educational sector of ideological bias. Affirming the principle of Merit as the foundation of British schooling could be a lasting achievement of the next government.