Labour targets UK's 'unfair society', threatens private school tax breaks

By Andrew Osborn

LONDON (Reuters) – The opposition Labour party said on Tuesday it would cut tax breaks worth 700 million pounds to fee-paying schools if elected unless they helped raise standards in state schools.

In a speech that generated intense interest in a country which remains stratified by class, Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, said the divide between private and public education showed Britain was a country run for the benefit of the privileged few, not the many.

“These schools account for just 7 percent of all pupils in England yet provide more than 50 percent of our CEOs, Lords, barristers, judges, QCs, doctors, even journalists,” Hunt, who was himself privately-educated, said, according to a text of his speech released by his party.

“I want us to become a country where we no longer feel the need to point out how few state-educated members there are in the top universities, professions and sports teams because that description simply no longer rings true.”

If left-leaning Labour, narrowly ahead of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives in opinion polls, won next May’s general election, it would make tax breaks worth 700 million pounds between 2015 and 2020 contingent upon private schools acting to help state schools, Hunt said.

That would include providing teachers for state schools, helping disadvantaged state school pupils get into top universities, and running joint extra-curricular programmes with state schools, he added.

Estimates of how many schools benefit from the tax breaks range from 2,000 to over 3,000.

The right-leaning Daily Telegraph newspaper said Labour had declared a “class war” on private schools, while private school groups denounced the proposals, saying they already did a lot to help raise standards in state schools.

Fees for private schools often amount to tens of thousands of pounds a year per child.

Andrew Halls, the head of King’s College School in Wimbledon, southwest London, which charges around 20,000 pounds per year per child, told the Sunday Times this week that private schools had sharply increased fees because of demand from wealthy foreigners.

The higher fees were pricing out middle class British families who would end up relying on the state sector, he said.

“We have allowed the apparently endless queue of wealthy families from across the world knocking at our doors to blind us to a simple truth: we charge too much,” he said.

(Editing by Steve Addison)

Source Article from https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labour-targets-uks-unfair-society-threatens-private-school-150221041.html

Labour targets UK's 'unfair society', threatens private school tax breaks