U.K. Schools Are Becoming Luxury Products for Foreign Elites
The U.K. is facing a serious education crisis. In February, the Labour government scrapped the Latin Excellence Programme, a scheme that funded Latin education in state schools, leaving some students without a teacher just months before their GCSEs (the exams all U.K. students take at age sixteen). There was outcry on both sides of the political aisle. Apart from the practical advantages of Latin (it is an excellent basis for learning other European languages and is useful for anyone in medical or scientific fields), it was the common European language of scholarship and learning for centuries. Labour have sent a loud and clear message to those children in the state education system: This linguistic and cultural heritage is not for you. It is only for those who have the means to pay.
Other Labour policies are ensuring that fewer and fewer middle-class families have the means to choose a better education for their children, regardless of their willingness to make financial sacrifices. Certain British schools (Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and the like) are globally recognized and have long been eye-wateringly expensive, derided by many on the left as bastions of privilege. But the reality is that most privately educated students in the U.K. attend solid mid-tier schools, which offer a structured, well-rounded education rooted in intellectual inquiry, discipline, and their cultural heritage. Sending children to these institutions is an expense that many socially mobile and aspiring parents, with careful planning and some financial sacrifices, have been able to manage. But as the Labour party promised in its campaign, 20 percent VAT was added to the education and boarding fees charged by private schools from January onward. Additionally, starting in April, all private schools will lose their charitable status, which previously provided substantial tax breaks. This move effectively prices out many of the middle-class British families that these institutions once served, meaning that schools must seek out wealthy international students who can afford full board and tuition.
The result: The British middle-class is being pushed out of its own institutions, and private schools are morphing into luxury services for foreign elites. Many of the bigger-name schools have successfully expanded abroad. Dulwich, Harrow, and others have satellite campuses in China, the Middle East, and beyond. The demand from international clients is so high that consultants in Russia and China charge exorbitant fees to match children with the right U.K. schools and prepare them for admissions tests. But it now looks like these international elites will become the core beneficiaries of English schooling. This undermines both social mobility and the country’s own stake in its education system.
I recently spent some time as a teacher at an independent school in England and observed first-hand the impact of this (then still forthcoming) VAT policy. Many of my best students were local, the children of doctors, dentists, and small business owners, whose families made various financial sacrifices, or pooled together with grandparents, to send two or three of their children to the school. With the news of the VAT increase, many of these families were reconsidering, calculating whether they could take on the rising fees or whether they should switch to state schools.
But, on a more fundamental level, I left asking myself: For those willing and able to pay, is there even anything left worth paying for? On the surface, the school had all the hallmarks of British tradition: a neat quad, navy uniforms, weekly chapel services under the watchful eyes of teachers swathed in academic gowns. But beneath this façade, the principles that once underpinned British education had eroded. The school paid lip service to its historically Christian identity and holistic education, while obsessing over spreadsheets of predicted grades and planning on how to market itself more aggressively to prospective Chinese clients.
Under pressure from middle management to make the school more financially lucrative, and from cultural campaigners pushing for a more progressive approach, little remained inside the classroom that could be termed a decent education. Government and cultural initiatives continue to push students away from learning the foundations of Western culture: history, philosophy, classical literature, subjects that ought to be part of their cultural heritage. While teaching a class on modern literature, I found myself having to explain the most basic biblical references. Despite them attending an ostensibly Christian school, many students had never heard of the Garden of Eden or the idea of the Virgin Birth.
During a staff meeting on teaching styles, a presenter displayed a slide declaring the Socratic method “old-fashioned” and “low impact.” I personally found it an incredibly effective teaching format with my older students, one that provided them with a dynamic sense of their own intellectual agency, one which no number of interactive PowerPoints could replace. Additionally, when making reading selections for some of our younger students, teaching children about gender identity and neurodivergence was deemed more important than exposing them to great literature.
One thing also became painfully clear to me as I taught classes ranging from ages twelve to sixteen: Children know when they are being patronized and deprived of material with real substance. They know when a lesson has been shoved in to satisfy a policy. They know when a classic has been taken off the reading list and replaced with something random but politically progressive. And they resent it. They will take this resentment with them into adulthood, wondering why a generation that had access to great languages, literature, and thought deprived them of it.
British schools were once among the best in the world. Now, they risk becoming empty shells, still commanding high prices, but no longer serving the nation’s children in the way they once did. While I grew fond of my students and developed great respect for many of my teaching colleagues who are doing their best in a system that undermines them, I left my stint as a teacher determined to home-school my future children for a significant portion of their education. Home-schooling has never been as common in the U.K. as in the U.S., but figures show that the number of children moving to home education in 2023–2024 has doubled or even tripled in some regions since 2019–2020. Part of this shift can be attributed to the pandemic, but it is also symptomatic of broader failures on all fronts of the education sector. State schools continue to decline, private schools are becoming financially out of reach, and those institutions that wish to survive are pivoting to wealthy international clients. But even for those who can afford it, the fundamental question remains: What exactly are you paying for?
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