Chaotic and noisy classrooms of 60 children free-flowing in shared spaces. No wrap-around care for working parents. A windowless isolation room for children who had misbehaved.
As I toured local state schools for my son, a few years ago, these are all the features I was disturbingly told about. I felt anxious and uncomfortable seeing this in action – and I certainly couldn’t see how this set up would work for our family. I knew then that I needed to look for another option.
So my husband and I enrolled him in our local independent prep school – and we’ve never looked back. We even enrolled our daughter in the same school two years later. But now it feels like Labour’s war on private schools by introducing 20% VAT is penalising us for wanting the best for our children.
Rachel Reeves recently said: ‘There’s an obsession with the 7% of children who are in our private schools. I’m more interested in the 93% of children who are in our state schools.’ When I read this, I felt angry, disillusioned, alienated, and othered.
While I understand that state schools are significantly under-resourced, this doesn’t need to be a competition. Children are not statistics, they are individuals – each with their own unique stories. Comments like this only divide communities by pitting us against one another.
Isn’t it in Rachel Reeves’ job description as an MP to be equally concerned about the education of all children in the UK? To me, this is the definition of reverse d.