Eighteen months on from Labour’s reforms, many private schools are finding things hard. Government data released on June 4th showed pupil numbers in mainstream independent schools in England are down by 5% (about 27,000 pupils) this year. That follows a 2.8% fall in 2024-25, the first year after Labour came to power. The declines have come mainly from fewer children joining private schools, rather than from an exodus of existing pupils. They have been most pronounced outside London—perhaps because it is in poorer regions that parents have been stretching furthest to pay for private lessons. Exactly how far these declines have been driven by Labour’s policies is open to question. Some of it is doubtless because the total number of school- age children in Britain is dropping (by around 1.2% in England last year). And well before Labour arrived in government, rising living costs were forcing many parents to think hard about their outgoings. But even taking that into account, it seems the reforms are having a greater impact on enrolment than was predicted. Back in 2024 the government forecast that imposing VAT would leave the sector with 6% fewer pupils by the 2030s, compared with what would otherwise have happened. It may drive more shrinkage than that. A hot debate is whether these declines have begun pushing a lot of schools into bankruptcy. The government insists not: in fact, it says, more independent schools have opened than closed since its VAT policy was enacted. That is true, but misleading. The new openings are mostly of small “special” schools serving children with disabilities, for which there is booming demand. Fees for pupils in these institutions are largely paid by local authorities (which can claim back the VAT). Focus only on “mainstream” private schools, and a murkier picture emerges. People are still opening these (seven of the 18 to open since the start of 2025 list their religious ethos as “Islamic”). But the long-term trend is consolidation: between 2016 and 2025 the number of mainstream schools in England fell by 11%, while the number of pupils educated in them dropped by only a bit. Nearly 60 closed in 2025 (out of 1,600). That was more than in 2024, but about the same as in 2023, before Labour was elected. Tracking closures that have been announced or threatened so far this year does not— yet—suggest that 2026 is certain to be vastly worse.
Yet one recent change is very striking. The average size of the schools that go under seems to be jumping up. It has long been weeny schools, with as few as 50 pupils, that most often fail. But since January 2025 at least a dozen schools with more than 200 pupils have closed or announced that they are likely to do so—about as many as in the eight years that came before. If St Joseph’s does close, it will be one of the biggest to run aground for a decade. As a result, the number of children being affected by private-school closures is growing (see chart). And private schools are leaving bigger holes in local communities when they go. Do any of these trends imply that whacking private schools with VAT will not after all raise much money for government ones (Labour’s stated motivation for the policy)? That depends on whose modelling you trust. Perhaps the most pessimistic forecast comes from the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-tank. It reckons the policy would need to shrink private schools by only 10-15% for it to end up costing more money than it raises (both because of the price of enrolling fugitives in the state sector and because of wider impacts on the economy). Yet this relies on some bearish assumptions—for example, that lots of people laid off by retrenching schools will struggle to find new work. And that parents whose children have been priced out of private schools will choose to work many fewer hours in future, now that they need not stretch to pay fees.
Forecasts from the Institute for Financial Studies, another think-tank, are more optimistic. It has long argued that the policy will generate decent revenues regardless of how many pupils flee to government schools. The money their parents save will probably be spent on other goods and services that also bear VAT, it believes (this might be true even if it is stashed away or invested for a few years first). And it points out that the price of accommodating more pupils in the state sector might be lower even than it is calculating, given that demographic decline is already creating spare capacity in classrooms. There is a catch, all the same. It is that, even in the best case, taxing private lessons stands to raise sums amounting to only about 2% of what the government is already spending on state schools each year. For people who see independent schools as poisonous purveyors of privilege, this is a detail; shrinking the sector is the point. For everyone else, it looks like the government is causing a lot of hassle and heartache for a piddling sum.■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/06/04/the-impact-of-taxing-british-private- school-fees-starts-to-show
Build a prime minister Sir Keir Starmer is the politician voters asked for, not the one they need June 4th 2026 Ask a typical British voter to design a prime minister and they might pick one with a distinguished career in public service. They would probably prefer someone pragmatic over an ideologue. And they would certainly prefer someone serious (if boring) rather than a showman. Out of a line-up, they might pick a moderately handsome middle-aged man in a suit. It is not just Sir Keir Starmer’s profile that could have been designed by an opinion-poll respondent. His government has rigidly pursued the poll- derived priorities of a typical voter. The public approves of its stringent new regulations on private landlords, its expansion of employment rights and its tax raid on expensive homes. Rail nationalisation and minimum-wage increases have strong support in surveys. And when the government has
stepped out of line (such as cutting winter-fuel payments for pensioners), a U-turn has promptly followed. Voters want, voters get. The experiment in government-by-focus-group extends to social policy, too. By popular demand Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has squeezed net migration down to its lowest level in years. The government outlawed support for Palestine Action, a controversial protest group, and permanently banned the use of puberty blockers for trans children, in line with the public’s socially conservative instincts. To an uncanny degree Sir Keir has moulded himself and his policies to the desires of British voters. Yet they hate him. His approval rating is one of the lowest ever recorded for a prime minister, approaching the disastrous levels of Liz Truss. “Build-a- PM”, the focus-group approach to governing, simply doesn’t work. You might argue that this is the result of incompetence, or the cost of governing at a difficult moment. But Sir Keir had negative ratings even before he came to power. In 2024 Labour managed just 34% of the vote in an election fought against the quivering wreck of the post-Truss Tory party. Strikingly, polls show that the voters who supposedly stand to gain from Labour’s policies have been the most eager to desert it. Low earners have left faster than high earners; private renters have flocked to the Greens; and trade unionists have abandoned the most pro-union government in generations. The fact that net migration has fallen to the lowest level since 2012 (excluding the pandemic years) hasn’t dented the rise of Nigel Farage and his right-wing populist Reform UK party. Voters get, voters don’t say thank you. Instead, Sir Keir joins the long list of politicians who have lost themselves searching for the electoral equivalent of El Dorado. Opinion polls in many Western democracies have shown that most voters are economically leftist and socially illiberal. This quadrant is well-populated by voters and scarcely represented by politicians. Those who try to fill the gap tend to fail. Advocates of this approach often hailed the long-ruling Danish Social Democrats, whose migration-sceptical centre-left posture had supposedly crushed the far right. Inconveniently, the Social Democrats won their lowest share of the vote in over a century in March, while the anti-immigrant
Danish People’s Party made inroads. Sir Keir has arrived at El Dorado to find that there is no gold. Chasing polls is a recipe for poor (and therefore ultimately unpopular) government. One reason is that it is often a mistake to take polls at face value. Ask voters about their preferences on migration, for example, and they will come up with proposals that would make Mr Farage blush. Yet many of the same voters tell pollsters they worry that Reform is too extreme (or even racist). During Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party his supporters clung to polls showing voters backed his hard-left economic initiatives. Yet plenty of them thought Mr Corbyn was a mad communist. (He led Labour to its worst result in 84 years.) The bigger reason is that the public respects leadership, not followership. Walter Bagehot, the Victorian journalist and essayist after whom this column is named, wrote that voters “did not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their ‘betters’ to represent them.” There is nothing incongruous about voters having one set of opinions and preferring another from their political leaders. People rightly expect their politicians to be more virtuous than them. Is it hard to believe they respect politicians who are more moderate than they are, too? There is little evidence that today’s voters are notably different to the ones who elected Sir Tony Blair three times in a row, or David Cameron twice. Neither of the two longest-lasting prime ministers of the 21st century were shy about presenting themselves as centrists. Nor did they feel obliged to substitute public opinion for public policy. Nowadays Sir Tony is a bogeyman, especially among his own Labour tribe. Sir Keir and his prospective successors fell over themselves to denounce his essay, published on May 26th, which called for a return to “radical centrism”. Sir Tony’s treatise advocated embracing artificial intelligence, deregulating the economy and cutting welfare spending. What sets his intervention apart is that it is an ideological approach to Britain’s problems. He is right that moderate politics need not be a strange grab-bag of focus- group-approved policies of the sort offered by Sir Keir—a mix that is despised in practice. Centrism can have a clear purpose.