IN THE last school year total school spending per pupil across Britain was around £6,600. A bit more in Scotland. A bit less in Wales.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, total school spending per pupil in England has fallen by 8 per cent in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20.
The bulk of these funding cuts were driven by a 57 per cent reduction in spending per pupil on services provided by local authorities and a more than 20 per cent cut in sixth-form funding per pupil.
The School Cuts website (schoolcuts.org.uk) usefully brings us up to date on the future effect of the education spending plans of the two main parties and the Lib Dems.
Of course, the per pupil expenditure on education is a key election issue and the comparative figures shine a powerful light on the priorities of the contending class forces and the parties that approximate to their interests. But there is more to education politics than money.
It may have escaped your notice that our present Prime Minister Boris Johnson was educated at Eton College. Fees for boys attending Eton are £14,167 per half.
In the wacky world of our over-privileged elite, a “half” is a school term. There are three of them a year.
This divergence between language and meaning may go to explain the more dysfunctional aspects of the financialised system of contemporary capitalism which these people favour.
Even the most innumerate of the educated fools that the elite system of private education not infrequently produces can work out that a school with a near £45,000 per pupil income is likely to be putting more resources into educating its charges than one with seven times less.
But the main purpose of the private education system is not simply to provide a good education — although it does educate some formidably clever and capable individuals — but to shape successive generations of a ruling-class elite in the ideology which supports their system and insert them into a vast network of privilege and power the better to maintain that system.
So powerful is this imperative to stratify that around dozen of the more prestigious (and expensive) schools form an Eton Group, a second division of 18 make up the Rugby Group, while a host of “minor” public schools take up the slack.
Just under 10 per cent of Britain’s school population are currently unequally educated in this sector but not as unequally as the rest of us.
We can think of Labour’s radical education proposals as emergency treatment to swiftly compensate for decades of underinvestment in state schooling.
This is all to the good and it can restore and improve on Labour’s past record. There are many criticisms to be made of of New Labour but there really was a serious effort to put in more money and to institute some valuable changes in the children’s, families and schools strategy and in staff planning.
Carrying through education changes is a complex business and Labour is right to take its time and work to a careful list of priorities — getting rid of Sats, reforming the inspection system, chipping away at the fragmentation of the school system with a step by step restoration of the local education authority role, a new national curriculum and — for starters — a squeeze on the charitable status and sectional tax privileges which feather-beds private education.
But beyond these first steps — and sooner or later — selection and sectional privilege must end with a real integrated system of comprehensive education which gives all our children the best start in life.
