The Politics of Portacabins
Private schools in the UK are no longer VAT exempt. As of 1st January 2025, 20% will now be levied on fee-paying schools providing education for pupils of a compulsory age. Since the 2024 general election, the policy proposal has been combed through, analysed and critiqued in a disproportionate number of media headlines. Much of the reporting focused on the plight of aspiring parents on whom the VAT would simply be transferred, putting a high-quality private education out of the reach of many middle-class parents. The IFS indicates that this will impact approximately 6% of children receiving education in the UK.
Providing context for the other 94%, the Financial Times recently reported on the current battle between fee-paying schools to attract high-paying customers with superior facilities and services. The race is on: with one business boasting access to 7 Steinway pianos for music students. Though these institutions have always sought to boast their superior education provision through smaller class sizes and easier access to elite universities, these are no longer sufficient for ‘higher tier’ parents in the profit-making education market. Steinways, it would seem, are the answer.
Less reported, and now buried in the day-to-day drama of the collision between US billionaires and British politics, was a small but significant education provision in the autumn budget.
Rachel Reeves announced £6.7 billion of capital investment for the Department of Education in 2025, including £1.4 billion to rebuild over 500 schools in the greatest need. Much of the focus concerned investment in educational infrastructure, or ‘crumbling classrooms’, after the new Chancellor added her own autobiographical motivation,
“When I was at secondary school, my sixth form was a couple of prefab huts in the playground. My school, like so many others, was rebuilt by the last Labour government.
But today, after 14 years of Tory government, progress has gone backwards, schools’ roofs are crumbling, and millions of children are facing the very same backdrop as I did.”
Provoking little outrage and almost no media commentary, this generally approved-of provision is largely uncontroversial, apart from where the money is coming from to pay for it. And yet, for precisely that reason, the Labour party have to work twice as hard to tell the story of why it matters.
This is not a question of political narrative or spin; it is how shared lived experience can and should influence policy for the better. It is also a question of taking up political space in the face of a loud and entitled opposition. There has never been a time that privileged, powerful, and wealthy people have not presumed to own the airwaves, only with more airwaves to own, the volume is now deafening. The story cannot compete with volume or rely on jargon, it must be real, because it is real for so many, myself included.
GCSE Maths, hut 10. Next to the higher-level maths group in hut 11. Old metal ‘heaters’ punctuated the sides of our cardboard cut-out classroom, showing no discernible attempt at working, nor the effort to try.
It was during fractions that it first occurred, I think, mid-way through the long winter term that our feigned concentration was interrupted by a loud noise from the neighbouring hut. Higher maths was doing star jumps to keep warm. Middle maths, as we were framed, were allowed no such privilege, our teacher something of a curmudgeon.
It was rumoured that the prefab huts had existed since the first world war, thus providing an educational setting to both my Grandma and I. They also offered the daily roulette of whether a slightly heavy-footed, pre-teen might put a limb through a decomposing floor. The only time they were a pleasant learning environment was on the first day of spring, when the air was girded with the scent of freshly cut grass – heavenly for all us without allergies, skin-peelingly awful for the rest.
The point is that some people have never run through the rain to English A-level in hut 13, and it shows, in policy choices and media discussions.
My school was a state grammar in a Conservative constituency – long acclaimed and critiqued as the middle class, academically selective filler for private schools - we were privileged. Yet, experiences like this, like hospital waiting times and increased food prices, and energy bills have been seen and felt and experienced by the majority of people who live in the UK. This is not an abstract idea, nor a fashionable policy, it is about making life better for the majority. And this is the first time in 14 years that the people leading the country have direct experience of this, and potentially the will to do something about it.
To succeed, both in governing and fending off the far right, Labour must take hold of the narrative. The engagement of these stories and the feelings associated with them are an unpopular and under-appreciated political tool. Yet, they better enable people to connect their lives with the policy that is being made, and have a hope for the future. Without it, the narrative will be co-opted by a far-right elite masquerading as working-class men, and pretending to care.