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EDITOR'S PICK
Good morning from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
When the controversial VAT hike on independent schools was first introduced, Labour said the measure was designed to make more funding available for more teachers. Most people already knew this was a smoke-and-mirrors excuse as the real reason was political class warfare – especially on the aspirant and hard-working professional classes – at its most naked, egregious and often hypocritical.
"Private schools prop up the class system in society," said Labour’s Diane Abbott, while also admitting she sent her son to a fee-paying school.
The latest private school closure and pupil drop-out figures last week from Independent Schools Council, basing their findings on a survey of its own member schools, make for celebratory, lip-smacking reading if you are a signed-up Labour class warrior – such as John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington – who believes private education is immoral. He has backed a ban on the existence of any private schools arguing that "private schools don't need to exist, and should not exist."
Labour's Waterloo Victory
According to a report in The Times, the number of pupils in independent schools is down by more than 30,000, with some year groups reporting a 7% drop in attendance. However, these findings disguise an even bleaker national picture. The Department for Education published its own figures revealing a more than 7.5% fall in numbers — down by 43,126 pupils since the VAT raid was implemented. That’s almost as many as the combined forces of French and British forces killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (the saying that the battle was won on the "Playing Fields of Eton" is apocryphal).
On the other side of the fee-paying green baize door, such statistics make for chilling reading if you are a parent with children in private education where fees have been quietly rising stratospherically in the last decade, even before the VAT raid.
In what used to be called "Upper Middle Class" circles, the subject of crippling school fees has almost become verboten on the county dinner party subject, along with tumbling property prices. Nobody wants to know—or speak about—the subject, as the termly casualty numbers are often just too close to home. Every time a parent reads on a school WhatsApp group about another child not returning for the next term, it feels a little like surviving an after-battle roll call.
The irony of the Labour tax raid is that one result has been a squeezing of the middle-aspirant-class that has made private education even more elitist, exclusive and a preserve of the truly rich. The VAT school wars have, if anything, promoted more education inequality. As a bursar of a top independent school put it to me recently at a drinks party: "For 20% of parents, they never think about the fees. The other 80% think of almost nothing else."
But it also looks like the result of this class war has not quite been what Labour intended, or hoped for: namely, the Death of the Private School by a Thousand Cuts.
Indeed, many top-tier schools continue to do well. Yes, according to the Independent Schools Council, some 105 private schools – especially smaller prep schools –have closed since the VAT hike.
But what has also happened is that, in order to survive, the entire character of many well-known and respected British schools has been irrevocably changed by having to accept ever-increasing numbers of “international” pupils, often Chinese or Asian, who keep up the boarding numbers and also pay more than British pupils.
Another Continent
The world of private education today is, indeed, very much Another Country. Only, err..it's not even British anymore. A report into the new demographic of UK independent schools in the Telegraph has made this clear. Entitled, “Top boarding schools ‘increasingly not British at all’, the report reveals that the falling numbers of British pupils has been countered with “a surge in the number of foreign students”, according to Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust and one of the UK’s top educational philanthropists.
Sir Peter said that British children were being “priced out” of boarding schools, with their places taken by international pupils. Sir Peter, a former adviser to Sir Tony Blair, said that this part take-over over many more famous English public schools was directly as a result of Labour’s “narrow-minded and mean-spirited” VAT raid on private schools, which had handed an advantage “to our foreign competitors.”
Almost 40 % of boarders in 2025 were international compared with just over 20 per cent in 2005, according to an analysis of ISC censuses over the last two decades.
Having recently toured several well-known independent schools as a potential parent, I've seen the glaring evidence with my own eyes. In some classrooms we toured, in subjects such as maths, the ratio of Chinese pupils to British was 90%. In 2025, the Telegraph reports, China had 10,959 pupils in British boarding schools, up from 4,753 pupils in 2014. There were also 7,226 pupils from Hong Kong.
This is because many wealthy Chinese and Asian parents have taken a “luxury brand” approach to education, with top British historic schools like Eton, Winchester, St Paul’s and Westminster now being seen as iconic global brands to have on a C/V rather a place to learn, acquire “friends for life” and work as cultural and social institutions as much as educational hothouses. Today, certain high-profile prep schools are now Eton/Winchester/Westminster cramming factories with princely boarding fees to match.
Yes, British parents and children are being squeezed out by VAT hikes but the price being paid for this ever-increasing Chinese/Asian take-over of top-tier British independent educational establishments (and don't forget Chinese investors own some of the private school groups) is worse than people realise. In some cases, education is being reduced to a private equity play where profit is the driving factor.
The Walk Out
The story of St. Michael's College in Tenbury is a cautionary tale about such motives. After the historic independent boarding school closed in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a buyout backed by the California-headquartered, American-Chinese SIAS Education Group.
Reports said a fortune was spent refurbishing the school like an Oxford campus - with millions invested in new computer buildings - but after a brief reopening, the investors just walked away, leaving fully equipped new classrooms entirely empty. The owners cited a hostile economic climate for the independent sector—including operating losses, high employment costs, and broader pressures—which made the project financially unviable.
Yet it seems that the Chinese haven't quite given up. An Etonian friend recently sent me a formal Eton College letter sent out by Headmaster Simon Henderson, announcing the Roll of boys who had won King’s Scholarships – such as those won by Harold Macmillan and Boris Johnson. Of the 14 names, only one, the heroic "H Moore" of Summer Fields – had a name that sounded remotely British. The vast majority appear to be Chinese/Asian including one boy whose school was listed as "Home Tutor, Overseas."
The truth is that it is lazy and misleading to simply blame Labour’s VAT surge on the decline and fall of numbers of British pupils in private education. The reality is that the system was already becoming unsustainable and unaffordable for an entire generation of toffs, lawyers, soldiers, judges, doctors, gentleman farmers, local businessmen, military types and other professional classes who had taken their private school education from the 1960s to the 1980s largely for granted, and expected their children to repeat it.
Britain’s independent school eco-system was in danger of becoming largely unsustainable years before Labour abolished its charitable status for tax raid purposes. The reason many schools are closing or in trouble is that many private schools saddled themselves with debt in a crazy arms race for “facilities,” while also pushing up school fees and teacher salaries to match the state sector.
A friend of mine who I hired as a journalist on the Catholic Herald a few years told me that when he took on his new staff job, he was taking a £40k pay-cut having been paid over £80k a year to be an interim acting deputy head at a London state school. And he didn’t even teach any classes!
It was notable that when Simon “trendy” Henderson recently announced he was stepping down as Eton's headmaster after 14 years, he was being paid a humble £380,000 a year. When I went to my rural boarding prep school in Shropshire in the mid-1970s the fees were £440 a term. Now they are over £13,000 for full boarding. Long gone are the days when religious schools could keep costs down as most pupils were taught by monks who were paid nothing.
Decline and Fall
Increases in National Insurance, the "safeguarding" industry, and the need for health and safety and HR officers, as well as dedicated "Special Needs" departments have all fuelled rising private education costs.
This is compounded by a rise in cash-strapped parents joining the school staff—as teachers, school secretaries, PR and marketing wizards, receptionists, registrars and the like —to get up to 50% fee discounts. Many private schools operate a subculture —a "school within a school" —where teachers with children enrolled receive partial fee subsidies, with the remaining costs passed on to other parents.
One day, a former headmaster or governor, maimed in action during the VAT wars, will write a bestselling expose about the slow death of the UK independent school system as we knew it.
But the Decline and Fall of private education did not all begin in January 2015 when the VAT hike was first introduced. The stories of profligate Olympic indoor swimming pools, new luxury boarding houses, new concert halls, all-weather sports fields, and En Tout Cas Tennis courts - not to mention the subsidised school ski trip jollies to Klosters - will be shocking.
But what is even more disturbing, in my mind, as a parent who has seen fees rocket as a consequence of the Chinese invasion, is that Provosts, governors and headmasters of leading independent schools need to wake up to the reality of what has really been going on: namely that it is not so much a Chinese take-over of British education but a take-away, or exit.
After elbowing and paying their way through the very best educational traditions that an English education can offer, the tragedy is that the vast bulk of these "scholars" - or possible spies - will not even bother to stay in Britain; they will use their blue-riband English education to get into an Ivy League American university. We will never see them again, let alone at a reunion. It's an education brain drain that needs to be paused and re-thought.
We had few such luxury or state-of the-art facilities at my school in the seventies and it made no difference to the idyllic experience I had of endless cricket, golf, skateboarding, ping pong, tennis and Sunday lunch "down by the pool" with a gristly slice of cold roast beef in a sandwich soaked with Hellman's mayonnaise, along with a packet of crisps. Bliss.
But the moral of the cautionary tale is that the end was in sight years ago as fees soared way above inflation and debts rose in a frenzy of new facilities and entitlement. Costs spiralled as building projects ran out of control, and roll numbers began to fall; a classic case of a 500 year educational system going bankrupt "gradually and then suddenly," to paraphrase Hemingway.
As with the sinking of the Titanic, the heads and governors on the top deck were repeatedly warned about Labour's fatal icebergs ahead but the champagne corks kept popping and the band played on regardless of at least six radio warnings. If they are honest, many schools only have themselves to blame.
Lord of the Files: Take 2
Lord Mandelson has found himself in the headlines again, with the 'Mandelson Files' revealing the true extent of his involvement within the highest tiers of the Labour Party, writes our Westminster correspondent Lucy Carrier-Pilkington.
The latest tranche of information reveals Global Counsel’s fingerprints and influence since the early months of the Labour administration. The files, which consumed thousands of hours of work by officials and more than £1 million worth of the taxpayers’ money, expose the deep-rooted influence of the disgraced peer in Westminster.
Global Counsel, which went into administration in February this year, was a strategic advisory and lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson in 2010. The company provided advice to high-profile clients including Chinese-owned TikTok, UK pharmaceutical firm GSK, and the controversial US tech firm Palantir. Other firms included JP Morgan and Shell.
The company went bust after it lost a series of important accounts over the peer’s relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson, who denies any wrongdoing, resigned from the board in 2024 but kept shares until February 2026. That month, Companies House administrators reported that the firm had liabilities totalling £4,596,149 – even after £2.7m of assets had been accounted for.
Now, claims of a breach in government sleaze rules are growing louder as material from the Mandelson files has revealed the lobbying firm’s undeclared involvement with the Labour Party.
It has also been uncovered that Chancellor Rachel Reeves solicited advice from Mandelson while he was chair of the company in November 2024. Emails show the chancellor’s chief of staff contacting the peer and asking him to “pop” into the Treasury to brief her about trade ahead of a meeting the following day. But no record of the meeting was publicly disclosed despite the ministerial code demanding government departments to publish details of ministers’ meetings with external organisations and individuals.
Conservatives have accused the Treasury of “breaking its own transparency rules to allow ministers to receive advice from Mandelson while he was actively seeking to advance the interests of clients through Global Counsel”. The Treasury responded stating: “These claims are nonsense. Treasury ministers comply with all relevant guidance.”
In addition, WhatsApp messages from the files reveal a meeting between the peer and Lord Livermore, the financial secretary to the Treasury. This meeting was also undeclared. At the time, Lord Livermore’s role included leading the Treasury’s work on growth, the digital economy and net zero. Mandelson arranged for himself and Lord Livermore to meet “away from HMT [the Treasury]” and added “I will try and get X [redacted Global Counsel staff member] to join because he has ideas.” The lobbying firm’s clients at the time included OpenAI and Sizewell C, both of which had a strong interest in Lord Livermore’s work.
Correspondence from the files does little to flatter the Labour government, exposing several senior officials’ view on the administration. The most embarrassing is Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, saying in a WhatsApp message to Mandelson that: “Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”. They’re asking the wrong questions.”
The Mandelson files contain series of revelations. However, they do not unveil the whole picture. Mandelson has refused to hand over his personal mobile phone for investigation, and there is evidence that information was actively wiped from the record through disappearing messages and deliberately deleted correspondence.
Cabinet of the Talents?
Following President Trump’s example, Sir Tony Blair argued earlier this year that government departments should be led by ministers recruited from outside of Parliament. Then Reform UK unveiled plans to give ministers greater powers over senior civil service appointments. At the same time, the government continued advancing its own reform agenda, including efforts to bring more outside expertise into Whitehall.
Different parties and politics. And yet on this point they all seem to be unexpectedly in agreement: British government will be improved if more outsiders are brought in beyond Westminster and Whitehall to help run the state.
In an essay written for us by Dr Nada Kakabadse, the Professor of Policy, Governance and Ethics at Henley Business School, she argues that this diagnosis could "well be right."
Dr Nada shows, indeed, how Britain has attempted to bring more external expertise into government since the Fulton Report in 1968. More than half a century later, the Institute for Government still concludes that Whitehall struggles to attract, retain and properly use specialist knowledge from wider society.
The evidence is surprisingly clear. Some external appointments have transformed public services, while others have become expensive disappointments. The difference rarely comes down to individual talent alone.
Read her essay here.
William.cash@macemagazine.com
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From the Archive
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