The New Statesman Debate | This house believes private schools should be abolished

Recorded: Sat 26 Apr 2025

Duration: 1 hr

The New Statesman Debate | This house believes private schools should be abolished

Spring 2025

Seven per cent of British children attend private school – a tiny minority – and yet they retain a grip on our elite institutions. The latest figures show that 65% of judges, 44% of newspaper columnists and 23% of MPs were independently educated. It’s a divided, divisive system that perpetuates inequality, and charging VAT on fees, as Labour have done, won’t fix it. Fee-paying schools, however, do not merely cater for the privileged few, but hard-working aspirational parents who want the best for their children. They also allow for a quality that is essential in all aspects of raising children: choice. Is this two-tier system an archaic injustice that needs total reform? Or is it the route to a better education for all?

For the motion
Danny Dorling: Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and author of Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s next generation
Terri White: writer, columnist, presenter, investigative journalist and author of Coming Undone
Aaron Reeves: Professor of Sociology at LSE and author of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite

Against the motion
Mona Siddiqui: academic, broadcaster and Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh
Julie Robinson: Chief Executive Officer at the Independent Schools Council and former headteacher
Baroness Sally Morgan: Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and former Chair of Ofsted

Chaired by Hannah Barnes, New Statesman Associate Editor