Sefton Labour Party backed the motion at this week’s Labour Party Conference would allow a Labour government to seize the “endowments, investments and properties of private schools”. [1]
Effectively this means that the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party want to see Sefton schools like Merchant Taylors, and St Mary’s closed and their assets given away.
Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Bootle, Rebecca Hanson, has branded this a Stalinist solution that will not fix education inequality.
“I’ve spent my life working with the educationally disadvantaged. I am passionate about policy that restores parents’ confidence in state schools. As a parent of state-schooled children, I am grateful to able to focus my time and energy on improving our society instead of worrying about school fees.”
“But this Soviet-style confiscation proposal from the Labour Party is an own goal. Such a heavy-handed, ham-fisted approach just means that councils, the courts and school governors get tied up in legal battles over playing fields and buildings rather than focusing on teaching children.”
“Labour’s badly-copied policy on Ofsted is similarly incoherent. Lib Dems will improve the regulation of education by ending a culture of unaccountable regulation and inappropriate state interference in schools. Labour policy is simply an expression of their view that state control is always good. Yet again they just haven’t through it through.”
By contrast, the Liberal Democrat’s comprehensive education reform policy, voted on by members at our 2018 conference in Southport, aims to see every child empowered. [2]
Rebecca Hanson MA(Cantab) MEd. taught in secondary schools with many challenges before going on to lecture in Mathematics Education at Manchester Metropolitan University and of the Open University. She served on the national committee of the Liberal Democrats Education Association for three years and specialises in the development of pubiic sector regulation policy.
Footnotes:
[1] Full Text Submitted by local CLP and others:
“Conference resolves: • To include in the next Labour Party general election manifesto a commitment to integrate all private schools into the state sector. This would include, but is not limited to: • Withdrawal of charitable status and all other public subsidies and tax privileges, including business rate exemption. • Ensure universities admit the same proportion of private school students as in the wider population (currently 7%) • Endowments, investments and properties held by private schools to be redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions.”
[2] The full liberal democrat policy can be downloaded, by anyone, here: Every Child Empowered: Education for a changing world – Policy Paper 128