Would calling for a ban on private school be electoral suicide?

If I’d had a vote in the last election I wouldn’t have voted Labour. I thought its flagship policies were too boring. Any government will invest money, regulate business and adjust taxes to nudge Britain in the direction it wants. Freezing energy bills may have been a good course of action, but what will win my vote are the policies that make a lasting impact. For me, Labour’s choice of leader is insignificant if the party’s biggest promises aren’t reformist and innovative.

Jeremy Corbyn may be on the left, but that doesn’t make him radical. As a 17-year-old student who’s experienced both an Ofsted-failed comprehensive and an elite public school franchise abroad, I know that British education has some serious flaws. Corbyn’s big ideas here, a National Education Service and scrapping tuition fees, are hardly revolutionary. He will pump money into education ‘from cradle to grave’. Lifelong learning is great and costs should not bar young people from university, but money alone cannot fix a system where the 7% of students who attended private school make up more than 40% of the students in our best universities.

Tristram Hunt last year proposed axing tax breaks for private schools. If Labour wants to make a real difference, get rid of private schools completely. This isn’t pure ideology and it isn’t hard left – it’s just radical, and there are solid arguments for it. At present private schools do nothing for our nation. They enforce class division by segregating the affluent from the poor, they destroy social mobility by allowing those with money to get ahead of those without and they exacerbate the problems in our state sector by removing the impetus for improvement. The private and state sectors do not even compete at the moment; they simply cater for different markets. Without private schools, businesses will lobby harder for better state education and middle-class parents will hold their schools to account. Is a ban on private schools the right thing to do? Yes.

I’m not saying that this is an easy solution. There never is one. New challenges will have to be overcome: the range in the quality of state schools will likely increase, demand for the best performing schools will rise (along with nearby house prices) and making sure that the whole state sector improves as private schools join it will still be problematic. There will be great opposition, but, once the arguments are laid clearly, 93% of Britain immediately stands to gain. Taxing private schools could be the first step, after which the government could utilise positive discrimination (a strategy which Labour has already used to improve gender equality) and allocate a minimum proportion of university places to state schools. From there a merger of sixth-form education, a suggestion of Alan Bennett, could be the first step in a process of gradual reform. Countries like France can stop their private schools from drastically outperforming their state schools. Could a ban on private schools here be done fairly? It’s not impossible.

If no party were willing to examine bold ideas such as this, we would never have had an NHS. It’s a vision that’s brave, idealistic and needs a hard sell, but it’s also the kind of policy that can harness Britain’s imagination and creativity, driving it do better. If Labour was determined and pragmatic in how it applied ideas such as this, rather than making the party unelectable, it may well be the inspiration that disillusioned voters are looking for. This leadership election is an opportunity for the party to decide what it wants its future identity to be. Above degrees of left and right, above its choice of leader, above party divisions – it should focus on being ambitious.