Lets Rethink Education: The Big Proposal

Introduction: What Would It Actually Take to Fund UK State Education at Private-School Levels?

A while ago, in my post Civilisation’s Real Cost: UK Tax vs. The Private Market Price Tag, I laid out something awkward: just how cheap public schooling is compared to private, and how much we pretend otherwise. That left me with an itch I couldn’t ignore.

What would it take to fund every child in Britain at private-school levels?

Not as a slogan, not as a wish, but in pounds, people, classrooms, bricks, boilers, and political courage. What would it actually look like if we stopped treating high-quality education as a luxury product for 7% of children and started treating it as a public good?

So yes — this post contains numbers. Quite a few. But stick with me. I promise every one of them takes us closer to a picture of what the UK could look like if it genuinely valued every child the way parents at Eton or St Paul’s value theirs.

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1. The Simple Proposal

Here it is in one sentence:

If we funded every child like a private school funds its pupils, we’d need an extra £140–180 billion per year.

That’s the kind of number that makes Chancellors twitch and think about lying down in a dark room. But before anyone reaches for smelling salts, let’s see where it comes from.

Because once you unpack it, the logic is surprisingly straightforward.

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1.1 How Many Children Are We Talking About?

Across the UK, there are about 10.6 million pupils in state and private schools combined. That’s our “upgrade” population.

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1.2 What Do We Spend on Them Today?

In England, the 2023–24 school budget comes out to:

• £46.7 billion in total
• £5,229 per pupil

Scale that to the UK and you get roughly £56bn a year spent on schools.

So right now we’re offering children an education worth about:

£5.2k a year.

That’s significantly cheaper than many people’s annual commute.

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1.3 What Does “Private-Level Funding” Mean in Reality?

Depending on whose glossy brochure you read, private day schools charge:

• £17,800 (Independent Schools Council)
• £22,100 (Guardian analysis)
• or a tidy round £20k on average

So let’s not overcomplicate it: £20,000 per pupil per year is the level we’re talking about.

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1.4 The Funding Gap (a.k.a. the “oh dear” moment)

The extra needed per pupil is:

£20,000 − £5,229 ≈ £14,800

And multiplied across 10.6 million pupils:

~£150 billion extra per year

With the realistic range:

• £136bn at £18k fees
• £179bn at £22.1k fees

So a safe, respectable working estimate is:

£140–180bn a year.

It is a big number. It is also the number required to treat state-educated children like private-educated ones.

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2. What Would That Do to Taxes?

UK tax revenues are currently around £950bn, or roughly 37% of GDP. If we add ~£150bn in new taxes, we rise to:

~43% of GDP

Which puts us near Denmark and Finland — countries that mysteriously manage to educate children, maintain buildings, and still function as advanced economies. Funny that.

For a crude household comparison:

£150bn / 28m households ≈ £5,300 per household

This isn’t how a real tax system works, of course — this is just a scale marker. The real system would (hopefully) hit higher earners harder and spare those struggling at the bottom.

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3. What Actually Changes in the Economy?

When you shift money at this scale, interesting things happen. Not the doom predicted by certain newspapers, but not a magic boom either.

Three big effects matter:

3.1 The Accounting Shuffle

Private schools currently generate about:

• £10bn in fee income
• £16.5bn in gross value added (GDP)

In a fully public model, that activity doesn’t vanish — it moves from the “private” column to the “public” one. GDP doesn’t really care. It just relabels the transaction.

This is why simplistic claims that “private schools boost GDP” fall apart — education is education, whether paid for by a parent or a government.

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3.2 A Redistribution, Not a Bonfire

Families currently paying private fees become better off. Everyone else pays more tax. GDP, being the cold-hearted thing it is, doesn’t track who feels better or worse — only the total.

So this is a political question, not an economic one.

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3.3 Short-Run GDP: A Slight Dip, Not a Collapse

Because taxes rise to fund the uplift, economists would predict a small short-term drag.

Tax multiplier: −0.4 Education spending multiplier (partial): +1.2 to +2.0

This roughly nets out as:

≈ −1% GDP in the short run

That’s it. Not catastrophic. Not transformative. Just a temporary wobble while the system adjusts.

The real story is what happens next.

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4. Long-Run Impact: The Human Capital Payoff

Education spending isn’t like buying lattes or fighter jets. It’s one of the few public expenditures that reliably produces long-term economic dividends.

Here’s what the research shows (OECD, IMF, Hanushek–Woessmann):

• A modest improvement in national test scores (¼ SD) → +3–6% GDP in the long run
• Higher average schooling → higher productivity and wages for decades
• Countries with smaller classes and strong teacher pipelines → faster GDP growth

Translated into UK terms:

If we genuinely improved education outcomes, long-run GDP could rise by 5–10% — £150–300bn per year.

That dwarfs the short-run dip and reframes the proposal for what it is:

An investment with a staggeringly high rate of return.

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In the next post I’ll take us through the Econmic mechanics .

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