Mind the gap...
Excellent work from the IFS has found that the spending gap between private and state education is now 90%, ten years ago it was under 40%. Soaring private school fees and a 9% real terms cut in state school spending per student are the causes.
Ten years of Tory cuts and the private school sector is laughing. If you can find £13k per child after tax you can almost guarantee their future. How stupid do you have to be to fail at a school which is spending almost twice as much on educating you?
Along with the self confidence, manners and contacts that you will pick up, your chances of making it in life are pretty much assured.
The result is that the talents of the brightest in society are lost to the economy and themselves purely because of the wealth of their parents and the inadequacies of the state. The playing field is being tilted in favour of the rich and against the best interests of society.
If you want the best from the next generation you have to educate and train them all, the chances of improving productivity by cutting both is exactly zero.
More than that, if you want a country of real opportunity it is not enough for the brightest of poor students to succeed, nor even that all the children of the poor should have the same chance to succeed; it means that the stupid children of the rich should fail. That just doesn’t happen.
How many charming, confident but useless privately educated bosses do you know? Apart from the PM that is.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.