A ban removes a choice from parents without improving the schools that remain

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the case for abolition rests on a transfer that would not actually occur. The hope is that closing private schools would move their resources, their pupils' families and their political weight into the state system and raise it. Proponents argue that resources attached to a family do not transfer when an option is withdrawn, and that what a parent was willing to spend on a school they chose is not what they will hand to one assigned to them. Proponents argue that the likely substitutions are well understood and all worse. Families who can pay would compete for houses in the catchment areas of the strongest state schools, bidding up prices until those places were effectively sold through the property market rather than through fees. Others would buy private tutoring, which is unregulated, invisible and attaches directly to the individual child. Others again would educate their children abroad or at home. Each of these routes, proponents argue, delivers the same advantage less visibly and with less public accountability than a school that can be inspected, taxed and required to publish results. They add that the costs of a ban are certain while its benefits are speculative. A substantial number of pupils would have to be absorbed by a state sector that has not been built to receive them, with the disruption falling on the pupils already in it as much as on the new arrivals. Proponents argue that a reform whose gains depend on a behavioural response nobody can demonstrate, and whose costs land immediately on children, is a bad reform. The argument concludes that abolishing private schools would remove a parental choice and leave the common system no better.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the substitution argument proves too much, since it would defeat any attempt to limit any advantage, and that the proper response to tutoring and catchment-area sorting is to regulate those too rather than to preserve the most entrenched form of the problem. They add that the transfer need not be voluntary, because abolition would be accompanied by taxation and funding decisions made in a political environment where the influential families now have children in state schools, which is the whole point. On the disruption, critics argue that a cost arising once during a transition is not a reason to keep an arrangement permanently.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The transfer need not be voluntary, since abolition would be accompanied by taxation and funding decided in a political environment where influential families now have children in state schools. [Rejecting P2] That advantage can be bought by other means is a reason to regulate tutoring and catchment-area sorting as well, not a reason to preserve the most entrenched form of it. [Rejecting P3] A cost that arises once during a transition is not a reason to keep an arrangement permanently, and transitions on this scale have been managed before in other parts of public provision. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that abolition must be planned and funded carefully, not that it would leave the common system no better.