Dear fee-paying parents (if I may),
Forgive me for addressing you as one large, homogenous group. It sounds terribly pompous, doesn’t it – in the style of one of those endless missives St Paul kept sending to the Corinthians. Frankly, I think he should have put a sock in it after penning number one, giving us the best wedding reading there is and leaving it at that. But I’m getting distracted.
Much like the Corinthians, you might well be thinking, ‘Just sod off – you don’t know us’, and you’d be right. Though what I do know, as a former prep-school mother myself, is there are at least as many types of fee-paying parents as there have been education secretaries in the past ten years (also ten, in case you’ve lost count).
For some of you, I know Labour’s imposition of VAT on fees has been a minor irritant, equivalent to a fly landing on an elephant’s rump, in that awkward spot where it can’t quite flick it off with either tail or trunk. But then there are the fee-paying parents of children with Send profiles who feel they’d be toast in the local primary; parents who live in a black hole for decent state senior schools; parents on two PAYE incomes with a mortgage for whom there’s always too much month at the end of the money. I’m talking about those who’ve really had to dig deep to fund the increase.
