The steady drumbeat of private school closures across England is becoming impossible to ignore.
In the Cotswolds, Rendcomb College, founded more than a century ago, has announced that it will shut its doors this summer, forcing around 380 pupils to find new schools.
In Bath, the Royal High School prep department, tracing its origins back to the Victorian era, is to be closed and reorganised. Palmers Green High, in north London, has also confirmed it is consulting on plans to shut this week.
Elsewhere, long established institutions from Wiltshire to the capital have entered consultation, sold land or collapsed into administration.
More than 100 schools have now been forced to close since Labour began imposing 20 per cent VAT on school fees in January 2025, pushing many children into a state system already struggling to find places.
Individually, each case comes wrapped in cautious language about demographics, restructuring or long term sustainability. Collectively, however, they coincide with a single, dramatic policy shift, Labour’s decision to impose 20 per cent VAT on private school fees, alongside the removal of business rates relief and higher employer national insurance contributions. Governors and headteachers have increasingly been blunt that these changes are central to their calculations.
Rendcomb College’s board spoke of an “economic situation facing independent schools across the country” and warned that the school would no longer be financially viable. Notable alumni include Richard Dunwoody, the retired National Hunt jockey, David Vaisey, the historian, and Roger Gorman, the tech entrepreneur.
The Royal High’s leadership, in a letter to parents reported by national newspapers, pointed directly to the new tax regime and rising costs, saying their cost base had grown faster than pupil numbers while birth rates fell. Warminster School, Bishopstrow College and Palmers Green High have all told similar stories this week, couched in managerial prose but shaped by the same pressure.
Opposition politicians have seized on the pattern. Conservative figures such as Saqib Bhatti and Andrew Murrison have accused Labour of waging an ideological campaign against parental choice and aspiration, arguing that closures disrupt children’s lives and push more pupils into already stretched state schools. Local councillors in affected areas have warned of wider economic fallout, from staff losing homes to villages hollowed out by the disappearance of major employers.
The government insists the policy is pragmatic rather than punitive. Ministers say ending what they describe as tax breaks for private education will raise £1.8 billion a year by the end of the decade, money earmarked for improving outcomes for the vast majority of children educated in the state sector. Critics counter that any gains are offset when displaced pupils require publicly funded places, and when schools that once paid taxes and attracted overseas families vanish altogether.
Fuel has been added to the row by past remarks from senior Labour figures. Ellie Reeves, now party chair and a Cabinet Office minister, said in a 2019 podcast that, given a free hand, she would abolish private schools because she believed they divided communities. Her sister, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, has previously described some private school parents as “snobs” in a magazine interview. Although Labour leaders reject claims that VAT on fees is driven by hostility to the sector, such comments are regularly cited by opponents as evidence of a deeper animus.
Legal challenges are now under way, with parents mounting a judicial review of the tax on human rights and equality grounds. Around twenty schools, including Fulneck School in the Chancellor’s own constituency, have already shut or announced plans to do so since the levy was introduced, according to figures quoted by critics. Thousands of pupils are reported to have left the independent sector, seeking places in state schools that are themselves under pressure.
None of this proves a coordinated plan to wipe out private education, and it would be reckless to claim that every closure stems solely from VAT rather than from falling rolls, ageing estates or long standing financial fragility. Yet it is equally hard to dismiss the mounting evidence that Labour’s reforms have accelerated existing problems and tipped marginal schools over the edge.
For families caught in the middle, the debate is not abstract. Children are uprooted, staff made redundant, communities reshaped. Century old institutions that survived wars and recessions are now disappearing in clusters. If Labour truly believes its policy is neutral rather than ideological, it will have to explain why the casualties keep piling up, and why so many governors, parents and local leaders say the same thing, that the numbers simply no longer add up.
Whether the VAT gamble ultimately strengthens public education or leaves a trail of shuttered schools and displaced pupils remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the transformation of Britain’s education landscape is happening fast, and for many families, painfully.
Main Image: Rendcomb College is a co-educational boarding and day school for 3 to 18-year-olds, located in the village of Rendcomb five miles north of Cirencester in Gloucestershire, England. Image by Saffron Blaze. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
