Letters: the insanity of Labour’s attack on private schools

Bad educationSir: Lara Brown (‘Class warfare’, 1 August) lays bare the baleful consequences – intended and unintended – of Labour’s vandalistic attack on private schools. Jeff GreenBathPunishing pupilsSir: Labour’s preference for waging class war against independent schools contrasts with my experience of communist Chinese attitudes more than 20 years ago. In 1999, as national director of the Independent Schools Information Service, I led a UK delegation to the first-ever international conference of private schools in Beijing. In the then ‘socialist market economy’, there were 50,000 private schools in the People’s Republic educating more than 11 million pupils. Among several leading Chinese communists, the director of Beijing’s municipal education committee told us: ‘Private education speeds up education reform.