Rendcomb College: The Betrayal of the Squeezed Middle

By The Wobbly Editor, 24 January 2026

The gates of Rendcomb College will soon be locked for the last time. This won't be the quiet of a school holiday, rather the silence of a school killed by a government that seems to prefer a landscape of uniform mediocrity over the messy, aspirational striving of its own people.

Labour’s 20% VAT on private education was presented as a matter of social justice, a “Robin Hood” tax on a privileged elite. The closure of Rendcomb exposes the bitter lie at the heart of that narrative. Founded in 1920 by Frederick Wills, Rendcomb was the antithesis of the Etonian caricature this Government so despises. It was created specifically to give children from modest Gloucestershire families a leg up, offering a world-class education through bursaries to those who would otherwise be trapped by the limitations of the state sector. By taxing Rendcomb out of existence, the Government hasn’t levelled the playing field - it has kicked away the ladder for those who had hope of bettering their children's future.

A Register of the Fallen

What we are seeing is not a policy adjustment but a purge. Rendcomb is just the latest casualty in a growing graveyard of schools that served the squeezed middle. These aren’t institutions with billion-pound endowments; they are charities that ran on razor-thin margins to remain accessible to local families.

The register of the fallen in the South West grows longer by the day:

§  Fairfield PNEU in Bristol – Absent! Gone in 2025, after 90 years of serving its community. The tax burden made its model, built for the local middle-class, impossible to sustain.

§  Bishopstrow College in Wiltshire - Absent! Collapsed into administration, taking with it not just a source of international revenue but local jobs and a respected local institution.

§  Royal High School Prep, Bath - Absent! Forced to close its entire preparatory school, a desperate act of self-amputation to try and survive the 20% hike.

The Independent Schools Council has tracked over a hundred schools that have either merged or folded since this policy was enacted. Perhaps the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, sees this as a necessary culling of unsustainable businesses. Those on the ground see it for what it is - the deliberate destruction of a sector, sacrificed for a political agenda.

The Arithmetic of Spite

The seething anger across kitchen tables in Gloucestershire comes from knowing this destruction is built on a fiscal lie. The Treasury’s claim that this policy will raise £1.8 billion to fund new state school teachers is a fantasy. It’s based on the absurd assumption that you can hike the price of something by 20% and lose zero customers.

The reality is stark. Enrolment in independent schools has already dropped by 11,000 pupils. A child forced out of Rendcomb doesn’t just vanish. They are pushed into a state system already buckling under the strain of crumbling infrastructure and a recruitment crisis. Each child brings an immediate cost of £7,000 to £8,000 to the public purse. The net result is a loss for the taxpayer, as the cost of placing these children in state schools will far exceed the VAT collected from the remaining parents who can still afford to pay.

We are bankrupting local centres of excellence to plug a deficit in the state sector. It’s an act of breathtaking self-harm. Worse still is the hypocrisy. The tax was supposed to fund 6,500 new teachers, yet the government’s own most recent data shows that the number of full-time teachers has actually fallen since Labour took office.

An Ideology of Envy

This policy is the direct result of the bitter envy that drives the thinking of those now in power. Their worldview paints every parent paying school fees as a cartoon villain, a member of some ultra-rich cabal. They are wilfully blind to the truth.

The reality is one of families who have emptied their savings, who drive decade-old cars, who have sacrificed every luxury to give their children the best possible start. They are being punished for their prudence and their aspiration by a government that views parental choice as a tax loophole to be closed. The human cost is now being felt in frantic, tearful phone calls across Gloucestershire as parents scramble for state school places that simply do not exist in districts already stretched beyond capacity.

Surrendering a National Asset

Labour seems to believe that to create a level playing field, it must first bulldoze the entire landscape. To kill a school like Rendcomb is to perform a lobotomy on our national potential.

The UK’s independent schools are, believe it or not, a massive national asset. Alongside Switzerland, our education system is a beacon for international investment and talent, providing the high-level start in life that produces the next generation of engineers, designers, and innovators.

By taxing this world-leading product into oblivion, we are surrendering a genuine competitive advantage out of pure ideological spite. Yet it seems that this Government would rather preside over a country where everyone is equally mediocre, than tolerate a system where some strive for something better.

The classrooms at Rendcomb will soon be empty, the ladder of opportunity it offered for a century now just ash in the fire of a resentful, student-union ideology. While the Labour backbenches can congratulate themselves on their progressive purity, the fallout will be managed by ordinary families in Gloucestershire. They are the ones left to pick up the pieces.

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