A main point from James Eadie KC in his almost three-hour submission for the government was that the 20% VAT charge will directly raise revenue, and this funding is in addition to the £2.3bn pledged to the education sector at the Budget.

He argued that ‘the state is free to change the law’ after it has debated the implementation thoroughly in Parliament and was part of Labour’s manifesto in the run up to the election, and had been in the plans for long before that.

Eadie added that even if pupils were displaced ‘every student has the right to a state education’ but the ‘state does not have to provide this sort of assistance’.

He did acknowledge that the addition of VAT on private school fees would ‘obviously’ make it harder for some to afford the fees but repeatedly argued that there was still the right to an education in the state system.

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