In 1284 Hamelin had a plague of rats. A stranger in red and yellow offered to clear them for gold, played his pipe, and led every rat down into the Weser. The mayor and burghers then declined to pay, assuming he had nowhere else to turn. He had. He played a different tune, and 130 of the town’s children followed him into the mountain.

I’m not suggesting anyone is leading children into a hillside. But the story is about a bargain broken by people who thought the other party couldn’t walk away, and the cost landing on the young, and that is why it has been on my mind.

Last week the heads of the Independent Schools Association London West met at Norden Farm. I’m the group’s Treasurer and report to ISA HQ, where the association now counts more than 800 member schools; our area has over 120 of them. The very small and the very large sat as equals, with no hierarchy, and we were asked to work in small groups on our challenges and on where a resolution might lie. One thing that Rudi Lockhart, ISA’s CEO and a welcome visitor to the meeting made clear, was just how hard the association’s leadership are working to support our schools.

This was not a meeting of the down and outs. John O’Farrell opens Things Can Only Get Better by dressing up his Maidenhead childhood as a mining village, with a Cookham colliery and everything, which is funny because nobody could believe it. Nobody in that room wished to overstate their plight, and I don’t either. The heads at Norden Farm still lead schools because they want to teach, to put on concerts and plays, and to see a child find the thing they are good at. But a mild plight can still raise an awkward question about the choices being made, and that question is what this piece is about.

First, the narrative. The line still repeated by government and by national institutions is that our sector enjoyed a tax break that has now been withdrawn. That is not what happened. Education was exempt from VAT, and what changed is that 20 per cent now falls on fees for pupils in private schools aged 4 to 18. Every head in that room knew it, and every one of us was tired of correcting it. The removal of mandatory charitable business rates relief under the Non-Domestic Rating Act 2025 has added to the strain, and it falls hardest on the smaller, community-rooted schools running on modest margins.

Second, the pricing. Major cultural institutions, science centres and sports bodies, many of them heavily subsidised, have introduced two-tier prices. State school groups get subsidised entry; independent school parties pay more for the same workshop or the same seats. Families paying fees still contribute through general taxation to the bodies charging them, and roughly a third of pupils in Independent Schools Council schools receive means-tested help. A flat surcharge on a school outing doesn’t touch a school’s reserves. It lands on a child on a full bursary.

VAT is a policy, and governments are entitled to make policy. A surcharge on a school visit is a decision taken by someone running a museum or a sports body, who has chosen to price a child according to the school that child attends. That is a different thing, and it is the ethical choice I mean.

There is a convenient story that the sector is simply a place of privilege, so I’ll put the figures on the table and let readers weigh them. On the sporting side, 59 per cent of England’s men’s cricket team is now privately educated, up from 33 per cent in 2014, and 50 per cent of the women’s team, up from 35. Team GB’s Olympic medallists were 36 per cent privately educated at London 2012, 31 at Rio, 40 at Tokyo and 33 at Paris. In the arts, the picture looks like this (the national average of children in private shops is 7 per cent):

These figures can be read two ways. Critics cite them to show how much advantage the sector carries, and they have a point; the pop-star row shows a field where it doesn’t hold. My reading is that the sector is where much of the country’s creative and athletic talent is trained, and that the same public institutions that celebrate the results are now adding a surcharge to the schools that produce them. The chief executive row makes the point wryly: a good share of the people running the funded cultural organisations that set these prices came through the sector they are now charging.

None of this was the mood in the room. I hold two phrases dear, and I used them with colleagues. The first: “There’s no good in the long run looking at the Rainbow, that’s behind us. Our job as school leaders is to walk towards the sunshine.” The second is somewhat ruder: “When all around you is shit, all you can do is shine.”

I am of course no longer a headteacher, and so have no such conversations to have any more. However, as an ISA member (Headteacher) for 36 years, I’ve certainly had much experience during my time. Shining is easier when you’re not on your own. Our association offers excellent access to mental health resources for a head in difficulty, though it is never enough by itself. Looking after children with Education-Health plans is something our sector does really well, but with specific schools supporting some of the myriad of issues that come with a statement. What helps as much is knowing that other heads are in the same weather, being able to share problems and align solutions to what works. The success is shown in the ‘difficult conversations made easy’ then have back at school with staff and parents.

The Piper’s lesson was never really about rats. The town broke its word to the one person it thought couldn’t leave, and it paid in children. The independent sector isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and neither are its heads. But the children on the school trip, bursary pupils among them, are the ones who pay the surcharge, and they are the ones the sector is for.