I was intrigued to spot a piece by former Gordonstoun headmaster Mark Pyle in the Sunday Telegraph.

If you’ve been following the broadsheet campaign on the Labour policy to charge VAT on private school fees you’ll perhaps be expecting a further brave step into gibbering hysteria – we’re now becoming immune to stories about a massive influx of pupils into a state system already unable to cope, about every decision by a school to close over the last four years being a direct result of the VAT imposition, and about the slow and painful collapse of the traditions and institutions of our once great island nation.

That is not what we get from Pyle (a self-described “traitor to the cause”). Instead, he argues that private schools themselves may have a case to answer:

It is school heads and governors who have made independent education so cripplingly expensive in the first place. All those state-of-the-art sports facilities with their astroturf pitches and Olympic-sized swimming pools, and multi-million pound music halls and “performing arts” centres (also known as theatres)?

On it goes:

For 50 years we have presided over or watched an expansion of extravagance that has relied on an ever-shrinking domestic economic bracket of fee payers […] Let’s call a halt to building more valhallas and pleasure domes; trim the flabby curriculum in terms of both exam systems and subjects offered; and contemplate enlarging classes. Let’s also start thinking hard and fast about how to generate more revenue, without attempting to squeeze yet more from parents. Why not set ambitious targets for cost savings and for increasing non-fee income?

Are private schools spending too much on shiny new buildings and worthless courses? Do they need to enter the “real world” of revenue generation? Where have we heard this before?

It’s a deftly done bit of contrarianism, and to my surprise it seems to have gone down rather well among the stalwarts of the Sunday Telegraph comment section.

What’s interesting to me is that this position is a novelty in the private school arena, but it is pretty much a mainstream position in the university sector. A couple of years back I drew parallels between the two systems – the line between university and private schools is a surprisingly porous one (something that is discussed in the very same edition of the Sunday Telegraph).

Should the equivalent former (or current) vice chancellor stick their head over the parapet to talk about the need for efficiency the result would be a communal shrug – that is absolutely the kind of thing that VCs tend to say.

The difference seems to be a mere 593,000 UK pupils are taught in independent schools. This is a participation rate of about 6 per cent (if you start from the perspective there are 9.1m pupils at schools in the UK). With abundant state schools available, the independent sector is not our national means of skills delivery or academic success. Independent schools are, therefore, seen (fairly or unfairly) as a luxury good – and without getting into the wilds of VAT (it is often said that any accurate description of VAT applicability is indistinguishable from parody) we do tend to put VAT on luxury goods. People spend the money on independent schools because they, or their children, are getting something extra.

And, despite what you may have read about a VAT-fuelled exodus overcrowding the state sector, there are more pupils in independent schools – and more independent schools – than ever before. To be clear, not all of this is luxury spending: not every independent school here is a Gordonstoun, Winchester, or Harrow. But for a small but significant part of the UK, paying for an alternative to something that is provided free by the state is a way of life.

Universities, on the other hand, are neither a free state option or a luxury alternative. They are both. The price of a year of university-level study is defacto controlled by the state, which provides loans to cover it taken up by the majority of students (for schools funding geeks, it’s pretty much a voucher system).

For universities, a government policy decision is restricting the amount of the cost of education that can be recouped. For a private school, the government is raising the prices in a private market via the imposition of a “luxury” tax. So efficiencies among private schools are market forces working correctly (a corrective to rising prices), but efficiencies among universities are a market failure (a capped price failing to adapt to the cost of doing business)? It feels like for both sectors, the truth may be somewhere in the middle.