The short answer is yes although not as blatantly as in the US. And it’s not exclusively a Tory thing.
The UK method has been through not keeping up with the increased real costs of schools (in truth a multi-party approach) and introducing various alternative state funded options which are not required to follow the National Curriculum.
Add to that the delightful Private Finance Initatives initially introduced by the Tories but massively encouraged/imposed by New Labour back in the day and you have a serious funding issue for the classic state school.
We have this too although slightly differently. Here the ‘faith schools’ come in two flavours.
Nice, respectable Catholic or CofE schools which all the middleclasses want their kids to go to because they are thought to be better than comprehensives and obviously little Tarquin and Lavinia (or Harry and Kate or whatever kids are called these days) need to go to a ‘good’ school with the ‘right’ people (in the sense that their parents can afford to buy houses in the areas where these schools are, attend the right church and keep in with the vicar, etc.) but the parents can’t afford a fee-paying school/can’t stomach the idea of packing their little darling off to some grim hole in the wilds of Yorkshire (British public schools are not all like Hogwarts).
Then you have Islamic faith-based schools which usually only crop up on people’s radar when someone (usually a Daily Mail editor or Tony Robinson) decides to allege that something awful happened in one or that they’re all training up jihadi death squads.
Oh, there’s jewish faith schools but they usually just get mentioned when someone chucks paint at them.
And they all get coverage whenever something vaguely modern is suggested like say teaching kids how not to get pregnant or that LGBTQ people deserve to live.
We used to have that. We now have a weird system where people have to pay for their tuition but they can get a government backed loan which they only have to pay back if they earn over a certain amount and whatever is left is written off after 30 years.
The government was recently told that it can’t pretend that all those loans will be paid back and that it has to account for the actual anticipated shortfall in its public accounts. Only 45% is expected to be recovered.
