Woodcote House, an all-boys’ independent preparatory school of 76 pupils, closed its doors for the last time on 4 July last year. Asked by the editor to write an elegy for the school, I set about making enquiries. Many ran cold. The website had been shut down. Requests to friends who lived in Surrey fizzled out. Not a year after the closure of the 150-year-old institution, all that remained were digital embers: a sad Instagram post in which former parents and friends of the institution mourned its loss; an online Telegraph article detailing the headmaster’s final letter to parents in which he cited the ‘buffeting headwinds’ and a ‘drop in pupil numbers’ of the independent school sector in the aftermath of Labour’s VAT raid.

According to Plato, Atlantis, that ‘great and wonderful empire’, sank in a single day and night. Britain’s private schools may be sinking at a marginally slower rate, but soon we may struggle to find their remains at all. In the rout of independent schools since Labour’s policy, small private schools (many of them faith-oriented and non-selective) have emerged as some of the greatest casualties. Among them are Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire (the alma mater of Earl Spencer,........

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