Category: Private Education

There is an old saying that people do not like seeing laws or sausages being made.

For teachers, the same could be said of wealth generation.

Teaching is imbued with a public sector ideology. It is labour that transcends renumeration; work that’s a calling, not a demand. The children, after all, are our future. But can teachers in the private sector be squeamish about supporting, even actively increasing their school’s wealth creation? Is there a friction between whether teaching is caught between public sector virtue and private sector profit propagation?

When I was a social worker, a not insignificant part of the job satisfaction came from being paid by the taxpayer. I was answerable to the community I served. This is a narrow view of course, but it was the uranium rod of truth that powered my ethics and beliefs.

And like social work, teaching is often imagined as sitting above ordinary economic logic. It is framed as a public good, a moral practice, a form of labour whose value exceeds its price. Teachers do not do it “for the money”. Education, we are told, is not a commodity. These ideas are repeated so often that they begin to feel like truths rather than choices.

And they are powerful truths. A good teacher rarely leaves your memory, and their instruction quietly shapes the futures of young people across the world – and can you really put a price on that?

Take that same ideology, however, and deliberately structure it for wealth creation—for private equity firms, individuals, or publicly listed companies—and it is hardly surprising that some teachers begin to feel a strain.

This should be caveated. Many of these same teachers have chosen to take their skills into a labour market—often overseas—that offers higher remuneration than state school wages and, in some cases, a better quality of life. To paraphrase my favourite line from the 1994 Kevin Smith movie ‘Clerks’, when a character is challenged about the innocent lives lost when the Death Star is destroyed:

“They knew what they were getting into. They knew who they were working for.”

Still, I don’t want to be disingenuous to private schools. This isn’t a class rant, certainly not from someone who is happily employed at one.

Teaching carries a powerful moral inheritance. It is one of the few professions still routinely described in vocational terms: service, care, dedication, sacrifice. That inheritance matters. It protects teaching from being reduced to a transaction and teachers from being treated as interchangeable service workers.

But moral inheritance also carries constraints. It shapes what can be said out loud.

In particular, it creates discomfort around money. To speak too openly about efficiency, cost, productivity or return on investment risks sounding crude, even unethical. The language of markets is tolerated at the edges of educational discourse, but rarely allowed into its moral centre.

This makes a certain sense in the public sector, where education is explicitly funded as a collective good. It becomes more complicated when teaching takes, even actively takes place inside private institutions.

Private schools are not naïve about economics. They must recruit, retain, invest, compete and plan for long-term sustainability. Fees do not simply maintain buildings; they fund futures. Yet even in fee-paying contexts, there is often a reluctance to name the relationship between teaching and wealth generation directly.

Instead, financial realities are softened through moral language. Schools speak of reinvestment, of quality, of excellence, of outcomes for children. Profit, if it exists at all, is described as incidental or virtuous—something that happens almost by accident on the way to doing good.

Teachers are rarely told explicitly that their labour generates institutional value; that reputation converts into enrolment; that enrolment underwrites salaries and expansion. Everyone understands this. It is simply not spoken plainly.

The result is a curious duality. Schools operate in markets, while teachers are encouraged to think of themselves as existing above them.

The tension here is not simply between public and private sectors. It lies deeper, in the collision of two incompatible logics that teaching is increasingly asked to inhabit simultaneously.

One logic treats education as a moral and civic practice. Its value is long-term, diffuse and social. Its outcomes may not be immediately visible, and their worth cannot be easily quantified. The other treats education as a service purchased by families. Its value must be demonstrable, comparable and timely. Outcomes must justify cost. Teachers are asked to hold the first logic as their professional identity while delivering the second as their professional output.

This is not hypocrisy. It is structural contradiction.

Most teachers are not opposed to schools being financially healthy. They want stability, good resources and fair pay. What unsettles them is not the existence of money, but the pretence that it is irrelevant. When teachers are asked to maintain public-sector moral identity while absorbing private-sector pressures, something gives. Often it is not performance, but trust. Cynicism creeps in. Branding language feels invasive. Metrics feel misaligned. Burnout is framed as personal failure rather than systemic tension. This is sometimes mistaken for ideological resistance to markets. More often, it is a response to being asked to live inside an unacknowledged contradiction.

Education does generate economic value. Acknowledging this does not diminish its moral importance. What corrodes professional integrity is the refusal to hold both truths at once. Private education will remain ethically uneasy for as long as it relies on public-sector virtue while operating on market logic. Teachers deserve honesty about the systems they work within—not euphemism, not moral fog, and not polite silence.

I spent three years working in the admissions and marking department of a private school and now teach within one. I have lived both sides of the contradiction. If private schools wish to claim moral seriousness, they must find transparent ways to articulate both the role of wealth creation and the responsibility of educating future citizens of a shared world.