What price can you put on a child's education? It depends on who that child is.New figures show the average fee for attending a top private school has now risen I above £ 17,000 a year for the first time. In contrast, a child attending a state school l in England can expect to have £ 4,000 to £ 6,000 spent on them, depending on location and additional allowances（allowance n.津贴；限额）. This would be worrying in any circumstances（n.环境；境遇）but when we have crumbling and cramped state schools, it feels almost grotesque. While some children enjoy drama halls and swimming pools, others are trying to learn surrounded by leaks, mould（n.霉；模具）and vermin（n.害虫）.

Inequality in education is not a new phenomenon. Even before vast underfunding（underfund vt.对......提供的资金不足）set in, we had one of the most unequal school systems in the developed world. Private schools, remarkably, still retain charitable（adj.慈善事业的；慷慨的）status, a gift from the taxpayer for retaining privilege. (The chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents most of Britain’s leading public schools，once compared making greater links between private and state schools as a condition of their tax break to the ordeal（n.折磨；严酷的考验）of forced marriage（逼婚；拉郎配）.) There is also rampant（adj.猖獗的;蔓延的）inequality even within the state sector, with middle-class offspring（n.后代，子孙）more likely to get a better deal from a comprehensive.

As Diane Reay, Cambridge University professor of education, who herself grew up on a council estate, points out, pupils in the more working-class comprehensives get less money per head, less qualified teachers, and higher levels of teacher turnover（n.人员调整;工作人员的雇佣或解雇）. Even if they are in the same schools as wealthier children, they tend to be in lower sets and get less experienced teachers. Throw in the introduction of academies, and this division only increases. In 2015, a Guardian investigation found that free schools received 60% more state funding per pupil (f 7,761 in 2013-2014) than local authority primaries and secondaries.

With aching predictability, austerity（n.紧缩）measures have made this situation worse. Last year, an analysis of Department for Education data revealed that schools with the highest numbers of pupils on free school meals are facing the deepest funding cute. Ministers have chosen to make “savings" predominantly（predominant adj.主要的;卓越的;支配的）off the back of low-income pupils in an education system that was already stacked（stack vt.堆积，堆叠）against them.Instead of investing in existing state schools, the government has wasted money on vanity（n.虚荣心;无价值的东西）projects. Since the Conservatives’ free schools policy was introduced in 2010, it9s pushed funding from other pupils, often paying way over the odds for the land and even diverting £ 96m to academy budgets originally intended for improving in-need comprehensives.

How has this plan worked out? This month , Plymouth studio school announced it would be the latest free school to close, only a couple of days after the Isle of Wight studio school said it would do the same due to lack of demand. The National Education Union ( NEU) calculates that the latest closures bring the total to 66 new schools launched under the government's flagship policy that have closed, partially closed or failed to open at all. “Free school” is a misnomer： while teachers are running out of paper for their classrooms, this ideological failure has cost the education budget almost £ 150m.