Kitchen tables are a good thing, aren’t they? They’re a great benefit to society. Without tables, what would we eat on? And what would pessimists do without them? They’d have nowhere to lay out their newspaper to read about the decline of families eating together à table.

So, tables are good. But how do we ensure that more people benefit from them? We could make it easier for tablemakers to make them and sell them to us. Some people won’t be able to afford them. But if there are plenty of tablemakers, with luck prices will come down.

Never, others cry. It would be much fairer if tablemakers charged everyone more. Then with that extra revenue they can let other people apply for free or subsidised tables. Some people won’t now be able to afford the pricier tables; but, relax, they can fill in a form and hope they win a subsidised table. Yes, with fewer full-price buyers, some tablemakers will go bust. But that’s a price we’re willing for them to pay to satisfy our sense of justice.

This is what passes for logic at the Charity Commission. It doesn’t have strong views about tables but about private schools. Yesterday it published a “public benefit assessment report” on five schools and failed two of them because “people in poverty must not be excluded from the opportunity to benefit”: the two offending schools did not offer enough bursaries.

The amount that schools award in bursaries is a new, more onerous “public benefit” test for deciding whether schools should enjoy the perks of charitable status. It didn’t matter that the two schools offered their facilities to the community and to local state schools, or generally exuded public-spiritedness, or that Highfield Priory kept its fees low — £5,795 a year — to encourage as wide a social pool of pupils as possible.

This bossy new directive may, just may, ensure a few more bursaries are created. The plusher, grander schools, however, already run generous schemes. But for middling schools on tight budgets — schools that provide an important public good by keeping alive esoteric subjects such as classics or chemistry or physics — it threatens their existence. They do not have rich alumni or slick fundraising operations. So fees will rise to fund bursaries, driving away new parents.

Those parents won’t be the rich or privileged. They’ll be the striving kind who forgo holidays or moving to a bigger house to scrape together £5,795 to give their child the shin-up that a private education provides. But why should the commissioners care? They can’t play at being heroes of the downtrodden if it means letting people help themselves.

Robbie Millen is deputy comment editor

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