Closing all private schools would benefit state schools

But that is because the schools are ongoing concerns. Take away the income and things will be needed to be sold to raise money as the owners and directors will be without an income.

Do you not understand even human nature.

If someone who you had previously helped was taking away your livelihood then the cost of that “help” isn’t going to be free

Maybe everybody else is more selfless than me, but this is not an argument that would have convinced me to send my children to poor state schools instead of paying school fees. My husband and I were responsible for bringing our children up and for their welfare. We would not have sent them to schools where they would have received a substandard education and had to contend with abysmal behaviour from classmates on the offchance that having our intelligent, well-behaved children in the room would somehow convince their classmates that education was worth something.
Agree with this.

The idea that parents should deliberately sabotage their children's education in case a good attitude and good behaviour rubs off on other children is based on the same (flawed) logic of lazy teachers who always sit quiet and hard working girls next to boisterous and disruptive boys.

It's not the job of children to compensate for the failures of adults.

• get all the relevant services properly funded
• ensure there's proper access to CAMHS
• get appropriate access to SEN provision that is appropriate for children's needs
• have proper intervention and support services that will work with dysfunctional families to break intergenerational cycles of harm
• change the dominant culture in some areas where parents are actively confrontational towards schools
• offer a range of schools in all areas and reduce the dominance of large one size fits all MATs
• invest in technical and vocational education
• then find a way that parents have meaningful choice on how their children are educated

Then abolish or restrict private schools.

Don't think throwing children in a giant mixing pot as an experiment will solve decades of deliberate policy decisions and adults making poor choices.

Unless you are banning home education too then people will just employ tutors and homeschool perhaps joining with other families. Like an old fashioned governess.
State boarding would have to expand as some families need boarding eg only living parent working overseas.

At the moment the state sector have a massive crisis in teacher recruitment. Having a couple of teachers on longterm sick leave covered by supply teachers is a fairly normal occurrence in schools. The last mainstream state school I worked in had eight teachers on longterm sick leave.

Separately, there is an epidemic of additional needs in our schooling system at the moment. The percentage of children with clinical levels of anxiety is through the roof, behaviour problems are at an all-time high and an unprecedented numbers of children have left mainstream education altogether because they can't cope with school. Some of those have found a suitably small nurturing independent school, but some are now being home educated, with varying levels of success. There has been a 40% increase in home educated children since before covid. Closing independent schools would just force many more children into home education.

@Nooyoiknooyoik

How would the class benefit from private school kids being there? I genuinely don't see how having some extra kids in an already busy class is going to make any improvement on a day-to-day level.

Are the private school kids meant to be very well behaved and high achieving and this rubs off on the other children?

Most private school kids don't live in deprived areas, so they won't be going to these schools as they won't be in catchment.

And again, I strongly believe that many just wouldn't send their kids to state, they'd home school with tutors instead, effectively building a private system on their own. I absolutely would not send my kids to my local state school, it was truly awful for me and I wouldn't risk my children's happiness on a social experiment.

I certainly don't think it would be a disaster if private schools were to close. The public sector would find space to accommodate as they have done in many places where schools are at capacity and someone decides to build a load of houses in the area.

But just a thought, if state schools were better, had better funding then less people would feel the need to pay for private schooling. Same with private Health.

But even with the same funding and class sizes, state schools will always have the less academic children, the children who have very little family support, looked after children, kids with better things to worry about than Fridays test.

This tbh.

Ours are in private because the older one has significant SEN which could not be met by our lcoal schools. As in literally cannot be met. I did a school open day where the students with additonal needs were LITERALLY sitting on the floor having lessons in the cloakroom because they were that overstretched. In the UK. Frankly I think we did everyone afavour to not add to the burden when we could afford to. The younger one gets a part bursary.

I'm from abroad and have worked abroad extensively. I am only here because DH wanted to be close to his (now deceased) elderly and dying parents. He took a career break to care for them. But he is also a senior professional. We pay top rates of tax. And all we get is people telling us we are rich bastards who should pay more and to fuck off if we don't like it.

So we will.

We have two plans - 1 to sell everything and abandon the UK when our younger DS is finished with school in 6 years. 2. To cut and run in the next 18 months or so. It depends on a number of factors- some political, some cultural.

When I first moved the UK this was meant to be the palce I would see out my days and life in. No more.

YABU - for your overuse of exclamation marks alone.

This.

I moved abroad. It's completely different

Maybe everybody else is more selfless than me, but this is not an argument that would have convinced me to send my children to poor state schools instead of paying school fees. My husband and I were responsible for bringing our children up and for their welfare. We would not have sent them to schools where they would have received a substandard education and had to contend with abysmal behaviour from classmates on the offchance that having our intelligent, well-behaved children in the room would somehow convince their classmates that education was worth something.

Haha! State schools cost much less than 20k per pupil!

Of course, but none of those things are a barrier to us changing how we do things. Geographic size: France and Finland are much bigger and they manage it, Belgium and Luxemburg are smaller and so do they. Population: Finland massively smaller, France and Germany about the same, they're doing ok. Laws can be changed. Culture... well, when there's no alternative of course it becomes part of our culture but it can also change.

Grammar schools used to be a big part of the system and now they're not. The Tories said they were going to allow them to expand into all areas but have failed to as they know they don't improve social mobility. Kent has the most number of grammar schools in the UK, it is also the LEAST socially mobile county in the whole country.

But they’d still be in class with the less advantaged children who would benefit from them being there.

The reality is we would end up with a fairer and better education system if all private schools closed. One only has to look at countries where this is the case.

We would end up like Finland where the posh kids go to the same school so the rich parents make sure the schools are good.

Britain is two-tier though and always will be.

No more buying up houses by good schools

@AxolotlOnions how do you propose to achieve that? Bussing isn't exactly uncontroversial.

OP of course, if rich people had to send their DC to state schools, the school system would be better. It's a no brainer. And it's something we should strive for.

@gwrachod bollocks. They'd just pay for tutors and extra-curricular activities. Rough comps in deprived areas won't gain anything.

Of course, the root cause is in the family and that is something the current government is doing nothing about beyond occasional vague soundbites about how unacceptable the situation is.
That's the elephant in the room, that and the fact that services that support families and children have been stripped to the bone so children/families who would have been supported don't get what they need (eg family support workers, social services, youth workers, intervention teams for young offenders and those at risk of offending, alcohol/drug services for parents, mental health support, CAMHS referrals, EdPsych appointments, SALT, therapeutic interventions, surestart, decent early years support for families, and a whole host of other things).

At the moment children with SEN and mental health needs are being failed, which is awful and puts parents in impossible situations. It's a battle for parents to access anything and it shouldn't be.

Children from dysfunctional families are also being failed because there's not the services to break the cycle of intergenerational harms.

I've worked with diligent and caring parents who have been crying out for help and support and got nothing because their child wasn't in crisis yet.

I've also worked with parents who hate education, don't care, and have no aspirations for their children other than for them to be supervised by us between 9-3.30. The parents are deeply confrontational, abusive to school staff, will excuse their children's behaviour and then shrug their shoulders and tell us that the child is the same at home "but what can you do"?

@Nimbostratus100 You are correct that the government pays a flat rate per child at school (with some minor exceptions eg special needs). What you are missing is that what the flat rate is changes over time eg £7260 in 2009/10 versus £6,640 in 2019/20 https://ifs.org.uk/education-spending/schools. So there’s no guarantee that the same flat rate would be paid for the additional 7% of pupils. As the government is short of cash, my guess is the flat rate would be lower than it is now = worse education for all kids than now.

Also parents who care about education and have money will find other ways to advantage their kids eg tutoring, buying houses in the catchment of the best state schools, move abroad.

So I wouldn’t support as I don’t think it would address inequality and I think it would reduce education quality for all.

I would rather increase funding to state schools by reducing public spending in other areas.

I’m another private school teacher who would look for any alternative than return to the state sector. I’ve done my time being sworn at and physically threatened and made to feel it was my fault by SLT whilst working in poorly resourced and micro managed conditions, no thanks. Conditions in State are getting worse and I have no desire to return to a system where my professionalism is questioned daily.

Personally, I’d look abroad or tutor or work in a related field and I know many of my colleagues feel the same.

Appalling. I would like to see far more support given to teachers and other public servants who have to deal with these vicious, lawless thugs. They should be prosecuted. This wouldn't be acceptable out on the street, so why is it OK inside schools or A&E?

Of course, the root cause is in the family and that is something the current government is doing nothing about beyond occasional vague soundbites about how unacceptable the situation is.

Excellent post. It appals me that social mobility has got worse over my lifetime. It was getting so much better after the end of WW2 and the introduction of the Welfare State, universal provision of free healthcare and secondary education, etc etc.

Amen to this. I remember a family who moved over the summer between year 5 and year 6 (final year of primary school) from their rented flat near the primary to a rented house right next door to a very good, hugely oversubscribed comprehensive school several miles away - much better than any school their son had any realistic chance of getting into in our area. The new house was on a direct bus route back to the primary school. That autumn they applied for a place at the secondary school and their son commuted back to the primary school by bus. Once they had secured a place at the comp in the spring, they bought a house back in our area, which was much cheaper, so he commuted the other way once he started secondary. They gamed the system very effectively and I admired their commitment.

Apparently so:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/finland-education-system-criticisms/

https://yle.fi/a/3-11160051

Apparently they now have the widest gender gap in trading, and family background has become significant in how well a child does.

If we had the educational resources of Finland (small class sizes, larger premises, shorter formal learning day, better resources, more time outdoors, better paid teachers, reduced focus on test results) then I think the majority of parents would be happy to have their child attend state school.

If they shut private schools, we absolutely wouldn't move to the state system.

We'd home school. We'd likely employ an ex private school teacher, and with some local friends who also attended the same school as us might do joint lessons for music, art, sport.

Of course, not a private school as they'd be banned, but private schooling offering much the same educational benefits as the private school that they could not get at state.

And when the children were old enough they'd go abroad to get a decent education, and we'd perhaps move too.

40-50% of kids in our village are privately educated. It's laughable to say that our local state school would have a place for them all, even if we did send them, which we wouldn't