To think that improving state schools needs people to pay an e.g. a state school tax?

Don’t think schools can become single Academies anymore. In our region MATs can’t acquire a single school anymore, they can only acquire a group of schools at the same time. Government wants all MATS to be large MATS, at least 10 schools.

The government is warning against single school academies.

Lots of movement happening, with larger trusts swallowing up single school and small trusts.

The problem is not so much academies per se, but the multi academy trusts.

Single academy trusts are actually quite efficient if they work together in partnership with other schools to secure good value for money in procurement activities/share resources etc. They can buy in local authority services where these offer VFM or they can seek more cost-effective alternatives where appropriate. And at school level, there is very little waste because they know that they need every penny that they can get.

Multi academy trusts absolutely take money away from schools to pay for overpriced central management etc.

Criminal isn't it. My Director of Children’s Services, with responsibility for the education and care of all children in the county, including statutory responsibilities which include safeguarding the mist vulnerable earns, around £140,000.
In the same county, a CEO of an academy trust, with 6 ( Yes SIX) schools, earns £250,000!
Mates MAT, mates rates gone mad!

Isn’t it that the 20% won’t cover the influx from private to state?

@babybythesea also cost of dismantling academies would be astronomical and wouldn’t benefit children’s education

@babybythesea the difference with academies is that they don’t have money taken off them by LA before they even receive their funding, the amount spent on central team should equate to the top slice that was removed before schools were academies. Current Government are all about academies getting larger, so will probably end up like LEAs!

I think one thing that could help funding is getting rid of a)academies and b) schemes which require changing everything every couple of years.

a) academies. Loads of money going on management. When schools were run by the LA you’d have 3 or 4 HR managers for the entire county. Now academy chains will often have their own. I’ve also met marketing managers for academies. All money given to schools and not spent on children.
b) Phonics schemes especially. We had a good phonics scheme. We had collected a raft of reading books which were varied (all decodable) which appealed to our children, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry.. Gvt decided that phonics scheme was no longer good enough. Buy the new scheme and all the resources. Including all new reading books, enough for each child. The books are ok but they are not as good as the ones we had which we can’t use now. All money which our school could have spent on other things but can’t because we have to follow the gvts random decisions that this scheme is no longer accredited.

I don't send my ds to school to 'buy them privilege and advantage and avoid riff-raff'. 🙁

I sent my ds to his current school because even Ofsted said the school at which he was offered a place, wasn't safe. The younger pupils were at risk of assault by the older ones. Bullying was rife. Staff had no idea who was on site at any given time.

My motivation was to keep him safe. And because they offered him a scholarship and he was desperate to go.

Then don't be silly. No one is sending their children to private school in order to do philanthropic act.

However private schools do save government over 4 billion pounds a year and that doesn't account for lending their facilities and acting as charities .

So if we should shut private schools then money has to go from somewhere?

Or are you also too silly to understand maths and economics?

@Bibi12 oh silly me! I thought by sending my children to private school I was buying them privilege and advantage and avoiding riff-raff. But in fact I'm performing a philanthropic act of public service by saving the government billions.

I would DEFINITELY pay more tax for better public services. I’m a realist - we can’t carry on at today’s unsustainable levels and expect a decent service. But I don’t want to see anyone left behind.

With a very heavy heart we reinvested the NI reduction the tories gave us plus a bit more to buy private health insurance for the family after I had a very lucky escape with what could have been a long term orthopaedic issue (right place right time). If I hadn’t been seen then I would have possibly been out of work for months due to long waiting lists so can’t afford for an unexpected issue to happen again to either of us.

However, I would happily invest that money back into public services in a heartbeat if it meant genuine improvements for all.

How much more tax are YOU willing to pay to increase state education funding to £15k per pupil? Or are you one of those people who always wants "someone else" to pay?? We can't all want the perfect World but not actually pay towards it ourselves. It's a numbers game. There are relatively few billionaires/millionaires, and you could charge them all another few million each per year in tax and it still wouldn't bring in the same amount of tax revenue as an extra 1% on income tax or 1% on VAT which would be paid by tens of millions of people! Everyone seems to ignore the behavioural aspects - at the margins, tax increases/decreases really does change behaviour and that is often detrimental to the UK. We really need to stop the politics of envy and start thinking about practical ways of increasing tax revenue AND making public spending more efficient. Lazily shouting "tax the rich" isn't the answer.

Exactly. We shouldn't forget Brown/Blair increasing NIC and promising the increase was ring fenced "to save the NHS" - well that worked well!! They increased it again a year or two later. I still remember all the slogans about "only a matter of days left to save the NHS". The result of course was just throwing more money into the leaky bucket.

My children are in state school but I'm absolutely against VAT on education.

Parents who send children to private schools already save government billions by vacating spaces.

YABU if only because no earmarked tax ever remains earmarked for long.

What’s that got to do with your comment? Your comment was trying to make a big point about how this policy will widen the equality gap. It won’t make it any wider than it is now. It depends entirely on how the money is spent as to how differences will be made so neither I nor you can make a call on that.

Just imagine if the govt actually put in £15 k per year per pupil for state school

Oh no the govt put in the bare minimum, even though we pay tax! Why an earth would we pay more?

We fund raise, help out and turn up.

And how are the bottom being helped by this policy?

As many others have said, they're not VAT exempt because they're charities. They're two completely separate things.

They're VAT exempt because ALL school education is VAT exempt.

Your comment was “the equality gap widens”. That’s measured in the difference between the top and the bottom of the scale.

Lots of people who use private schools do have experience of state schools though.

Errr because the gap literally means the distance between top and bottom..?