State school 6th forms oversubscribed

Do you get that one extra student might not add substantially to the overall school overheads, but that ten per class does?

The overheads fund all the school provision. The funding per student goes towards all of these costs, not just their individual teaching or the things they personally use. Nobody is in the bursar’s office saying “Jenny and Kate in year 12 don’t play any sports, but Barney in year 13 doesn’t do any drama, so we’ll cut the school sports pitch resurfacing this year and have the school play instead.” Or, “Ewan and Katie in year 13 have packed lunches, so this year we’ll make one of the dinner ladies redundant and get rid of one of the cookers.”

Arguing that your DC doesn’t use this or that is nothing to do with how schools fund their resources. If you want your DC to go to a school sixth form, the school still has to pay for all its facilities and subjects. Otherwise, an FE college that doesn’t have these is the obvious choice, no? And even then, the college will still provide maths, even if your DC does English, History and Art, or vice versa.

To listen to some people on here though you'd think that private schools will be empty come September. That isn't true either.

It is idealogical not financial. Labour want fewer kids at private school. They may or may not wish to pay for the impact that has on state schools. Time will tell.

So your DD doesn’t, but why would everyone else be the same?

It’s testament to how blinkered people are, that in this thread there are large amounts of people who seem to be Labour/state school supporters, essentially arguing that: much larger A-level class sizes are fine, extra workloads for teachers and staff is no biggie, and state sixth forms shouldn’t provide decent facilities for students? Or that because x happens in their area or DC’s school, everywhere else must be like that. And that this is all somehow a good thing, just because they blindly like the idea of private school parents paying VAT? Even if the obvious consequences are that the knock-on effect on state school students will be marginal at best and potentially quite adverse at worst.

Hey, I suppose it’s yet another example of how people can be made to vote against their own interests by plying them with inaccurate ideas (cf. Brexit); but I still fail to see why the overall picture is so hard to grasp. The system isn’t just YOUR school or YOUR kids. It’s the whole system overall. If there is more pressure on state schools but not really much extra funding (or the costs end up higher than the money the policy raises), one individual school might get a few more bums on seats, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good policy, or one that does anything for the state sector or less advanced kids overall — other than increase funding pressures elsewhere in the system.

Taking on an A level MFL student doesn't increase the costs of the sports field.

It probably doesn't increase kitchen costs either unless there is a contract related to exact number of pupils in the school.

She liked her school with the exception of sport. So as she didn't have to do sport she stayed.

I don't see how she incurred additional costs for sports facilities or the canteen as she didn't use them.

However that wasnt what I was replying to, you asked about if sixth formers wanted to go to schools with no sports and outsourced canteens and my point was that sports facilities and nice canteens wouldn't have interested her in the slightest. I hope that clarified it for you.

Actually the local FE college has better sports facilities than her school and the catering students produce some excellent food at reasonable prices. You don't have to do sport or eat there so again irrelevant to her

I guess a special magic fairy pays for the kitchen staff salaries and the sports field then. Which a lot of FE/sixth form colleges don’t have anyway, so by your logic better value for money? Why didn’t she go there?

Good, I'm glad you have accepted that your points about photocopying and chairs were hyperbolic.

@TeenToTwenties <sigh> no, these are EXAMPLES, in order to explain to you how exempt charities funding works. All of these things are real costs, not hyperbolic. Does your DC’s school have a photocopier? More than one? Do you know how much these cost to buy, or rent and service? How much the maintenance is? I bet you don’t. Even one of them costs a fortune. Those babies are expensive. Just because sixth form maths doesn’t use it, doesn’t mean it’s not a substantial overhead. This is what I mean. The sixth form funding doesn’t somehow come overhead-free as extra amounts. Same for all the rest of the school costs.

Where I am (Hants) the A level students tend to end up in one of 2 places, either the outstanding one with ~2000 in a year group, or the other outstanding one with ~2000 in a year group. They are seen as excellent half way houses to university with much more freedom and flexibility of options than schools. Other smaller colleges are also available but state schools with a couple of exceptions don't have 6th forms.

I can say for my DD she would have left her school and gone to the local college if she'd had to do sport. She took a packed lunch so wasn't interested byin the canteen.

And finally - where do sixth formers want to go? Do they want to go to the school with no sports provision, 30 in a class and the canteen outsourced to Sodexo where they will just be “bums on seats” funding fodder? No — they want to go to the schools with great facilities, small class sizes and a more individual experience.

And, inevitably, the ones with higher grades and more middle-class parents will be more likely to get the sixth form places they want — pushing kids who are less lucky or advantaged into the schools which just see them as bums on seats. Those will be the kids at the less good schools and sixth forms with less good facilities and less good provision overall. Which is exactly what this thread was originally about.

Good, I'm glad you have accepted that your points about photocopying and chairs were hyperbolic.

Of course if a state school 6th form suddenly has a 20% increase in numbers that would be difficult / impossible to cope with short term at least.

But is that actually happening?

There are more state 6th forms than private ones so ex private pupils can be spread out. Many parents will stay private.
In certain areas there may well be glitches of extra high demand, but where I live it isn't uncommon to travel for an hour to 6th form. (My DD is an hour door to door for her college.)

VAT on schools is idealogical more than financial for Labour. We need to accept that.

Right, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe not so much for a couple extra (though a fixed proportion of the funding will still be, per accounting rules, allocated to overheads). But don’t you see that you’re misunderstanding what “spare capacity” means? It means add a couple extra per class and the situation is probably favourable and the teacher’s workload and student experience isn’t too adversely affected. That’s your amount of “spare capacity”.

But once you’ve added a few more, the increased need for teaching provision plus the decline in teaching experience becomes a net negative. At a break-even point you then need to employ more teachers, and the costs start to outweigh the additional funding. That costs you even more in salaries, pensions, NI - more than the increased funding. When does that point get reached? Well, one school may be able to teach 30 maths students in a class with no decline in teaching quality or individual attention (though I doubt it). But in English, Art, drama, music or Chemistry? That tipping point gets reached earlier. Art and English teachers can’t increase their classes from 15 to 30 without reductions in their timetabling elsewhere. And students don’t want to go to sixth forms with 30 in a class. They start to choose elsewhere. So there’s a point at which adding more students creates diminished returns with the need for additional staffing, classroom space, loos, resources, admin, IT provision, etc. And all these pressures, despite what you think, are much more acute in the state sector, because of generally less good buildings, less staffing, more costs for pupil support, etc.

Spare capacity isn’t just merrily adding more bums on seats and assuming the increased funding is “profit”. Schools aren’t able to do that, either in their accounts, or in the effect on pupils. The idea that a private school exodus will be great for state schools just isn’t realistic. At a small margin, maybe. Not at 10-20 percent plus, which is what well may happen. We wait to see.

What IT provision, photocoping and textbooks do you think there is for six form that would need to be increased with a few extra six formers?

Who pays for the IT, then, if you understand that example better? Who pays for and maintains the school IT provision - do the parents do it at home? Do the sixth formers do it themselves?

You don’t seem to get that photocopying or textbooks are just examples of a cost that has to come out of the fixed funding amount. Different subjects use different proportions of those overall overheads. A proportion of the funding goes towards all of them.

But we also get all the data about the ability of the cohort as well 😆 Including, for example the school’s and candidate’s GCSE cohort performances relative to the school, the LEA and the national average. Amongst other things!

@TeenToTwenties Okay - do you not understand that a proportion of the per capita student funding goes towards overall overheads, including all the costs of upkeep, non-teaching costs, etc., including the accounts?

Schools - including academies - are exempt charities. They don’t make profits. When they get additional “bums on seats” that extra funding is not free “profit” over and above existing costs. A part of that extra funding goes to the overall overheads. The rest goes towards teaching. But it only benefits the school if it allows more teaching to be “bought”. If it gets swallowed up in increased overheads and costs but no extra teaching provision, it doesn’t benefit the students directly, or the teachers.

Crucially, the fee amount is fixed by the DfE — and schools’ costs aren’t all fixed. If energy costs rise, or there’s more wear and tear on the buildings, or more admin staff are needed, or supply staff, or NI goes up, for example, there’s no additional increase in the per capita funding amount for that year. That extra funding gets swallowed up by the other costs. Of course schools want to attract more pupils - to give themselves more income! But that doesn’t mean that amount is then available as a kind of extra profit - it’s more likely to only just keep many schools going.

I’n not sure why people don’t realise this. It isn’t remotely as simple as “more pupils brings more funding”. Well, if you’re a school bursar, yes it does. Hooray, you can now afford to keep paying your energy bills! If you’re a pupil or a teacher, you not only may not notice a difference, but the costs of increased class sizes may impact on you, with more work for the teachers and less teaching attention fir the pupils.

And yes, more pupils does mean more costs. You can’t just add more pupils without increasing some of your costs, any more than the hotel can get in more guests without paying more chefs to make the breakfasts and increasing the amount of wear and tear in the pool (if you like your private market analogies).

But knowing the size of the cohort tells you the grand sum of f all about the ability of the cohort.
In my trust there are schools where the top performer in their A level cohort would be the bottom of my A level cohort. By a lot.
The cohort size is to an extent irrelevant.
What we do say is how they compare to other students more specifically and realistically. Of course it helps there that I’ve been teaching in the same school for nearly 20 years.

Sixth form do very little photocopying nowadays.

I have read your posts and regardless of what you say you do it is clear that you are advocating for private schools. It is also clear that you do not have much on the ground knowledge of today’s state school six forms.

Basic info - LEA and MATs are all state schools, not private. Have you actually read any of my posts?

Anyone who thinks schools are paper-free and do no photocopying needs to take a look at that budget line in the average state school’s accounts.

Or it is that you think it’s all done by IT these days? Some kind of magic IT that the school doesn’t pay for, provide, staff support for and so on? Does the magic school budget fairy pay for that too, or maybe the parents provide, staff and run all the software and the school computers?

And which uni are you teaching in that has students heavily reliant on photocopying?My uni age kids recoil at anything printed on hardcopy.

How many state schools have you actually walked into?

Being a trustee of some private schools doesn't actually give you a better knowledge of what does and doesn't happen in state schools or universities than the people who work in them.

@neverthelastone So are you claiming that there are no 6th forms with any spare capacity in any subject? And that say all Spanish, Ancient History and Latin classes are full and can't possibly take on extra pupils?

You aren't being very coherent with your logic which is why I am having trouble following it.

If you want to argue that A level teachers shouldn't have to increase class size due to extra work load or decrease in quality of teaching then that makes sense and in certain cases is probably true.

But saying that taking on a few extra A level students means more chairs or cleaners are needed just doesn't sound plausible and thus acts as a detriment to your main argument.

I have no idea what the optimum class size is for A level, though I guess it varies by subject. I bet however that there are some subjects that could take extra pupils if they were there wanting to attend.