VAT on fees and schools wasting money

[Cinnamonswirled]

It seems as though the fees are likely to go up by 15%.

But is anyone else frustrated by how much their children’s schools seem to be spending on unnecessary things like never ending building programmes, ever-changing branding and gimmicky roles for staff?

It all seems a bit tone deaf in the current climate.

Does anyone else feel this?

Maintained schools have a payscale which you can look up. They also have to publish on their website whether any employees earn over 100k

Academies trust publish accounts and normally have number of employees over various brackets - so you can sort of work out the one person is the ceo, and the 11 roughly equate to all the secondary heads.

Its really hard to get people willing to be a head.

@Cinnamonswirled when our local indies advertise teaching positions they are very open and transparent about what the salary is. They also indicate what additional pay there is for running add ons and after school clubs, positions of responsibility etc.

They are indeed businesses with their own bursars taking on the role of an FD. And yes their accounts are available to see if the parents want to look. Most have no desire to for the reasons I said above. They are okay with the amounts they are paying for fees.

Maybe some schools do use the same consultants. Maybe they feel it is good value for them.

Just because you don't like that they do doesn't mean they shouldn't.

Why aren't you leaving the indie sector then if its such an issue for you?

England significantly underspends on secondary state education per pupil. The 2024/2025 spending of £7690 per pupil is not a real increase when accounting for inflation. We are way way below places like Germany and many other OECD countries. It is a problem as it affects long term productivity significantly if we neglect our young to this extent.

The line we are being sold is rich private schools charging 15000-20000 per year are the evil ones. They are probably overcharging a bit and have too many frills.

But the real truth is that the state education budget especially post pandemic when every civilised country is putting more money in is woeful. That is where the inequality lies. A Labour Government needs to up that and not spin us some lie that billions will be coming from private school parents via VAT because that simply is not true. They absolutely know that the problems with kids are mainly in secondary schools, years 7-11 in particular.

I really don’t understand why more state school parents are not as pissed off as I am about this.

I imagine parents aren't 'challenging' schools on where the money is going for the same reason that I'm not challenging the provider of anything else I'm paying a fee for as to how they spend it.

The schools offer to provide a service for X amount. Parents then choose whether this is where they want to spend their money. They choose and the transaction takes place. Provided the school then provides said service, why would parents be challenging it? I don't give a shiny shit how it's spent; I've totted up what the service they're offering is worth to me and ascertained it is an appropriate price that I'm prepared to pay. How they get there using those funds is nothing to do with me.

You seem to be conflating the interest of an employee with that of a service user. You are employed by a business to provide a service that sells to a consumer. If you don't like the way the business operates, then move to another one.

@LBOCS2

The conflation lies in watching institutions that are hundreds of years old be ripped apart by a fairly short term period of greed. And a vague hope that parents might stand up for the values of the school.

As a student of a private school in the 80s and 90s, no one spoke in these terms about school as a ‘business’ or a ‘service’. We were part of a movement (a feminist movement) that nurtured hard work and academic interest.

These suggestions that one leaves the schools they work in because they don’t like how they operate surely come from people who don’t work in education. Teaching is not and should not be a dynamic job market (its success relies on your commitment to nurturing a generation through their school days). Very often, the teachers outlast the school leaders who fleetingly turn up—cause irreparable damage—and move on to their next headship before anyone gets to hold them to account.

“The conflation lies in watching institutions that are hundreds of years old be ripped apart by a fairly short term period of greed. And a vague hope that parents might stand up for the values of the school.

As a student of a private school in the 80s and 90s, no one spoke in these terms about school as a ‘business’ or a ‘service’. We were part of a movement (a feminist movement) that nurtured hard work and academic interest.

These suggestions that one leaves the schools they work in because they don’t like how they operate surely come from people who don’t work in education. Teaching is not and should not be a dynamic job market (its success relies on your commitment to nurturing a generation through their school days). Very often, the teachers outlast the school leaders who fleetingly turn up—cause irreparable damage—and move on to their next headship before anyone gets to hold them to account.”

I totally agree @Cinnamonswirled

I think it is important to look at private schools in France and Spain and ask why they are not suddenly 30k a year but have kept the older traditions.

If these heads have gone so overboard over the last 15 years, no wonder the taxman now wants part of the pie. Realistically state secondary spending should be at 10k per pupil and private about 50-70 per cent more, and definitely no more than that. The accounting for grounds and maintenance to be clearly earmarked separately as obviously grade 2 buildings etc may cost more to maintain properly.

I always enjoy your posts @Araminta1003 and wonder how you know so much!!!

Pay scales.
https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/advice/pay-pensions/pay-scales/pay-scales-england.html

Maintained school headteacher - from L6 £53380.

Leadership scale determined by the school size.

This is an example of the scale in a small primary.
https://schooljobs.lancashire.gov.uk/vacancyDetails.asp?id=190496

Secondary, larger schools, higher up the leadership scale.
https://schooljobs.lancashire.gov.uk/vacancyDetails.asp?id=190193

Maintained schools (governors) are under LA scrutiny for their spending. They are not legally allowed to run a deficit budget. LA finance teams, will licence a short term deficit, but only with a regularly scrutinised and benchmarked budget.

Academy trust CEO’s are a different fall game all together and agreed by the trust board! Accountability much more lacking.

I agree that Exec Heads / CEOs for MATS are far more lacking in accountability.

I used to sit as a governor at a time when we had to comtemplate joining a MAT - the other governors simply didn’t believe me or care that the government has no means of inspecting the Exec level of a MAT.

A scandal in plain sight.

@Cinnamonswirled- what are your thoughts on governance in private schools? So many have slightly weak volunteer governors? Is it not their job to call out excessive spending and the accountability of the head? Do you think most are successful professionals and just do a cover my backside job so rely on external advisors to sign off/pass the buck? That is why the consultancy advice is so pervasive?

Where I live there is a well known slightly maverick private school head who still dishes out large scholarships on spurious grounds with no regard to affordability checks. His school has very little support staff/admin though so that is where the savings are made. On the other end of the spectrum, is another very slick very successful private school with all the bells and whistles and legions of support staff and welfare and sustainability type roles and an admissions team that wines and dines globally. Very different outfits. Both seem to have some parent governors.

I digress but my question really is whether school governance is fit for purpose these days?

My recollection as a governor in the maintained sector was that there was a problem with governors not knowing what they didn’t know.

Academisation or joining a hard federation seems, to the lazy and unaware, to lead to economies of scale and staff sharing arrangements.

Yet, there is no evidence that system leadership has any positive impact on student outcomes because the DfE never wrote the framework needed to evaluate it.

I will more happily accept the argument that ‘We are federating / academising because the government are replacing LAs with this model, and so we have no choice’ than any suggestion that ‘we are doing this because the proposed structure will benefit our school, including its most vulnerable members’.

So, lack of expertise or critical awareness around education in the UK and in the OECD - and schools really need governors to have this. Training is hit and miss.

And my experience was that our board was populated with a group of people who wanted to be Conservative MPs, but who rarely turned up to meetings.

This is not everyone’s experience. Some governing bodies work extremely well. Ours was improving because our new Chair of Governors was perceptive enough to see historical failings in its recruitment. He and I disagreed on the importance of having teachers on the board, however. We had no staff governors, for example - just vacant positions.

For the independent sector, there is a rule (from the Charity Commission?) that you can’t have staff governors.

Governing bodies therefore are too remote.

Ours didn’t used to be like this, but new leadership, and the pandemic, to some extent, means that governors no longer engage with staff. Not even exit interviews. We cannot write to them. Everything has to go through the clerk to governors, who is a Senior Leader in the school. That includes Safeguarding and Whistleblowing.

In my opinion, the gatekeeping means that they don’t get to properly understand whether their decisions on spending are having the desired effect. This stretches from recruitment of the Head, establishment of new senior leadership roles, curriculum changes, investments in professional development and capital expenditure.

This leads to everyone engaging in the model referred to all over this thread: it is a business; it offers a service; it has to spend on marketing to get the fee income.

If your success indicators amount to just a few financial headline figures then I guarantee that you are letting down the most vulnerable in your school (and expanding, or excluding, the ‘most vulnerable’ group in the student body) - because you aren’t looking at educational outcomes for all.

Governors’ lack of understanding of their school and the sector make them dependent on the one consultancy firm that they all use. The very expensive annual report that they all buy—and which seems to amount to the sum total of their awareness of the sector—has led to homogeneity of fees, curriculum provision, lesson timings, facilities, low pay for teachers, (ludicrously) high pay for Heads, massive expansion of support staff (akin to the early 2000s in the state sector—which was then followed by redundancy)… I could go on.

Would you like to read the annual report from that consultancy that is so influential on your fees, as a parent, or your pay, as a teacher. Well, you can’t! They won’t show it to you!

So, my feeling on private school governance is that it is remote and lacks accountability and transparency. And that one consultancy firm has unbelievable influence in the sector (and I think that is wrong, and good governance should be resilient to that).

Schools need the ‘gimmicks’ to attract those overseas wealthy parents… how much value a private zoo adds to an actual edu stink, I’m not sure…