Nearly £9000 more spent on private secondary pupils than state pupils

[SluggyMuggy]

Research from University College London that found £12,200 a year is the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. For secondary, it’s £15,000 compared with £6,200.

This entrenches inequality as private pupils are given far more resources towards their education.

People will just find themselves priced out of catchment for the best schools.

Education system would be transformed

So, so naive.

Better family homes? Ban those too.

Absolutely. Tutors, gyms, holidays. Perhaps we should ban the lot because not everyone can afford them.

Mumsnet is hard to understand. "It's not a race to the bottom" is trotted out on every thread where there is the slightest whiff of someone being better / worse off than another, with the single exception of private schools - then everything should be taken away from private schools and pupils forthwith, never to return. In the matter of private schools it really is a race to the bottom! Yet, as other posters have mentioned, people who pay for private medical care, private dentistry, or invest their mortgage / rental payments in housing in the catchment areas for good schools are not vilified at all - in those instances it is understood and accepted that people have used their money as it works best for them, and no-one bats an eyelid. I have no skin in the gsme on this one, but I'm really struggling to understand why private schooling evokes such strong feelings, when private medical and dental care don't, and gaming the system for the right catchment area doesn't either. Fundamentally, it's all the same thing - people making the best decisions they can for themselves and their children, based on what is available to them at the time.

Including all the listed buildings and those within Unesco world heritage sites.
Blimey whose going to pay for all that maintenance now 🤣

Total lack of thinking ahead 🤯

Private medicine
Private dentistry
Private tutors

They would be sold and become hotels or apartments.

A UNESCO world heritage site surrounding Canterbury Cathedral……OK 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Not to mention a lot of buildings and finances to build them were gifted to the schools for educational purposes only.

Even the Labour Party realised that the idea of banning private schools was a totally ludicrous one, and indeed nigh on impossible due to their history.

Let's ban all restaurants, only fried chicken shops allowed.

This.

Ban them all. Get politicians to send their kids state. Build more schools to accommodate. Tax the wealthy to fund it. If they aren’t playing 20k a year school fees they can afford it. Education system would be transformed.

This is frankly ridiculous. My state school education has paid for my kids to go to private school so no particular axe to grind but 'taxing the rich' is such a lame argument.

The ultra-rich tend to be internationally mobile so will simply piss off overseas to a lower tax country (Monaco is packed for a reason). The reality is that many middle class families already have a big tax bill while also paying for private education and healthcare.

Pretty much half of what they earn goes in income tax and NI, before we get to VAT, CGT, IHT etc. The highest income tax rate cost the government more than it generated when it was first introduced and some people have a marginal tax rate of 70% which you can see in the graph. There is a tipping point at which people have a disincentive to work harder (which happened with consultants and pension caps).

Then you add in the funding needed for all the private school pupils, the lack of land (our site is owned by a worshipful company not the school), the cost of building new schools, the time lag to do it and the fact that house prices by the best schools will be a barrier for those kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It's the politics of envy that doesn't actually achieve the desired effect.

For the very wealthy obviously 🙄

So you're going to close Private schools.

How are you going to stop people paying for private tuition in their own homes or after school?

Let's not forget that Belfast is not in Ireland. It's in Northern Ireland, and therefore part of the UK.

Also, the biggest export of Ireland (i.e., the state to the south and partly to the west of Northern Ireland, is pharmaceutical products followed by organic chemicals, then optical/photo/tech medical apparatus...
Also in the top quarter of the list is machinery, nuclear reactors, boilers, aircraft and spacecraft.

Ireland saw net migration yet again last year. Along with natural increase (births), this has meant another increase in population, to 5.3 million, up from 3.805 million in 2000. Obv this is still down from 8.175 million (in the entire entire island) in the 1841 census, but island wide, including NI, the population is about 6.185 million.

Gaming the system to get your kids into one of the many, many excellent state ("public" in US) schools is sniffed at when Americans do it in America.

Every time someone mentions the public schools' lavish facilities, the incredible extra curricular opportunities, the stipends paid to teachers to run clubs and coach sports, the SEN departments, the pastoral care, the excellent academic provision and results, the small class sizes, etc., someone comes along and talks about inequality as if this is solely and American phenomenon. Honorable mention goes to the alleged poor quality of American education, despite the fact that American students in droves accept places in American universities every year (including many in the world's top twenty) and also places in universities outside of the US. Oh and guns, the ultimate ace up the sleeve that makes it impossible to learn from any American funding model or educational philosophy.

American education is funded by taxes, mainly local school district property taxes but also state income taxes. If you want good state schools, you'll have to put your money where your mouth is.

I fully agree with your last sentence. But somewhat simpler in America as their taxes don't also pay for the NHS equivalent - so there's a bit more to go around. Or am I wrong? I know very little about America, so happy to be educated! (Excuse the pun 😀)

Unless we change to a communist country, there will always be inequality.

OP, are you a communist?

So lets try and reduce inequality becomes...

You must be a communist and we will always have inequality.

Righto. Let the poor starve as we can do nothing about inequality without becoming a communist country.

Remember private school parents are also very likely to be contributing to state schools as well through taxes (disproportionately so I would imagine)

What a load of crap.

DC at private secondary. Because the state schools around here have such poor exam results.

Before we chose we looked at the local state secondaries too of course.

DCs school start GCSEs Y10 - it wasn't until going around the local state school that I realised kids could start GCSEs in Y9 instead.

The results at the state secondaries who do the Y9 start are well below national average - and this is in an area with very little ESL etc.

Same. Very weird.

Private school parents disproportionately pay higher rate tax so are already net contributers.

Thank you so much for paying more tax, we are all so grateful.

Exactly- former educator here and there will always be inequalities. Most of it is to do with the types of backgrounds they’re from.

Even in state schools the one in areas with more educated middle class parents who are engaged in their children’s education and have ambitions on them will be very different from the kids who couldn’t afford to live in that catchment area.

Plenty of state school parents pay loads on tutoring as well. Are you going to ban that too??

middle class state school kids who get to go away on holiday and go on day trips to London and receive all kinds of cultural enrichment is inequality too. Where do we draw the line?

It's not surprising more is spent on private school kids - it's the parents choosing to pay that though.

What is more surprising is that the amount spent per pupil varies so much in the state sector.

My area of Wales pays one of the least - it's seem to be reflected in the results.

Once again the very small numbers of kids in private who will be more privileged whatever are being used to distract about the huge inequalities in state sector.