Okay… so what exactly are the sacrifices made for a private school eduction (feel free to scroll past if you don’t want to read another public school one 😉)

[vote4whoeveryouwant]

Yes, know another private school one. But I keep reading about people making huge sacrifices so their children can go to private school but I’d be genuinely interested to know what these are?

I earn pretty well but we only holiday alternate years, don’t have a car and haven’t done anything to our decrepit house for years simply because we don’t have enough leftover after outgoings and all the boring stuff.

My DD has dyslexia and we did look into private school for her as she really struggles but it no matter what way we tried to rework our finances there was no way we could make it work.

They've only just come to the end of paying, so they should maybe give their kids a chance before deciding it was a waste of money!

The main question is whether the VAT take will actually outweigh the other costs - ie is the tax ideological or actually revenue generating.

Assuming that the cost is a "discretionary" spend the things likely to be reduced/dropped are likely to be discretionary spends. So probably less on eating out, cleaners, hair cuts, holidays etc, so there will be a similar "total" VAT taken from the individuals if they keep the kids at private school. Then the cleaner will probably also have less income to spend on luxuries...

Add on the costs of educating those whose parents can't stretch, the kids who would have gone private but now aren't, the kids from the "cheap" private school that folder and the offset of VAT paid by schools on purchases against fees charged and I don't think much money will actually be gained - making it ideological and window dressing rather than actually useful.

I have no skin in the game because despite a solid family income (probably nearly 6 figures gross) and both parents being privately educated we are heading down the state plus extra curricular route.

I'd rather see higher taxes on wealth (not just at point of inheritance), income (but make the thresholds keep pace with inflation) and property to pay for better services for all than a people pleasing tax of dubious effectiveness...

Can you link to the IFS report? I can only find this one which finds that modeling household income for households which use independent schools is extremely difficult due to the complex variables involved, especially asset wealth and family subsidy. I ahve downloaded the Anders et al MRA they cite which finds the same thing based on massive multi-variate analysis of the Millenium Cohort Study - essentially everything we are arguing about here but done properly.

In a nutshell its not knowable but all the evidence is independent only families come from the wealthiest households, and the strongest association between private school attendance in a multivariate analysis is with household income i.e. the single factor most likely to determine whether a child attends a private school or not is how rich their parents are.

My point was obvious -we're a well off household with low housing costs and on any conservative estimate it would still be out of reach for us. So you have to be really quite well-off before its within reach.

I just wish people could be honest about this. The majority of millennials and gen z are not going to be owner occupiers any time soon, rents are high, the cost of living is higher than ever. Paying for independent school is unaffordable for the majority of families in the UK. If you can afford it and food and a roof over your heads, and run a car even you are doing grand. Holidays, new cars etc are very much out of reach for the majority of the population.

I work in the NHS. I see cold, malnourished patients every day, many of them young. I see parents stressed beyond belief by debt, living in cold damp houses, trying to support their kids with complex needs. I work with child safeguarding teams who know a lot of what we are dealing with in MH is linked to the neglect caused by poverty.

What's profoundly distasteful about these threads is the assumption people make that the patients I am seeing and their parents are not working hard or do not care about their futures. They work really hard and they care as much as well off households, but in a world where UC forces single parents on to zero hours contracts with antisocial hours so they are not at home to supervise their self-harming child in the morning who is refusing to attend school due to bullying the assumption that if they just put in more hours in a warehouse they could move them to an independent school is just a bit...sort your priorities out.

The problem is most of the electorate is see this sort of thing as more ofa problem than Emily and Daniel not being to holiday abroad or having to drive a three year old car. And if their kids have to slum it in a state school we reckon they will probably be OK.

People can argue all day about privilege but if everyone on this thread stops sending their DC to private school the money they save won’t be going to the poor will it? They will buy their new cars and bigger houses, they will go on holiday and build their extensions. They aren’t going to be donating it.

Stop with the hyperbolic 'sacrifices". They're choices; spending choices.

I'd love to know which schools are being talked about here, because when we took leave of our senses and went on a couple of open days (Hampton Boys was one) I have never seen so many shiny lovely cars queuing for the car park!

I agree with the poster that this about choices. It not different from choosing to buying a flat in expensive area versus buying a house in a cheaper area. I think it's different in you are paying for private school due to SENCO - I wish we had better provision.

Wow. I have a tiny house (100k mortgage), a 5yo car, don’t drink or eat out, never travel abroad, only have a U.K. holiday for 4 days once a year. And I still don’t have enough money left to pay for private school.

Some of you are living in la la land if you think you’re making “sacrifices”.

Last couple of posts here are right. Private school is a choice. Like buying shoes from M&S or Prada. Minimum fee £15k per annum? So you have 1000+pm after tax to spend on fees. It's not that or starve, go cold etc. If you can send 2 at the same time you got 30k going spare or 2.5k pm.

And they’ll pay VAT on all of those things.

It's living in a 3 bed semi or normal 4 bed detached instead of a nice house off a road on a hill, a unique house rather than a housing estate house.
It's renting a house in France for 2 weeks in the summer rather than jetting off to Thailand for Christmas or July in the Caribbean.
It's buying a normal decent second hand car rather than buying or hiring a land rover / 4x4 monster.
It's watching the food bills, so wine around £10 a bottle, standard meat + 2 veg meals rather than takeaways or eating out a lot.
It's making clothes/shoes last regardless of change in fashions. Skipping haircuts/highlights, not forking out for Botox or nails or pedicures.
It isn't POOR people sacrificing the shirts off their backs, it's people who could live a wealthy lifestyle just bumbling along like most people who are doing nicely. It's possible to do for day school but not boarding school - has always been that way, since the 80s at least.

You probably didn't notice the people coming via bus. My best friend sends her son to Hampton boys, she lives in a two bed flat in Feltham so that they can afford the fees.

Hampton Boys 25k pa. So she chooses to spend 2k per month on that. It's a choice. But she has 25k pa after tax and outgoings to spend on fees. Some people on here earn that per year so I don't think they will see the flat as a 'sacrifice'.

@3WildOnes I can completely accept that there are outliers in every demographic. What I can't accept is the hyperbole from all the posters about second hand cars when I have seen with my own eyes that this just isn't the case. We lived near Hampton Boys too, so have plenty of acquaintances who paid for education and still managed the annual February ski trip and exotic holiday plus city breaks. And often with a SAHM too. Plus in nice houses in nice streets which were ironically already in nice catchment areas.
I just wish there was more public owning of the fact that chances are, if you pay you're privileged. If T's very tiresome. Especially with the news reported today that demand for private school places is UP, despite the VAT thing having been first floated around a year ago. https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jun/15/number-of-private-school-pupils-rises-despite-claims-families-priced-out-by-labours-vat-plan?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

Exactly this. Frankly, OP can’t earn that well if they don’t do any of those things and still can’t afford private school. Bottom line is people have varying resources and varying ideas of what ‘skint’ is and what ‘earning well’ is.

not quite

They can put it in pension or other types of savings

A lot (and I do mean it) will reduce their hours or one parent will quit work - this is my case. I can't make VAT work so DC is moving to grammar and I retire.

Re sacrifices - we live in London in a really shitty tiny place which is legally considered overcrowded. After mortgage and school fees we live on £17k pa - this is two adults and a teen, includes everything, bills, food, cloths etc. No car, no subscriptions, no takeaways etc. PS was worth every penny given DC's SEN, I feel very bitter about it

Of course it's a choice but they are obviously making sacrifices to make that choice. Neither her or her husband are high earners they are both teachers.

OP said she earns well. She implied that she has a partner/husband too. She probably could afford private school for her one child if she were willing to make the same sacrifices that my friend and I both make to send ours. Unless OPs definition of earning well is wildly different to my own, which is why I asked OP to clarify.

Brilliant article.

Everyone has a different idea of what earning well means. I remember a friend using that exact phrase when she got a job paying £25k

Oh for goodness sakes! One can value education and not send their children to private schools.

We have both worked well over full time - NHS job plus waiting lists plus extra for covering other things like long term sickness etc. I never saw it as a sacrifice, seemed the right thing to do at the time.

With the VAT coming in I’m taking them out of their schools and going very part time.
Someone else can do the lists now I’m putting my feet up!

It is more that some may value education as the ONLY or main way to ensure the best outcomes for their kids and if so - they will try to acquire the very best of that. Or they may believe it is their network or their child's network that makes all the difference. That may be paying fees but could also be buying in an a catchment of an amazing state school or finding religion. Others may feel that their children's outcome will be just as good wherever they go and the school isn't really the deciding factor. They may even believe (and some Research supports this) that it is what they do as parents or how they support at home or genetics that determines outcomes.

In general, the more expensive something is the more valuable it is - in most other areas/commodities. So it can be extrapolated that no one would pay £££ for something if it did not provide significant added value over the free version. Hence if I value education as the only/key determinant of outcomes - then it would make sense that I may go for that promotion, push harder up the greasy pole, do more than 9-5, to make it possible.

I see the same with healthcare. As a private provider - there is always the question of what is the value add in a society with the NHS and it can't just be shorter waiting list (although these days - that is good enough!).

I personally don't believe VAT will force many out but rather it will deter people coming in and possibly expedite people exiting at the end of a stage. What I wonder is how it will affect the working behaviour of many and if that would result in a significantly reduced tax intake.

As someone said - the factor that correlates the most with private school is household earnings. How many of those households have modified their behaviour to ensure they can afford these schools? If this is removed, how many coming might say - ah well, I will keep my income sub-100, take all my benefits and take it easy? We won't know until it is implemented but it would be interesting to see nonetheless

Like a PP, my eldest is at a small, not highly regarded, private school funded by his EHCP due to autism. His younger brother started at our excellent and well regarded grammar school, but was on the verge of nervous breakdown by October half term. Being in the top 5% of grammar cohort, he will never (rightly) qualify for EHCP despite the fact that a mainstream secondary school affected his mental health so badly.
So we are paying the fees for his education, all the while knowing that if support had been available to him at the grammar school, he would have been in a much better place academically. But I needed my son to survive.
Yes, we are lucky that our (less than 60k for two full time working parents) wage allows us just to do this. But we do have to make choices to enable it. No subscriptions, old cars, no holidays anywhere, rare meals out, very few new clothes, and both boys get their socialisation through volunteering in their own areas of special interest.
We will be able to fix the broken bathroom when my son finishes school, but for now I am just grateful to be able to make choices that mean that my child is no longer self harming and considering ending it all. Still wish I didn’t have to. And that people earning significantly more than me didn’t keep saying that I must be rich and deserve all the additional choices I am going to have to make.

Sacrifice is obviously the wrong word. It’s tone deaf to say it’s a sacrifice when others are barely making ends meet, but you get the point. It’s going without something you could otherwise afford, through choice although some feel the options were v limited in terms of state school suitability . Cutting your cloth might be more accurate, but
whatever you call it, plenty are doing it. Of course it’s not the same as those managing hand to mouth, nor do I think the majority of sensible people think it is.

For us it’s essentially working 5 years longer than we would have otherwise .

Honestly. The vast majority of you would be much much better off moving house and attending a decent state school. I received a much better education at my state 6th form than I did at my highly regarded private school.

I agree, but it’s not the same for everyone! My son had hit the placement jackpot, but autism made it untenable for him.