Private Schools being able to hold charitable status

[IdiotCreatures]

I went and looked at a building associated with a local independent school yesterday, as it's always piqued my curiosity.
The school is run by the Woodard Corporation. I looked at their books on company house yesterday.
The amount of money moving through them is ridiculous. If people want to pay for a private education, then surely the institutions should be taxed.
Apart from a small number of scholarships, the average person is not benefiting from these institutions.
In the case of Eton, as pointed out on another thread, these schools are probably leading to damage to society and definitely do not promote the idea of equality.

Of course despite going to state-funded schools, the children of Cameron and Blair aren't mixing with the kids from council tower blocks. No, it's not just fees that help keep the riff-raff away. House prices and religious selection make many good state schools only accessible to the wealthy and sharp-elbowed. What do posters propose to do about the other forms of social segregation in schooling once they've levelled-down the independents?

Having spent the past couple of years living in Denmark, they have a terribly low education standard in general but they have a system that enables choice. Every school gets the same funding per pupil, the ‘private’ schools then charge an extra fee on top, which is waived if parents are low income. I think it’s a much fairer system.

My children will all be attending private school after a terrible experience in government schooling in the US and Denmark. My elder two have autism and my youngest needs additional pastoral care as we spent so much more time on the elder two. The school fees in Denmark came to £6500 per year for 3 children. In the US it will be about $110k, which is about £80-90k depending on the exchange rate. If my job offer comes through I’ll be spending about £60k in the UK on fees and another £20k on specific tutoring for the elder two.

I would prefer a system where parents have a real choice when it comes to educating their children. Removing the charitable status from schools doesn’t help anyone. The private schools offer that diversity that so many children need and mainstream settings can’t offer. It’s not about elite boarding schools. The vast majority of private schools are really nothing special and cater to those who wouldn’t thrive in a mainstream setting.

Sixth form colleges have to pay VAT unless they are part of an academy chain. Which makes no sense at all as academy chains often make money (for the academy chain) independently run colleges don't. Therefore it is insulting that private schools don't pay tax.

It's disgusting OP.

Plenty of Labour mps object to private education and/or charitable status. Why didn’t they do something about it while they were in power?

www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10380235/amp/EDEN-CONFIDENTIAL-David-Cameron-does-U-turn-send-daughter-21k-private-school.html

Hate DM but first thing that came up when I googled

You're right. But that only cements the point further that people
In power pay and therefore have no skin in the game the rest of the population have to play.

.....people in power pay and therefore have no skin in the game the rest of the population have to play.
*

This!!!!* 💯__

You're right. But that only cements the point further that people
In power pay and therefore have no skin in the game the rest of the population have to play

I think it’s unlikely that many Labour MPs educate their children privately. There was uproar when Diane Abbott did it and any Labour mp doing it would be castigated in the press.
I appreciate that Labour are in opposition but their MPs are supposedly influential people - exactly those who many pp have said would improve state schools were private education to be abolished.
Are these Labour MPs doing much to improve state schools?

@Andante57 i don't imagine there's much they can do while in opposition. But I do recall in the late 1990's and early 2000's much WAS done in London at least to improve state provision. There was a vast school rebuilding programme, and Blair's mantra of Education Education Education seemed for a while to translate to actual policy. The primary my two went to was rebuilt, and eventually the secondary they would have gone to had we not relocated got a similar rebuild. It was rather wonderful to see education being taken so seriously. All gone a bit quiet since.
And sadly the rural area we moved to didn't enjoy the same titivation.

Faffadoodle thank you for answering my question.

Because they don't have alumni that are rich enough to give £100,000 at a time (as Rishi Sunak did)?

Where to start (as a former professional fundraiser including in the school sector...)

Professional fundraising advice is expensive. If you are going to run a successful multi million pound campaign that is a small %of costs.

However, a successful fundraising campaign needs a lead gift of 10-15% of the total.

I.e. if the total you are trying to raise is £1 million, you need someone connected to the school who can give £100,000-150,000.

Eton has a large number of alumni who could do that if they chose. You local state school - far less likely.

I did run a successful £1 million campaign in a state grammar school - 40% of pupils had gone to a private prep, and almost all would have stayed in private education if they had not got s grammar school place. So there were a number of parents with that sort of money. But it is very rare.

And anything under about £1 million makes paying for fundraising expertise too much compared to the total raised.

Interesting @Runnerbeansflower

Does that answer your question @Barbadossunset?

It does seem fairly obvious why private (public!) schools can raise more money than state...

There's more to it than that though. Some state school pupils do well for themselves, but they don't make bequests to their old school. Private schools on the other hand seem to work hard to maintain links with alumni. There appears to be a stronger sense of community.

@TullyApplebottom "To question whether they provide public benefit is legitimate. To say they are subsidised is untrue, and not legitimate. If you cannot argue your case honestly, maybe it’s not that strong."

I totally agree with that last sentence! But I didn't say private schools were subsidised at any point in this thread, so I'm afraid that your second sentence is untrue. So overall you appear to be arguing against your own ability to state a strong case? In general, accusing people of dishonesty isn't a very effective rhetorical tactic, for all kinds of reasons. But fire away with both barrels if you want, just try not to blow your own feet off at the same time.

Arguments about private schooling tend to be low quality because people say they are all good or all bad. But like any interesting thing on this planet, our current setup of private schools has positive and negative aspects - to say that anything is totally good or totally bad is puerile. The question is what the net effect is. And whether this is the same across the entire set of private schools, which are a very varied bunch.

For what it's worth, I think there is a strong argument for charitable status for private education that's filling a gap, e.g. in provision for children who can't integrate readily with mainstream education for whichever reason. I'm less sure about the St Paul's of this world, at the other extreme.

You haven't yet responded to my main point: that attendees of private schools grabbing a disproportionate amount of access to further education is a very serious public harm, which tips the net public effect onto the negative side - at least for a substantial proportion of private schools. Why not counter that argument? You could say:

• it's true, but X and Y offset it (for some kinds of schools or all)
• it's not true (there's a fair bit of evidence for it though)
• it's true, but it's not actually a bad thing
• some other argument that my Guardian-reading-liberal mind is incapable of coming up with by itself

What do you think?

@DdraigGoch that's an interesting point. Private schools certainly do a better job of keeping up with alumni, which obviously makes fund-raising easier. I would happily chuck my old state school some money - it was rough as a badger's backside, but the teachers were great and I really got a good education out of it - but they got shut down around 1990 when London hit a demographic dip.

Perhaps part of the problem is that there might not be a very clear route by which a bequest could be made: the legal entity of a state school can be quite mutable (academy conversions, closures etc) and so it's harder to get something stable that a bequest can manage. What happens to a bequest when the government or local authority decides to mix things up and marge/close schools?

@Aintnosupermum I think there's a far stronger case for charitable status for private schools that fill gaps in provision - as opposed to those that try to afford preferential access to credentials. I don't know what the balance is between the two though. For instance the Girls' Day School Trust have 25 schools and they are definitely on the "preferential access" side of things. Is there an easy way to tell what the balance is between the two types?

It is expensive to stay in touch with alumni.

Worth doing if many of alumni can give £100,000 within 20 years of leaving school (e.g. Eton and the like).

Not financially viable for your standard state school

It's not a question of 'community'. It comes down to having rich families whose influence and access results in rich offspring.

@Arkestra Its not easy to tell the difference. The other issue is that my elder two both have ASD but both have a need for a highly structured academic setting. My son will do very well in a hot house environment. My daughter will do best in an all girls arts focused school. She wrote her first play at 6 and spent most of covid writing and directly YouTube videos (I filmed but never let her post anything!).

At the other end of the range are the children who really struggle and need specialized access to education. Plenty of private schools do not have amazing grades or have ever sent pupils to Oxbridge but they work with the children who would fail in a mainstream setting.

@Arkestra you make a good point about charitable status for those kinds of speciaist schools who cater for special needs. I have a young friend who teaches in one in Devon which seems to take kids who were excluded from state schools. The LAs appear to pay for the provision. No problem with this kind of set up for special needs.
But St Pauls. or even our local low ranking private school really shouldn't get the same treatment as the above

Does that answer your question @Barbadossunset?

So only private schools can fund raise because only they have rich students?This implies that no one who goes to state schools is successful in business or their careers which is patently untrue - upthread someone has said they would be happy to give their old school some money.
Apparently the Wolfson Trust are looking into it www.wolfson.org.uk/state-schools-fundraising-toolkit/

Honestly your arguments are bizzare! There is no subsidy and no taxpayers money is being given to private schools. Private schooling saves the taxpayer a fortune by schooling the 8% that attend private schools.