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.

As charities they don't make any profits. All money gets reinvested into the school. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to have charitable status.

For the umpteenth time, there is no subsidy.

Nope.

Why would they, when anybody able to afford the fees is already ‘privileged’ ? Of course there are scholarships, some less well-off people take personal loans at crazy high interest rates. But otherwise social mobility is for the U.K. , not the whole world. It’s very common for people to get accepted and not go because they can’t afford it. I myself only got financial help at the last minute, funnily enough hours before I was going to reject my offer. I was lucky, as someone else had turned the scholarship down.

Also private=privilege isn’t an international concept.
Some countries don’t allow foreigners into state schools for free. So they have to pay. Might as well go private if that’s the case. As there’s a lot of xenophobia in the state schools.
Others don’t have free education that’s feasible (whether it’s a lack of school places, location, cultural factors) , so parents pay a small sum to a teacher and kids are taught in a religious building/village hall/teacher’s home.

@OooErr Private schooling having "nothing to do with access to higher education" will come as news to the majority of those who send their children to private schools, who consistently list preferential access to higher education as a major motivation in doing so. And the schools themselves boast of being able to optimise this!

You are in denial. If you're not prepared to acknowledge (as several heads of major private schools have done in the past) this most fundamental point - that the current structure of private schools allows people to effectively pay for preferential access to higher education, and that for many this is exactly why they send their children to the schools - then it's hard to see how to engage with you.

OP I don't think you understand what is required for charitable status.

All kinds of organizations can have charitable status. Schools. Theaters or orchestras. Local museums that charge admission.

The fact is that they are providing a useful service and they are not making a profit at it. And they are meeting all the requirements in terms of oversight, obeying rules businesses don't have to.

There is also the question of whether parents should have the right to educate their kids in the way they see fit, and whether it's appropriate to tax that when there is no one making profit from it.

@MMangyInseam I think you've missed out on some of the debate on this thread. One point at issue is whether private schools provide a net public benefit (a legal requirement for charities nowadays). One can agree that people have a right to educate children however they want, but if the aim is to advantage their children (in terms of access to limited places) compared to those who can't afford similar opportunities, then how can this convincingly be framed as being of public benefit?

Being non-profit making is not enough to be a charity.
It has to be for the public good.
I do not accept that providing education to the top 5% of rich people who pay it for privately is a public benefit. And actually neither does charity law accept this is enough. It is why they all have to loan school sports fields etc out to state schools to pretend they are a public benefit.

I wonder if the v high % of our top sportspeople coming from private schools would count as public good? I can't remember the figure now but at the last Olympics there was a lot of talk about how do many of our medallists were from the private sector. I work in one but my kids go to state and the difference in the amount of sport provided and accessible is astronomical.

I think it is more to do with the cost of training for years, all the travel etc before you even get to be an Olympic hopeful.

The 'development track' Emma Raducanu was on to get to the US Open cost £10,000 per year.

A friend of a friend was a field Olympic hopeful a few years ago - it was constant scraping together the money for training, travel, diet etc. He worked a minimum wage job because it gave the flexibility he needed.

If you have parents able to pay for private school they are likely to be able to fund your training in all those years to be in contention for elite sports

Being non-profit making is not enough to be a charity
It has to be for the public good

There are plenty of people with influence who are opposed to private education such as Alastair Campbell and his partner Fiona Millar. It’s surprising then that a court case hasn’t been brought pointing out what you say about charitable status and trying to get it removed.

@Andante57 But that is why they all offer access to state schools to their facilities and more. I am sure they will talk up the reality on the ground.
A court case may succeed, but it would be very expensive as any school a court case would be brought against would I am sure get practical and financial support from other schools to fight it. Because it would affect them all. Only an institution or someone super rich could realistically do this.
And the Charity Commission has had major cuts to its funding so only deals with the very worst abuses now. It is fairly toothless now.

@Arkestra yes, but what does ‘preferential access’ mean? Is it a direct channel to the admissions departments? Or getting in with massive donations (like the U.S Ivy League schools).

Nope. It’s the all-rounded education that private schools give including relevant extracurriculars, interview prep. Students have a certain confidence when speaking.

A child applying for Oxbridge Physics for example will be expected to have done a few science projects, participated in events. It’s not enough to ‘simply’ have gotten the required grades and watched a few YouTube videos.

All of this can be replicated with anyone who has the money to hire private tutors/knowledge and time to guide their child. Plenty of middle class state school parents do this.

So if you’re coming at the angle of ‘money can’t buy privilege’ then you’re wrong for fixating on private schools. Their marketing materials can claim anything they like. And in fact they may just provide a ‘one-stop’ shop, especially for busy parents who work long hours. But that doesn’t mean that in their absence there are no other options for buying privilege.

The ONLY way this works is to extend the same resources to every child. Which tearing down private schools doesn’t help with.

Antelope - this post provoked a vague memory about this very topic so I googled it and in 2011 private schools won a court case against the charity commission then headed by Suzie Leather (who was herself privately educated, as were her 3 children).

‘A court has ruled that the Charity Commission, which regulates charities, was wrong in some of the ways it made fee-paying schools show their public benefit’

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the schools would win today.

Also @Arkestra I’m well aware of what it takes to get into elite instituons. I went to LSE (my undergrad wasn’t offered at Oxbridge) and at the time of admission I had won a few industry sponsored essay competitions, read and dissected undergraduate level books and also had my own little financial analysis project going.

I went through developing country state schools (with no teachers for half my lessons). I was lucky that my A-level college (that I won a scholarship to!) emphasised the importance of these things. I didn’t even realise that LSE was so elite or competitive, I must’ve been the only idiot who got there and realised everyone else was making a fuss. Not joking. I only saw that it had the most scholarship options, I just wanted ‘a’ U.K. uni and was advised to apply as I had top grades. All I knew as elite was Oxbridge ( but doesn’t everybody?)

Also to add the moment I got to uni …. In Fresher’s week … people were applying for spring weekS already! They also muscled into club leadership positions, attempted to organise events and do loads of things ‘for their CV’.
It was insane.

If you’ve been told all your life that you just need to work hard and get good grades , and the get ‘a’ degree you’ll be in for a massive shock.