I should add, my boy has gone from a high-performing (OFSTED Excellent) state school class of 30 kids with absolutely no interest or respect for their teachers where intimidation and violence was the norm, a high proportion of the kids are vaping / pretending to at least. The after school fights I've seen were viscous (worse even than what I experienced as a kid in the 70's/80's when noone really cared about all that sort of thing) and generally filmed and put up on SM to compound the misery and humiliation of the victim.
If you do well in a subject you would be bullied by the disinterested hard kids in and out of school and on SM.
His new private school has 9-11 kids per class. He receives extra tutoring of an hour on Saturdays 1:1 with one of the much older kids (voluntary), and has discovered he likes and is good at maths - he is catching up / almost caught up in maths which he now actually understands.
He is now engaged in classes (apart from Physics, but nothing is perfect), the teachers like him, his class mates like him and he is happy, he has found confidence and realises his worth. His life is transformed, he has just completed his Bronze Duke of Edinburgh, is volunteering at his old primary to help younger kids with reading and maths during his (much longer than state school summer holidays).
This costs me just south of £15K per year (which I cant really afford on my slightly above average salary). But unfairly, state school costs me £5.5K per year in tax. Considering his private school class size is 1/3 of a state school, I'd say the private school is run more efficiently and is getting far better results. Maybe state school system should be looking at how private schools are doing so well with less resources and model themselves on that.
So, this will cost me £15K per year for 3 years, but you know what? my boy is worth £45K - he probably now has a decent future ahead of him, ok we wont be having holidays abroad for the next 3 or 4 years, but that's ok, because we get 52 mostly happy weeks a year, not 50 weeks of misery and a week to 10 days of sunny foreign holidays to forget that misery.
So Kier Starma can shove his desperate-for-power petty vote-pleasing nonsense up his privileged condescending no-new-ideas backside (he probably had my vote until this), and so can any parents who value their 2 weeks of sun and surf over the rest of their kids lives -or- would deny me the right to do what is best for my boys.
It's one thing to say, "I'd do anything for my kids" while sat at home watching daytime TV, but I and my wife are actually doing it -and- (by-the-way) we are without-complaint funding the state-school system despite getting absolutely no value from it.