Do you think labour will actually implement 20% vat on school fees?

[labpit]

We have two in Year 7 and year 10 and I am not sure what we will do if this happens. It is a certainty do you think?

I've got one left at private in year 10, and if Labour bring this in, I'll take my place at our local 6th form, as is my right.

They should welcome us with open arms because apparently, I'll already know some of the teachers when they move across back to state, I'll hassle the teachers about standards and they'll be raised, I'll join the PTA and raise loads of money, and I'll donate loads of money to the school.

I think medical, dental and (perhaps) veterinary degrees should be state funded where the graduate works for a monopoly provider, like the NHS. But I also think that young doctors should be required to work for the NHS for a commensurate period post-qualification. Ten years perhaps?

"Ultimately, we need to raise more taxes to put into education (and health) and the only people who can pay are the wealthy."

I think you'll find that the majority of income tax in the UK, I think 60% of it, is paid by the top 10% highest earners - so "the wealthy" already pay a lot!

The same briefing doc states that
"Overall, direct taxes (which include income tax, NICs and council tax) lower income inequality. Richer individuals pay a greater share of their gross household income in direct taxes compared with poorer individuals. Council tax limits the extent to which direct taxes reduce income inequality."

My DH paid an effective rate of tax of 47.7% last year. Yes, 47.7% of his salary went straight to the government.

Just how much more do you think he should be contributing?!

We keep pouring ever more tax into the system, and it's never enough. So much wastage and corruption everywhere. What really needs to happen is a complete overhaul of how the government and public sector is organised, and a review of what services they should be providing etc.

But that is such a massive job that no one is ever going to take it on. So instead, "the rich" will keep being asked to give an even bigger proportion of their income, whilst nothing actually gets improved.

I don’t know if it’s as black and white as wanting to ‘lavish educational resources’ on them. The ‘advantage’ we wanted was safety. The state schools near us had had quite a few stabbings when we were choosing secondaries. We were scared, esp as our son is a bit ‘different’ and a target for bullies.

We were in the privileged position of ‘buying’ a school place for our son which didn’t have those issues. No doubt it was an ‘unfair advantage’ but I don’t really apologise for wanting to keep my son away from that ‘social disadvantage’’ if we could. People can judge us and that’s ok.

Agree completely.

"The state schools near us had had quite a few stabbings when we were choosing secondaries."

Stabbings inside the school?

Was it Kingsdale in Dulwich? 🤔

Do you think they will start charging people who use grammar schools? Let’s say if you earn above 50k you now have to pay 2k per child to the state school budget and if you earn above 100k you pay 4K per child? Some on the very left despise grammar schools too. Do you think they will start asking church state schools to self fund more as well? Let’s say upping the 10% to 20% so they also become non viable?

The worst thing this country has done is handing out top up benefits to the poor because it just meant that employers got away with underpaying them and zero hours contracts. Everyone needs to contribute to the system properly. Everyone needs to pay actual tax, that is what all the research shows. And every person deserves a decent living wage.

@RockaLock ,

Well, Bill Gates will probably pay 95%+ over his lifetime. What is a ‘fair’ rate depends very much on what you earn.

The richest are paying more and more total tax because they have more and more money. It is a lot to do with the miracle of the 2008 banking bail out, where some of the richest paid a massive negative tax rate and the subsequent miracle of quantitative easing, which inflated asset prices, again benefiting the rich.

But, leaving such philosophic debate aside, do you know that the government gave no money to state schools to cover the teachers’ pay rise, and state schools had to miraculously fund this from their £5,000 odd they receive per pupil? Can you imagine how that impacted the education of students?

You are right about corruption and wastage etc, but that won’t miraculously disappear. We need to deal with the appalling lack of funding in our education and health sector.

Not inside the school, sorry. Pupils from the school involved in altercations and stabbings off school property.

Me too.

I don't think it's necessary for my daughter to be in the same school as gangs from the local estates to experience "diversity". No apologies for wanting a decent safe environment to send my kid to. No lavish facilities at my daughter's school at all - completely ordinary school with normal middle class families that in other European countries would be free, but in the UK is impossible to get unless I pay for it (in our area at least) outside of superselective grammars.

I'd be interested to know (genuinely) if these kinds of debates happen in other European countries - where private education is not taxed. Or is this unique to the UK where the gap between rich and poor is widening?

@izimbra you're right that I don't want my kids in school with a certain type. The ones that beat them up, terrorised them on the bus, followed them home so they felt unsafe on evenings and weekends. Am I meant to feel guilty for taking them away from that? Ok then.

@izimbra are your dc subject to this?

The last thing privately educating parents want is the equality of opportunity that would be the result of state schools having the same resources as private schools. It would mean their child no longer has an advantage over other children!

There are plenty of comments on private v. state school education threads along the lines of ‘I went to university with both state and privately educated people and if anything the state educated have done better’ or ‘I went to a bog-standard comp and there were plenty of high achievers’ or ‘my dc are be,used that anyone would pay when they get the same education for free’.

It seems the real advantage lies not so much in private schooling as in whether parents have access to a good state school.

"Other more progressive countries do this. It's paid to the school of your choice and therefore allows any parent to choose any school they want for their child."

This is what the campaign for 'school vouchers' in many US states intends to do. What it means is that anyone who can afford to top up their voucher, who can travel to take their child to school in an area a bit further away, and who has a child who selective schools would want, can take the money out of the state school system. My understanding is that this system works to rapidly increase inequality of educational opportunity, social segregation in schools, and to promote racial and religious segregation. In the US there are groups who hope this system will collapse the entire public education sector in their states.

“I'd be interested to know (genuinely) if these kinds of debates happen in other European countries - where private education is not taxed. Or is this unique to the UK where the gap between rich and poor is widening”

Haven’t seen much in France or Germany or Switzerland or Spain all of which have similar percentage of private schools I think. If anything there is a growing demand for private education and soft skill s and clubs provided on site because of a shift in working patterns and both adults having to work and therefore wanting good quality education and DCs well looked after and engaged physically in sports, because the parents don’t have the time to do if themselves anymore. It is really upside down to discourage this when kids have high obesity rates and mental health issues as a group. They should be incentivising people to spend well on their DCs and not the opposite especially now that birth rate is a challenge. If many high earners with DCs leave we are truly screwed.

@Newbutoldfather yes, I did know that about education funding, actually, because I work for an educational charity that works closely with state schools, and indeed we have lots of current teachers and SLT working with/for us. I am quite aware of the funding situation in schools.

And even if I didn't have my current job, there is a thing called, you know, the news, and as I have 2 school aged DS, I take an interest in education generally and follow such stories.

But thanks for mansplaining it for me anyway

But maybe if the huge amounts of inefficiencies were tidied up elsewhere within the public sector, then there would be more funding available to education, where by and large (at least at school level) there is very little wastage.

Of course the rich pay more and more tax as their wealth increases. That's only right. But whether it should be more and more as a percentage of their income^^ is another discussion.

My DH is fully PAYE. We have no way to reduce our tax bill through offshore companies, dodgy contracts etc. He is not a "fat cat" director or banker. We are comfortably off, but we are certainly not the super-rich that people generally think of when they talk of making "the wealthy" pay more tax. And yet, he handed over 47.7% of his income as income tax.

We are very happy to pay all the taxes that we are asked to, greater good and public benefit and all that, but there does come a point at which you think ?!?!really?!? and I'm afraid this year, 47.7% was it.

France (I don’t know about other European countries) has a very differ attitude to private schooling.

There are a few elite and expensive ones but most are surprisingly cheap, with one year’s worth of fees being about a term’s worth in the uk.

They are often for children who don’t quite fit into mainstream and are not generally considered superior.

I agree with you

And if it helps I caught a piece on taxes and the last line was (‘sadly’ in the analysts words) we already ‘tax the rich’ as much as other comparable countries

"It seems the real advantage lies not so much in private schooling as in whether parents have access to a good state school."

A 'good' state school will still have half the number of teachers per 100 children than a private school. It will still have a cohort of disruptive, low achieving children, which mainstream private schools won't. It will usually struggle hugely with recruiting and retaining STEM and other specialist teaching staff.

What do you think separates a 'good' state school from a 'bad state school'?

"I agree with you

And if it helps I caught a piece on taxes and the last line was (‘sadly’ in the analysts words) we already ‘tax the rich’ as much as other comparable countries"

"The prime minister first said he would be happy to publish his tax return in November last year. He has now revealed he earned a total of £4.766m across the three years of 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22 and paid a total of £1.053m in tax - an overall effective tax rate of 22%."

Many of the wealthiest people in the UK pay a lower rate of tax than teachers or nurses, because such a high percentage of their money comes from wealth rather than earnings from work:

https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/how-much-tax-do-the-rich-really-pay

It will still have a cohort of disruptive, low achieving children

Since you used a comp with higher parental incomes than other schools when you do your reform to allocation do you think this will go up or down?

Contracted schools in France are €2,500-€10,000 a year. If the school is not under contract, expect to pay €8,000-€15,000.

One DC did an exchange with a private school in France under contract, so state grammar here to school under contract ie subsidised there. DC said the school was very nice. But we also have state grammars that look more like private schools, places like Cranmore and Skinners.

Many of the wealthiest people in the UK pay a lower rate of tax than teachers or nurses, because such a high percentage of their money comes from wealth rather than earnings from work.

The tax system is to blame for that. They should have taxed housing wealth ages ago, also to disincentive people from using a house as an investment rather than a home.
The trouble with wealth taxes is the high administrative cost so they should introduce wealth taxes for people with a net worth above let’s say 5-10 million as that lot will have accountants anyway. Then they should tax housing wealth, death and a mansion tax or at least a proper council tax because councils are bust anyway. It would be far better to let people see the spend locally that disappear into a central government sink hole so the likes of David Cameron can carry on war mongering.