To think good school places will be even harder to find next year because of the VAT on school fees

[Nesca1]

We are are looking at secondary schools for DS. We have our eye on a decent school bang in the middle of a solid middle class area . The school is always over subscribed; this year we would have gotten a place but last year we would have missed out because of how far we are from the school.
Usually, the school offers places to children living 1600m away, last year it was 1400m due to a large number of sibling applications.

Due to the whole VAT issue, i think more parents from the local area are going to be sending their kids to this school, rather than sending them to private schools.

Is this a reasonable assumption? I don't think parents will wait for the policy to be enacted, but they will move their year 6 children into this school.

I think that is an entirely reasonable assumption. Those families who may have scraped school fees together will most likely decide a 20% uplift is too much for them to manage for 7 years of secondary so I expect many will opt for good local schools.

It’s going to vary

Some parts of the country have much lower levels of private schooling, and it may well not make that much difference

i think one of the main weaknesses in the IFS report is that it does not really cover what would happen in places with high popular density and high levels of private schooling (ie cities). I think they are glossing over the issue you describe.

It will increase house prices near desirable schools even further - which some would say is a good thing - but will have the effect of proving people out, and putting some families beyond the furthest distance offered

Demographic change (low birth rate years) will ameliorate that idc.

And of course not everyone will leave all at once, nor will schools go bust straight away. But there will be an outflow, not just people leaving but also people starting later or not at all.

So you it will increase demand on school places, but I think the effects will vary enormously from area to area.

yep- it's one of the very obvious consequences of the VAT proposal. Why politicians of any stripe cannot seem to think things through to their logical conclusion is beyond me.

You're right to be concerned about this. In fact, even if VAT isn't brought in immediately the threat of it will mean more people in the state system. It won't make much difference in some areas but will be chaos in areas where there is already a shortage of places, and will disadvantage the people with fewest options even more (people who might have considered private school will be the better off, who will also find it easiest to move house).

I'm a Labour voter but I think this is being badly mishandled- it's a worry both in terms of the effect on kids and how much time and goodwill Labour are going to waste by bungling their headline policy.

I suppose it depends how many private school pupils the same age as your child live closer to the school than you do.....

I think the amount of children that this would apply to will be very minimal. Private schools should be absorbing the loss into the current fees in my opinion.

I think you're being naive. It's going to push up house prices in a lot of areas and make them even more unaffordable

It's very easy to look at the big schools like Eton and Winchester and say 'it won't be a problem'. It's the small independent schools, many of which have SEN focus which are going to struggle.

Just look at the amount of private schools going on strike at the moment - there's already a lot in financial difficulty...

Its not just current private school kids though. Quite often as can be seen on MN some people who can't afford it all the way through are told to just go for secondary. There will be those students too. And then inevitably when some of the smaller break even independents can no longer survive and close there will be even more having to access the state system.

Currently funding is made available for those kids in the private sector schooling to the LEA which isn't being spent on them. Thus when it does need to be this will take away funding that is being used by the LEA currently.

I think it's simply a difference of opinion. The vast majority of fee-paying parents are not scraping by to afford the fees – most will simply absorb the increase. Many independent schools will also likely either re-address their fees to absorb at least some of the increase and/or increase scholarships, partial scholarships and improve sibling discount rates as they will not want to lose custom.

It doesn't make much sense that a family only just missing out on a private school place, solely due to VAT application, would instead transfer that money to a higher mortgage over more years than school, stamp duty etc.

It will apply to some, but it my opinion not in much way to make any sort of dramatic impact. And if it is, readdressing the focus on state education is always going to be a painful challenge but it's a highly necessary one.

Absolutely. Getting a place in a good school or a grammar school will be MUCH more competitive.

Are Labour 100% going through with this?

They are a business at the end of the day. If they are in financial difficulty then they should employ better finance directors or not operate.

I think it depends where you live.
The numbers going private where I live are tiny, and the state secondaries are large. I doubt that fewer people going private would cause more than a blip. Clearly if you live in an area with more going private, it will make more impact.

Plus secondary admissions give priority to those attending feeder schools, so those going to private primary and then choosing not carry on with private secondary will be lower on the priority list than those going state throughout.

Yep. The school my DCs go to (the older of who has asd, adhd, tourettes, learning difficulties and dyspraxia) has a full 29% of pupils out of 700 with SEN. That is a pretty significant proportion. Like other parents we chose to go private thankfully because we could make that choice- but after our local state school's HT laughed in our face on open day and told us that they simply could not cater to DCs needs and told me that 'Face it, he's a little weird' well damned right we sacrificed a whole fucking lot to get him into a school that welcomed him- and us- with open arms.

We will be able to pay a 20% uplift. But I know from talking to others it will be the straw that breaks the camels back. Some super rich parents- but others not. Gps are paying for it, or in the case of a child in DS1's class his mother runs a local cafe during the day and got a part bursary. Another- self employed plumber widower. Others are teachers at the school, the local dentist and lots of immigrant business owners, a business owner who runs the local bowling alley etc.

It will almost certainly have an effect in our County, we have a mix of Grammar, private, and comprehensive. The applications for the Grammars and the one decent comprehensive are going to soar I suspect.

This

It won't make any difference where I live either.

I think this will be an issue in affluent areas of London. Less so in other areas.

We have two in private and one in state. We are now thinking we will move our older ones to state when they reach natural exit points. We will keep our youngest in state and move house so that we are in the catchment of a good comp.

Unlikely to have much of an impact in most areas I’d have thought. Going by my own local area, there are around 10 state high schools within a 10 mile radius and one private school. Each high school has an average intake of between 150 and 200 (some lower and some much higher). The private school is 3-18 and says it has over 1,000 pupils on roll. Probably more in the upper school so say y7 intake around 100? If none of the pupils wanted to go there (extremely unlikely) that intake would mean 10 extra pupils per state school. If say 20% decided not to go, that’s 2 extra pupils per state school. A few of them are undersubscribed as well so this would make very little difference to demand overall.

Same as many areas, which school you end up with is a postcode lottery and the highest achieving one has a furthest accepted place of 0.6 miles. I would say there are very few houses that anyone affording private school would want to live in within this radius and that’s if they even come up for sale. We border a grammar school area so I think it’s likely to cause the pass mark to rise there but again, it’s very marginal compared to the number of feeder schools already.

Other areas may be different if the proportion of private places vs state places is very different.

The numbers that attend private schools are very small, plus birth rates are dropping (after this year 7 admissions). I wouldn’t worry in the slightest.

It really won’t make that much difference. Don’t worry.

We live in an area with high levels of private education and low-ish levels of state places. There are already less spaces at state than applications and it’s not uncommon for children to get sent out of town for school.

That said it’s quite an affluent area and the state schools are good but not amazing. So it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Personally we opted against private this year because of the potential of VAT and long term risk. We got into the local oversubscribed school which meant one less place for someone else.

I think there are quite a lot of private school parents who are very invested, for obvious reasons, in telling us how incredibly damaging this policy will be for the state sector. I remain unconvinced.

I guess we'll have to wait and see!

I have quite a few friends who send their kids to private schools, and the VAT thing doesn't change anything - if you can afford private school fees then the extra 20% won't make much difference!

It'll only be a minority of parents affected.

Also, lots who send their kids to private school don't live within the school catchment in the first place, hence their decision to go private.

Less than 6% of kids go to private schools.

I do wonder if it’s a bit of this going on. Having said that, our neighbours are both state school teachers and have two children in our local £15k/year school. I do wonder how families like theirs will cope.