To think that improving state schools needs people to pay an e.g. a state school tax?

[Theyhadsomehoneyandplentyofmoney]

What with the current hoo ha about VAT on private school and commentary about equality and privilege.. wouldn’t it make sense to vastly improve state schools? And in order to do so obviously the government needs more cash.

Isn’t it reasonable therefore to ask anyone using state schools, to pay a bit of tax for that, in order to improve all said schools from their (often) current dire state?

@Bibi12 oh silly me! I thought by sending my children to private school I was buying them privilege and advantage and avoiding riff-raff. But in fact I'm performing a philanthropic act of public service by saving the government billions.

Then don't be silly. No one is sending their children to private school in order to do philanthropic act.

However private schools do save government over 4 billion pounds a year and that doesn't account for lending their facilities and acting as charities .

So if we should shut private schools then money has to go from somewhere?

Or are you also too silly to understand maths and economics?

I don't send my ds to school to 'buy them privilege and advantage and avoid riff-raff'. 🙁

I sent my ds to his current school because even Ofsted said the school at which he was offered a place, wasn't safe. The younger pupils were at risk of assault by the older ones. Bullying was rife. Staff had no idea who was on site at any given time.

My motivation was to keep him safe. And because they offered him a scholarship and he was desperate to go.

I think one thing that could help funding is getting rid of a)academies and b) schemes which require changing everything every couple of years.

a) academies. Loads of money going on management. When schools were run by the LA you’d have 3 or 4 HR managers for the entire county. Now academy chains will often have their own. I’ve also met marketing managers for academies. All money given to schools and not spent on children.
b) Phonics schemes especially. We had a good phonics scheme. We had collected a raft of reading books which were varied (all decodable) which appealed to our children, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry.. Gvt decided that phonics scheme was no longer good enough. Buy the new scheme and all the resources. Including all new reading books, enough for each child. The books are ok but they are not as good as the ones we had which we can’t use now. All money which our school could have spent on other things but can’t because we have to follow the gvts random decisions that this scheme is no longer accredited.

@babybythesea the difference with academies is that they don’t have money taken off them by LA before they even receive their funding, the amount spent on central team should equate to the top slice that was removed before schools were academies. Current Government are all about academies getting larger, so will probably end up like LEAs!

@babybythesea also cost of dismantling academies would be astronomical and wouldn’t benefit children’s education

Isn’t it that the 20% won’t cover the influx from private to state?

Criminal isn't it. My Director of Children’s Services, with responsibility for the education and care of all children in the county, including statutory responsibilities which include safeguarding the mist vulnerable earns, around £140,000.
In the same county, a CEO of an academy trust, with 6 ( Yes SIX) schools, earns £250,000!
Mates MAT, mates rates gone mad!

The problem is not so much academies per se, but the multi academy trusts.

Single academy trusts are actually quite efficient if they work together in partnership with other schools to secure good value for money in procurement activities/share resources etc. They can buy in local authority services where these offer VFM or they can seek more cost-effective alternatives where appropriate. And at school level, there is very little waste because they know that they need every penny that they can get.

Multi academy trusts absolutely take money away from schools to pay for overpriced central management etc.

The government is warning against single school academies.

Lots of movement happening, with larger trusts swallowing up single school and small trusts.

Don’t think schools can become single Academies anymore. In our region MATs can’t acquire a single school anymore, they can only acquire a group of schools at the same time. Government wants all MATS to be large MATS, at least 10 schools.