To think parents of private education school children will be fine

[Bluewhitered]

I’ve seen lots of threads on this topic recently. It would be great to have it’s own section so those who want to chat about it with fellow parents , can without an argument.

But private school parents and their children!! We will be just fine. There’s so much smugness and bitterness and hate coming from people who think it’s great the VAT will be added and force some out. In fact I don’t disagree - add VAT on ! Great, and then we can take either our state places up … win win we have more money to spend on holidays, deposits for houses for our kids, private tutors, extra cirricular activities etc and we can probably move to better areas with the outstanding state schools or OR we pay it it we can afford to keep our children there.

On some of the independent school committees they are working out how to charge the fees differently so the actual fees we will pay 20% on are low and the rest of the money is on stuff that’s exempt from VAT. They are also looking at changing the nature of the schools so the children get their state education allowance and then pay extras on top- like you would nursery extras.

The chance of labour implementing it is low. There are solicitors looking at it now and whether they can change the law to allow it.

So either way we’re not in a bad position - as most of the threads argue we are the wealthiest in The UK- some can’t afford food bills etc so we are incredibly lucky to have choice and it is true we must have money to
even contemplate spending £25k on each child in school.

Yep. Private school parents and private school children will be perfectly fine, I am very glad to say.

Why all the mention of “tax breaks” if they are not trying to demonise private school parents? We all know that the tax break point is a load of rubbish and that private school parents save the taxpayer billions every year by not using State schools. It is absolutely demonising a group of people for political gain.

And a minority is a smaller group of people than the majority. It doesn’t have to relate to discrimination.

It is not a published fact that all private school parents have quadrupled their wealth under the last Government.

That's clearly not what I said.

Indeed. It was you who likened this particular highly privileged minority to migrants, and set up a false equivelence between the treatment of these two groups in campaigns, not I.
I understand the 'tax break' reference to be talking about the schools who have been able to exploit a loophole and avoid their particular form of luxury service being subject to VAT, not the people paying the fees. The government to be have been pretty much silent about people who pay school fees, with all comments referencing the schools themselves as far as I'm aware. So in what way are parents being demonised?

It’s nothing to do with exploiting a loophole or being a luxury service. Education is currently VAT exempt, all education. VAT will not be paid by the schools, it will be owed by those that pay the fees (i.e. the parents). Yes, Labour have been pushing it back on to the schools and saying it is up to them to swallow the cost. But, of course, the biggest outgoing to a school is its staff so what Labour are actually doing is telling schools to cut jobs. Ultimately it will be the parents that have to pay and yes it has been interpreted by many people as “rich” people getting tax breaks. Labour know exactly what they are doing by using this language.

It is exactly the same kind of nasty politics as was used during the Brexit campaign and Labour know that it appeals to the same type of people.

Well why use it as your justification for charging VAT on private school fees then?

No they all won’t. That’s the point. And you can keep saying that they will but it’s utter rubbish. You have zero evidence for that.

I am so over this argument now. I actually don’t care about paying more if we decide to stay.

This isn’t the real issue though, although it is a nice distraction for some.

There is a thread on MN right now where someone is talking about the mental strain on their DH teacher, so much so that they are leaving teaching, along with most of his teacher training group. I think he was verbally and physically abused and had no support from his school. This isn’t an isolated incident apparently as other teachers joined in and said how awful their experiences are.

So the real issue here is that a lot of our schools are just awful and the teachers are leaving in droves, not that private schools have been given a tax break.

Personally I think that piss poor parenting has gotten us to this point, and a couple of extra grand spent on your school from VAT on independents isn’t going to change the attitude of students, parents and depressed teachers.

If there is some more cash to spend I am sure Labour will piss it up the wall before it even gets to the schools, and even if it does reach them, will be in the form of another layer of management or some new woke, never before thought of position, to make sure the school is ramming the latest brainwashing agenda down the poor kids throats, rather than actually erm….teaching them something useful.

THings mentioned in that thread are ALL linked to funding.

Funding for TAs, teachers, support staff all links in with the overall standard that a school can provide.

"
If there is some more cash to spend I am sure Labour will piss it up the wall before it even gets to the schools, and even if it does reach them, will be in the form of another layer of management or some new woke, never before thought of position, to make sure the school is ramming the latest brainwashing agenda down the poor kids throats, rather than actually erm….teaching them something useful"

Ah, you're one of those. Instantly can be disregarded then.

So very well said!! Thank you!!

The VAT that will be raised will be less than 1% of the education budget. That’s nothing. I have my reasons for choosing private and the VAT doesn’t bother me, but let’s face some facts. There are many schools where kids are running absolutely riot each and every day (and you from the naice state schools have no idea, you really don’t do we don’t need your opinion). Kids cannot learn in such noisy, violent environments and neither should they be expected to. State school SEN provision is utterly disgraceful. In order to ‘level up’ the opportunities kids have the government need to spend an unfathomable amount of money sorting these schools out. The VAT on private schools is chicken feed. It’s just to distract voters from asking real, hard questions about the state of schools and what the government intends to do about them.

It’s just to distract voters from asking real, hard questions about the state of schools and what the government intends to do about them.

It's fairly obvious that the reasons why state schools are broken is that they don't have enough money going into them. What do you expect to happen if you cut council budgets by 50%??

I should imagine that if a school expels a student with really bad and disruptive behaviour, they lose a lot of money.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you stop funding a service, it breaks. That is this government's fault.

If a new government promises to fund state schools again then people will expect them to explain how they will fund it, the same Tory supporters who accuse Labour of 'pissing money up the wall'. Which is actually a load of bollocks when you look at what Labour did for state schools when they were in power.

It would not surprise me if the people harping about how unfair VAT is and aiming their victimhood at everyone else also feel irritated by the idea of social mobility.

I was wondering what day school was charging 50k per year 😂

The £100k VAT (over their whole education) is after income tax so we’d need to earn £180k of extra salary over this period.

That’s many, many months of us both slogging away for zero money.

No thanks, will move to a grammar area instead.

We're in a similar situation. We've worked so hard to get to this point, but, with frozen tax thresholds and inflation, we are actually worse off than we were a few years ago and our work life balance has dived. Now we'll have to pay the equivalent of another 2 years of school more than we were expecting. It'll be years before we can start saving up for anything else. What's the point?

100k VAT over what period?

The simple mathematics doesn't work does it?

If its 3 kids across their whole school education it's a lot different to 3 kids just in secondary.

However, those 3 kids just in secondary could be 3 kids across 10 years so again, your simple maths doesn't really add up.

An update for the thread on our situation!

So we have decided that labour have given us much food for thought in their policy. Kier has pushed us into making a decision we wouldn’t have done previously if this wasn’t coming into place. We would have kept our children in the school they are in as we could afford that but not 3 with a 20% increase.

We have made an offer and had it accepted on a house in a village that has a grammar school. It’s a house we couldn’t have afforded without taking the children out. We have decided to move our children and take the places in state school. We are keeping the house we currently live in and renting it out so it’s an investment for us. We have done that cliche thing though of moving to a nice small village, with a grammar school and effectively it is similar to their school already. I suppose this is what Kier Starmer has with his children- nice affluent area, nice schools so maybe Kier is onto something - he has led the way to copy what he has done.

We feel strangely ok with this as the children will still be in a great school and we will have more money. We are putting the money we save on fees into pensions so it won’t be going into the economy like Labour expect but for our and our children’s future.

Now what’s interesting is we are not alone. The school the children currently attend are now merging with the big private school because numbers of children leaving are too high and the number of children starting the school is down 75% this year cited to the potential VAT increase. Some are waiting to decide what decision to make but we’ve had 7 out of 19 out notice in in DD class, hence why the school will now merge , and 7 state school places will be taken up come September. The school have sent an email out saying they will take of their charitable starts and burseries and scholarships that offer monetary discounts will stop if the policy comes in and also local groups who use the schools facilities will now pay going forward- they’ve done this to reassure those staying at the school that despite a potential increase it will now be ran like a business and they won’t be subsidising others.

So the knock on effects on the policy are now in play - I guess this is what labour wanted though? Everyone in free education and spending their money on pensions instead or houses?

Hopefully Labour will make a move against grammar schools in the next few years as well. At a minimum, I would like to see GSs focusing on kids from low income family. Given all that piffle about “social mobility” that GSs supposedly provided, they should be privileging kids from poor families, not providing “free private schools” for kids from wealthy families.

But isn’t this exactly what labour want? They want us to have a free education and not choose to pay for private schools? This is exactly what they want , no? Labour seemed to think private schools are elitist and upset we are paying so want to give us free education and for us to spend our money elsewhere. Interestingly those moving kids who we know are putting it into their pensions though so as not to use it now but for when they are older and as a personal benefit to them.

Ans regardless of grammar schools- yes they can take those away but it doesn’t stop it being an affluent area, with parents with similar values and children alike. Higher house prices, less crime in the area, not many children and parents on benefits going into the school. Labour can’t change the socioeconomic status of an area even if they take the Gramma school away

Grammar schools as they currently work are bad for poor kids, as they don’t usually get in, and being the “secondary modern” option has very negative effects on the quality of education provided (smell of failure hanging around the place, will struggle to attract good teachers etc.).

Ironically, the largest number of grammar schools and secondary moderns converting to comprehensive status actually took place under the administration of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher didn’t want to de-grammarize the system as she was a big fan of GSs, but she basically had to do it because of demand from parents in these areas - parents were fed up with 11 plus pressures and with the rubbish standard of education provided by the secondary moderns.

NB/@Bluewhitered its Sir Keir

What’s your plan for if your DC don’t pass the 11+ for the grammar? You seem incredibly confident they will get places just on the basis of you living in the vicinity.

Yeah they are extremely bright and above national average - no problem with getting in. We wouldn’t move if we thought they wouldn’t get in! They’ve won the Form academic prizes at our annual speech night year on year.

We’ve attended the gramma school open day- many parents either questions about numbers. The school currently take a wider area as they had the capacity to do so- they will just take from the village area now and not outwards from their immediate catchment area like they were able to before.

So in the time since you last posted you’ve arranged the money to buy another house your 3 children have been allocated places in the local grammar school (without presumably having an address in the area otherwise why move?)
And the private school your DC are currently at has advised it’s closing in the last week.

Calling bullshit on this! I assume you are posting this in a last ditch attempt to bring attention back to the VAT on private education policy prior to the election but I’m afraid nonsense scenarios don’t tend to garner sympathy.

Also it was interesting to speak to the head teacher at the grammar open evening- he said they’d not had this many parents come and visit before and from the independent schools. When asked how they would accommodate everyone moving to get in to the school- had said two ways- larger class sizes and smaller catchment area