To want the private school people to shut up noq

[Rescuereivers]

i am a parent with a private school
child in secondary school, and state primary child.

I mean I get it that your kids will suffer if you pull them out. But why did you not factor in a rise in costs and make damn sure you could afford it first? Cause state school is not THAT bad, and if it is in your area, there are places you can move to. if you could only just scrape by with the fees when you put them in, well that’s just reckless, and your fault not Labours.

And if your child has SEN then that’s awful, but it’s awful for parents in state schools with SEN kids too.

Please stop with the whining, cause state and private school parents alike are both heartily sick of hearing you moan.

(and you really sound like a Conservative HQ bot employed to put scare tactics on. You’ve gone over the top and it’s beginning to backfire).

Or course a sen child is receiving a different service - it's a sen service

Well the Tories have done that already with the effects of Brexit, raising our taxes to the highest level ever, stagnating our wages (NHS incomes in this house), lack of investment in green energy so bills huge and fucking the economy up.
Half a million children are now living in poverty MORE than in 2010. 1 child in every single classroom (on average) is living in temporary accommodation. I care more about them than some kid having to go to a state school.

This!!!
Why not just scroll past? 😂😂

I can already picture Starmer standing up in a year or two’s time proudly saying “well maybe it didn’t bring in as much as we’d hoped but you know why that is, they’ve had to lower their standards JUST LIKE STATE SCHOOLS and that proves it has worked!”

Because we all know that raising money is not the objective here at all. It’s just to make state schools look less bad.

If you treat them like a business they’ll act like a business and adjust their accounting accordingly. Make no mistake the private schools will be handing over as little as physically possible to the taxman, as is the prerogative of every single business in the country.

I suspect most people here would happily take a cut in standards at private schools in return for not making any money of the policy, because making money was never really what is was about was it? It’s about envy, pure and simple.

I’m looking forward to the rationale on why other educational services such as university, tutoring and all other sorts of provision will not be taxed too.

Exactly.

Yet we can't complain about a 20% increase based on classist policies.

I don’t have children yet, but I currently plan to send them to private school. Here’s why.

I live in a rural area where the local state is, frankly, shit. It is a sink school known for having problems with bullying and absenteeism, and has been that way for 25 years. I don’t expect it to change.

There is a private school in the same town. Nothing high profile or charging Etonesque fees, but still about £20k a year, not insignificant post-tax. Given the current options, I plan to divert a significant amount of household income to school fees when the time comes.

There is one good state school “local” to me (a 30-40 minute drive away) which is impossibly oversubscribed. All of the houses in that village are priced at a premium, because of the school. Of course, using wealth to buy an expensive house in a good catchment area isn’t sneered at, despite costing the equivalent of a child’s private schooling (if not more).

I don’t plan to move, because we live next door to family to provide care. So moving to the catchment of the good school would make it almost impossible to be around for family as we are now.

We can afford VAT on private school fees, so we’ll send our children regardless. It’s an annoyance, nothing more, for us. We are fortunate.

People who crow that those who have to pull their children out “if they couldn’t afford it in the first place” demonstrate the horrid crabs-in-a-bucket mentality of this country. Telling hardworking middle class people to get back in their box, because they’re not wealthy enough to truly deserve private education. You’re not a bastion of fairness, you’re a mouthpiece for the elites that want to squash the middle classes down whilst enriching themselves further and increasing wealth divides in this country.

I don’t think VAT on private school fees is anything more than a policy of envy. But there’s enough envy in our national psyche that that policy will inevitably come into force.

Agreed.

Why should other people, who can't afford what you have decided to buy, subsidise you? Fee paying schools aren't charities and shouldn't be treated as such.

@SquashedSquashess 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

@CaptainMyCaptain how is it a subsidy? It's an additional tax.

No. They didn't have to pay VAT because the schools were given charity status and now they will. Its not extra.

If my circumstances changed and I have to remove my child to state school. I’d suck it up. Our local school is a dump, but kids still get out if it with good grades. I’m sure it would mean more input from me helping them in the evening, being a more conscientious parent. Currently I can just delegate everything to the private school.

What I wouldn’t do is moan on and on about it. I’d suck it up.

You're coming from a place where that money is assumed and therefore "owned" by the public purse already, thereby subsidising,

The policy makes me sick and my kids aren't even school aged yet. It's just classic labour classist bullshit - pull down those who can do something just because it's not available to everyone.

There’s an interesting discussion on Times Radio about this policy in Scotland.

Education is devolved but VAT is not, and 25% of children in Edinburgh go to private school. How does that marry up?

I do t even know why I’m answering as this is nothing to do with me but you sound like the people who say ‘why did you do ‘x’ if you couldn’t afford it?’ Of course circumstances change, we’ve had insane costs suddenly wipe us to do with housing, car health etc!

And if you chose a school, your kids were happy there and then suddenly something meant they’d have to leave of course you’d panic!!! I don’t get why people are making it about someone assuming private is better than state, when I was young I went to a semi private because literally the only other school in my area regularly had the police in, had people smoking and hanging around shouting at other students outside it. There’s a school like that around here and if that were our only chose I’d sell everything to get them into a different school

It's not about charitable status, which won't be being changed. It's about the fact that education is currently exempt from VAT. So currently private nurseries, universities, private schools, private tutors etc have an exemption from VAT because their purpose is Education. It is proposed that the exemption for Education is removed so that all of the above could potentially have VAT added on.

I agree OP.
Anyway the removal of the VAT exemption for private schools has been on the agenda for as long as I can remember. It always seemed an inevitability. If parents choosing private school weren't paying attention and budgeting for it happening sometime then that's their bad.

It’s got nothing to do with charitable status. This is the problem with the policy. People seem to have strong opinions on something they don’t understand the workings of.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for these people because they're going to be a little bit worse off on their £200k a year income? If I had the money to afford sending my kid to a private school, I would definitely be able to afford 20% on top comfortably. But if you are sending your kids to private schools on an average income AND struggling with your finances because it is very expensive, then that's a bit silly isn't it.

Also, women pay VAT on sanitary products which are essential... Unlike private schools 🤔

Private schools pay input VAT now, unlike state schools. I do agree that the VAT system is ridiculous though. We have VAT on toilet paper but not caviar for example.

I don't think most people would allow for a 20% increase in costs overnight, no.

You could apply your stance to anything. So for the love of God, stop moaning about your mortgage going up, stop crying about the price of food soaring and when your gas bill is shooting through the roof just pipe down, yeah?

It’s a 20% increase in costs, on top of already large increases in costs over the last couple of years.

Yep.

Presumably because a great number of children currently in private schools will move to state, meaning the government now need to meet the costs of their education. So the VAT is lost, and the cost per head of about £7k per child per year will need to be paid out.

Either that, or schools will be expected to absorb without the extra funding required, and I'm struggling to see how either scenario will really benefit anybody.

Sanitary products have been VAT exempt for some time now.

Wrongly, in my view, in the case of disposable items which are unnecessary.