To ask if anyone is clued up on the challenge this week to VAT on school fees?

[feesss]

we went to look round a school this morning and we obviously asked about VAT and the lady showing us round said there has been a challenge this week so it may not happen? Is anyone aware of this? I can’t see much online about it?

Disingenuous to believe otherwise?

Really? Surely Labour would be going after corporation tax on these huge profits if that was the case wouldn’t they? Not letting them keep charitable status.

Oh for goodness sake, they don’t declare profits. Any surplus after costs is reinvested because they can’t declare a profit. So they build assets instead. It’s really not that complex.

State schools don’t have state of the art theatres like the ones I’m taking about. They don’t have Olympic standard swimming pools. We are talking different level here.

See above

reinvested? as in bursaries, staff and investing in new facilities to further the education they provide? almost like a nonprofit really. What do the shareholders or owners make of these businesses that never make a profit?
I guess we can add the term ‘business’ to ‘our children’, ‘working people’ and ‘woman’ on the WTF list.

Utter bollocks. You may as well say that the RNLI is a business because proceeds from the shops are invested in new lifeboats.

There are no shareholders, no one is making money off of the back of it. Education is the sole aim, not profit.

I have no words. If you think there are parallels between a true charity like the RNLI and private schools, it is not even worth engaging with you. And besides, your posts are just rude.

The schools that are charities don’t have owners or shareholders that’s why they are known as not for profit as they don’t make distributable profits. They are governed by unpaid trustees who perform a similar role to governors in a state school and will then pay staff including a head and bursar to run the school day to day.

a school can be run as a profit making business and have shareholders thst it pays dividends to but then couldn’t be a charity and would be subject to corporation tax on its surplus

They wanted to remove charitable status as well at one point in which case corporation tax would be due on surpluses as you say, however it was scrapped pre election however I think this was more of a case of the issue being complex rather than it being something they didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t be suprised if the suggestion comes up again in time

They may or may not be a charity, but they're certainly not a business. No one is taking a dividend.

I'm afraid that if you come up with nonsense arguments then the responses you receive will be correspondingly robust.

The sensible way would have been to up regulation via the Charities Commission and find a solution that benefits all, including local state schools.

A lot of big building projects in the richest private schools were almost entirely funded by donations from existing rich parents and alumni rather than fee income. The same as refurbishments in eg a Cambridge College. A lot of it is funded via donations and a drive to get those in. That being a charitable donation is tax free and grossed up and a lot of people will leave money to these schools and colleges in their will (again inheritance tax free).
Plenty of people also leave money to NHS and cancer charities etc. There is a huge culture of charitable giving and donations in England. The charities sector fulfils a lot of need that Government fails to deliver! If an entity is constituted as a charity, it is a charity legally speaking and it is up to the regulator aka the Charities Commission to deal with that.
If the Labour Party wanted more from private schools they should have demanded more regulatory fees from private schools to the Commission and more oversight.
Big building projects create jobs and taxes are paid on all jobs as in private schools these won’t be cash in hand, they will be tendered like for churches. Taxes are paid in abundance by private schools via PAYE etc already.

Its fine, your ‘robustness’ says more about you than me. You really can’t comprehend that an entity can be run like a business without declaring a profit? You cannot have been anywhere near the wealthy schools I was talking about. I have. Huge capital projects, expensive marketing and PR machines that would put many corporates to shame. Not exclusive to the large boarding schools either. Some London and HC day schools follow the same type of corporate model. Of course many schools don’t have those budgets but that doesn’t mean they conform to being charities in the true sense of the word.

By corporate model, you mean marketing, more executive structure via various heads and lots more admin staff and PE teachers than in state schools?

Again, most of the huge capex spend in many schools is funded by donations. That is an actual fact. If you have been to all these schools like we did doing music and music camps you will have seen all the Donation Plaques with lists and lists of Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern donors. And how exactly is that direct foreign investment going to harm the UK? It does not.

Yes it takes special comprehension skills to understand, that you possess in abundance. It’s now about how successful the school is in delivering education or how big a budget it has that makes it a business. Gotcha! Nuffield health better watch out.

From someone who can’t even spell possess? Hilarious

?

Collectively, private schools offer approx 160k kids (out of a total number of kids at PS of 620k) some kind of scholarship or bursary (means tested annually) with 40k kids educated entirely free of charge. Thats approximately £930million pa of charitable giving on education alone - collectively the largest charitable donors in the UK (& frankly no other uk charity even comes close)
Couple this with extensive outreach programmes: school partnerships, community use of facilities, programmes with elderly & disabled charities etc overseen by a board of governers, adhering to their charitable charters & in line with rules dicated by the independent charity commission, it would be very very hard to contend that many of these schools do not fully comply with every aspect of being worthy charities.

Yes, Nuffield Health won in court against the Council’s attempt to charge them business rates. So what is happening with business rates on private schools constituted as charities? They cannot have one form of charity aka Nuffield Health not paying it, but another, a school paying it? What happened to legal precedent and the rule of law? I really thought Starmer as a lawyer would have some basic legal skills and respect for the courts and the rule of law, including the Human Rights Act.

You realise that not everywhere is like Eton or Winchester? The private schools up here (North Wales) don't charge anything like those sort of fees. They cater to kids with SEN, kids from Forces families, kids whose parents simply don't approve of the curriculum the Welsh Government is running.

This policy won't be felt by the Sunak family. It will be felt by the families up here. Equality should involve bringing state schools up to the level of the private ones, not bringing everyone down to the level of a Special Measures comp.

I've got no stake in this, no kids of school age. I just recognise a bad policy when I see one.

@DdraigGoch - this policy is all about middle class Labour voters high up in the civil service and similar not being able to afford London private schools anymore, because those big bad boys raised the fees beyond their means. It has all along been just about that.

Of course I do but DH went to Eton and I have nephews at both Eton and Harrow currently. Who said it’s a good policy? I certainly didn’t although I believe Eton is coming out of it rather well. What I take exception at is all the hyperbole on here which does anything but raise public sympathy. The impact of it is yet to be clear.

@BotanicalGreen So we should wait until children have to leave their familiar school settings that have often been found as respite from the failings of the state system and not make the slightest positive difference to state schools THEN say "oh, oops, never mind its only a small minority"? The fact that your experience is with Eton and Harrow means you have no concept of what the schools like mine or the poster from Wales was talking about. I don't need sympathy, I need someone with a brain to advise the Labour party about the economic reality of this and ideally, for them to bloody listen instead of wittering on about astro turfs and embossed stationary.

This is very naive. The vast majority of children are likely to get a higher mark if they have had intense tutoring. The 11+ exams are fairly easy to tutor for. Those children with parents who can afford tutoring are likely to do better in those exams than those whose parents haven’t paid for tutoring.

@Araminta1003 I think you've hit the nail bang on the head.

Many of those supporting this are only doing so as they have been priced out and those claiming "we could afford to but don't" are likely in truth, unable to afford it very comfortably.

We can all agree fees have gone through the roof and even traditional jobs that 10 years ago could have supported paying fees now can't. That's a hard pill to swallow.

The idea that £930 million of part and wholly subsidized places wd make private schools the largest charitable donors in the UK is so delusional it is laughable. Of the medical funders Wellcome alone is committed to making grants of £16billion over the next decade though that's based on its endowment (which is a close parallel to the public school business model). CRUK and McMillan generate nearly 500million pa for care and research almost entirely from donations.

The ignorance about civil society on this thread is astonishing.