Doubts grow over Labour’s VAT plan for private schools

[Blanketyre]

Article in the Observer here:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/oct/05/doubts-grow-over-labours-vat-plan-for-private-schools

I must say they've gone very quiet on it.

I think Bridget Phillipsons post on Twix was pretty nasty as it othered kids at private schools by calling state kids 'our' children.

Go after the schools but not the children and teens that go there.

😂Nice try

Teaching unions have suggested the September date not stopping and concern over a few bilingual private schools in London does not a diplomatic row make.

Newsflash- there is a whole lot of UK outside of London!

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/labours-tax-ideology-has-collided-with-reality-and-its-not-pretty-3302033

Are you still not interested in the thread?

I thought you weren't interested

I don't live in London so yeh thanks I know that! I live somewhere with the lowest rate of GCSE passes in the country. That's the true inequality, that in the state sector your chances of getting 5+ GCSE grades depend on your postcode.

The concept of @Applebutt3r not being interested is doing a lot of heavy lifting this morning.

I can’t bear this policy. I voted labour in the hope that they would make positive changes to the NHS, reducing waiting lists and making it feel safer to be in hospital etc. So much of their rhetoric post election has been negative, focused on levelling down and reducing people’s choices, without any positive plans.

I just can’t see how making private schools even more elite and expensive does anything other than increase divisions, increase pressure on state schools and infuriate a load of people who want to be able to spend their own money to make choices about education.

@Applebutt3r with regard to your posts re EHCPs..do you know how high the thresholds are now to get one? Achieving that without employing an educational specialist lawyer is getting increasingly difficult, which of course is being many people. Almost all go to appeal, require endless paperwork, nitpicking, evidence in triplicate and can be incredibly time consuming. Couple that with CAMHS waiting lists years long and equally high thresholds for engagement and you absolutely have kids who can cope in small, quiet private mainstream school but who would not have an EHCP. My school has numerous places and individuals that overwrought kids can go just for a bit of time out. Teachers will send them work on Teams, we have a flexible SEND team who will pop in and out just occasionally as needed. More than anything it's the scale / size of the school that allows these things plus teacher / pupil ratio. Quite simply there is time and headspace to consider a child's individual needs at that moment. It cannot be replicated in 1000+ state comprehensives

I care. I'm a 61yo single mum with a DS on a scholarship. He has 5 terms to go.

VAT for me would be an extra £3k when I'm already stretched to breaking point. I've taken a pub job to cover it, two nights a week.

A delay to September 25 would cut my liability from an extra £3k to £1.8k, which would be a huge help. I don't mind paying VAT but at such short notice is difficult.

The Guardian (of all papers) reporting on the challenges in such a way is as interesting as (if not more) than the well rehearsed and very valid questions. One of the issues being raised is, imho and having working on public policy making for over 2 decades, particularly concerning - policy changes of this kind require a thorough impact asesssment... nothing has been released for this policy. Surely if the numbers quoted by Ms Reeves and Ms Phillipson are backed up by HMT's analysis, that should not be a problem.

Ha ha ha

My school (private) still cannot get registered for VAT as at the moment HMRC are not permitting it.

From our end we have ascertained we won't loose any pupils, we just have to follow the rules and do VAT like other businesses, but presently we can't as we can't yet register.

In theory that process, when it happens will be easy to do.

It would make far more sense for parents at schools where they have to withdraw and transfer to do so in September, this would also make more sense for State colleagues taking in those transfers out of our sector.

What will be will be, it will happen though, either in Jan as planned or Sep.

I am very against the policy and hope the various pieces of litigation or planned litigation succeed. Even if it were delayed to September 2025 already a lot of damage has been done. It is against EU law to impose VAT on education. Whilst we are not in the EU we want surely to keep some similarities. Also English law of charity since about 1300s has seen education as a moral good even if not helping the poor. These are long standing concepts.

My biggest objection is that whilst 90% of people in the UK have had tax/NI cuts since 2010 one group (those on over about £70k) have had the biggest tax burden in 70 years the Tories have crushed that group with tax and to have £10k extra tax imposed (2 children at day schools) is an awful lot extra to expect this group - the hand that feeds - to bear. This is the group with no child benefit, not "30 free hours", no single person tax allowance. How broad do the shoulders have to be before they break? It affects parents who are NHS doctors and are just trying to do the best they can for their children by picking good private schools. These parents are not evil. They are making a choice (which I know not all better off parents make of course) that is about helping their children.

Would the labour voters in favour of this like to have to pay an extra £10,000 of tax from January too or are they only happy when someone other than they pays tax?

My child has a recent EHCP with absolutely zero need for a lawyer or appeal. Mainstream education in a private school would absolutely not meet her needs. Everything you have listed is common in state schools - time out spaces, work on teams, flexible send teams and non is EHCP worthy.

Sick to death of SEN being used as a pawn in all this and the threats from rich parents saying they’ll simply employ lawyers to get an EHCP and take from state educated kids.

Its vile.

@Applebutt3r I don't live in London. I'm in Edinburgh where around 25% of kids are privately educated for secondary. Like it or not, it's part of the culture. We're pretty pissed off that this money we're apparently going to pay isn't even going to go to state schools up here given state education is devolved but VAT isn't. It's an absolute shambles.

And we are sick to death with Labour using our kids as political pawns with Phillipson saying she doesn't care about them. Her language around the nearly 600,000 kids in Indy schools is vile.
Her lack of understanding about an incredibly complex sector is inexcusable.

The school place we were offered was at a school rated good. It was obvious to anyone with eyes it was not.

Seven months later Ofsted described it as unsafe, and changed it to Requires improvement, sacked the board of governors, changed the head teacher and then wound up the trust entirely.

An Ofsted listing of Good means precisely nothing.

Your kids access an education that is wildly known to cause huge inequalities. There is no need to care. The fees parents are paying amount to more than many people get paid.

As I have stated before, the biggest inequality is the postcode lottery of state schools.

Yes of course it does - but if you had the money to help your child would you?

Or would you decide that your ideology is to help all or no one so you would let your child suffer?

If you know what it is like to have a child suffer in the state education system - then surely you would be the exact person to understand why people move their children private? If you know how hard you have to fight for an ECHP - then you know exactly the reason why some parents have moved their children to private with fighting.

If you won lotto would you spend it on moving your child to safer place or would you spend it on a holiday or home improvements?

I suspect if you are the type of parent to fight for an ECHP than you are a parent who puts their children's needs first and I do think you would spend a lotto win on helping your child whatever that looks like.

As you know an ECHP is something not given out easily - there is a long drawn out process with the parent/s needing to be heavily involved.

My son, with SEN needs, is in an amazing government high school - they've been wonderful with his SEN. My daughter was in a state school which was horrible for SEN - her mental health was suffering and she had developed severe OCD. Where we live there are not a lot of spaces in state high schools to move a child to - we had her on a list for other state schools for over a year before we found a private school who agreed to take her so we moved her.

My daughter is in year 13 now - we can afford the vat increase for two terms but if the vat had of been around when we moved her I am not sure what we would have done.

Yes we are lucky enough to have been able to avoid private school for her. But we rent now and I do wonder if the state school system had been better geared for her needs if we could have saved that money towards a house deposit.

I want your child to have the best chance in life just as I want everyone's children to have to have the best chance in life - and I would be happy to pay more taxes for this to happen. In fact we donate and continue to donate money towards our children's state schools because we believe this.

But private school parents are not the reason the education system is underfunded and this tax has unfairly picked them off as a cheap trick to win votes. State school parents (of which I am one too) are angry at the lack of school funding and so they should be - but the government has been very clever at deflecting this anger to be directed at private school parents rather than where it should be directed at - the government.

It is not the fault of our kids that state education is grossly underfunded. Yet they are the ones being targeted. If Labour cared so much about state education they wouldn't have told DfE to make cuts of £1 billion.

Nope it’s widely known that private education is the biggest cause of inequality.

Show me how much Labour really care when they tell DfE to cut budgets by £1 billion. It isn't the fault of indy schools that state schools aren't properly funded

The inequalities aren’t just about funding .