Council spends £8000pa on a taxi due to VAT on private schools

[Iwishicouldflyhigh]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14403627/Labours-VAT-raid-teenage-girl-private-school-council-fund-8-000-taxi-bill.html

So now a place is being taken up in an overscribed school, a 15 year old has had her eduction severely disrupted and the local council has 8k less in the pot.

Well done Labour!!! One of many stories, i'm sure and so predictable.

There were no places at any schools nearer.
The school 25 miles away was the only one that offered !

Actually speaking as some responsible for compilingthe budget for a large local authority, the cost of home-to-school transport is very much part of the problem (alongside the areas you mentioned), especially for SEND pupils. Without the increase in SEND transport over the last few years, Council Tax could have been a few 1-2% lower each year.

@WhitegreeNcandle you certainly do! Education, and the SEN system in particular, is full of acronyms.

Maybe they feel like they are done subsidising the state. Council-provided transport is an entitlement if there is no school within the stated distance- why should it not apply to this family as well as to any other? Why should parents home educate if they don't consider this in the best interests of child or family? Just having previously had their DD in private education doesn't disqualify them from the provisions everyone else enjoys- they aren't the Enemy of the People. Just be happy the state avoided the cost of educating this child up until now.

If there was a place at a closer school, the council wouldn’t be paying for transport.

I wouldn't count on it being a minority. What's likely to happen now is that those who can no longer afford private education will buy homes in the catchment areas with the best schools, which will mean that those who used to be able to go there, will now be out of catchment and will have to go to a worse school. This will also not help social mobility.

Yes I think that they LA duty to provide transportation should end when they offer a place at a nearer school. What the family decide to do then is up to them.

I might have some time for those posters who are angry that the parents isn’t driving the child themselves, if they made a point of only living on the bare essentials themselves and insisted on using all
their surplus income paying for state provided services that they were entitled to… but I’m certain those posters don’t do that, and are therefore massive hypocrites!

Their duty does end at that point.

Can you imagine if someone posted saying they wanted to for Example remain in temporary housing as they preferred it to the council house they were offered and tried to say ‘well I rented for a few years so I saved you money at that point so now pay higher rent on emergency housing for me as I like it better!’

So I assume this will only be till
that point ? But as there’s no LA statement and I doubt this will be followed up in the press that this freeloading family will get away with it

There’s nothing in the thread that suggests the child is SEN though.

Bogvig suggested ‘pay for your own transport or home school’ , so I’d like to think they weren’t saying this with reference to SEN kids either

The council have fulfilled their duty of offering a place - parents and child have accepted it. It ends there.

The council isn't now going to be keeping an eye out for a space coming up and asking them to switch! Plus they may well have other children who want those places and would be higher up the admissions criteria.

Plus, child is going into Y10 in September - no school wants kids arriving in Y10/Y11 and it's incredibly rare that a space becomes available in those year groups.

Perhaps, but the system shouldn't rely on parents appealing decisions to work correctly. If you ask for a decision, and you get it, why should they doubt it's true?

I also think that councils (and many government bodies in general) fail miserably in making it easy or clear how to access services. It should be simple for a parent who has a child entering a new school, for any reason, to see where to go to get admitted to the right local school.

I see this in my job all the time, people who are trying to access government services of some kind, online usually, and they can't find the right pages or forms, or make them work, or can't figure out the process, and no one at the relevant body will help them. So it's no wonder to me the service users aren't taking all the right steps in many cases.

Are all families using state education ‘free loaders’?

No but I believe this family are

@bigvig can say that, but it’s no different to tell old people with decent private pensions to decline their state pension, or to require scold someone who went on a nice holiday for not going private for their medical treatment.

If you people want to end free home-to-school travel, they should lobby their MPs to change the law… Until that point it’s ridiculous to think people will voluntarily not avail themselves of their legal rights… As I’m sure everyone who is complaining does (and why they’re such hypocrites)

why?

£17k, I reckon

Good for them, if they are.

LA have different ‘pots’ for different things. She’s costing them money. The family aren’t in poverty they could have, and should have met the transport cost themselves

The thing is, it's not very good for the child to have to move schools again. If they had planned for the right number of school places for the number of children in the area, they wouldn't have this problem - it's of their own creation and the students shouldn't pay for that.

Lots of families who use state schools and other council-funded provisions aren’t in poverty. They are costing the council money too. This family have saved the council money over the years. Many others have just taken from the pot. Your argument makes no sense.

This thread is bizarre, so many posters seem to think that kids should be denied access to normal claims for state education because at some point they were in private education.

It's like saying, oh, in the past you used to pay for a private GP. Well, now that you are having to use one funded by the NHS, you should have to pay out of pocket for that access.

It makes zero sense.

Lincolnshire appears similar.

The cost for all children from home to school pre 16 for the financial year 2022/23 was £40,973,394.72. 41 million quid is an actual sum of money. Total budget for that year was about £550 million. So about 7.5% (I might have missed something). It does seem very high indeed, so I might well have missed it.

https://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/directory-record/74713/council-funded-transport-from-home-to-school