To think this is ridiculous about Eton v little private school (title edited by MNHQ at request of the OP)

[Sunshineandoranges]

I think it is ridiculous that while some little private schools are closing as they aren’t viable the big posh schools like Eton (edited by MNHQ) will claim back millions on vat paid in the last ten years due to a clause in the legislation. Any school, can claim back vat on capital projects costing over a quarter of a million pounds in the last ten years. Eton (edited by MNHQ) built themselves a swimming pool and dormitories costing millions and are are due to get a £4.8 million rebate. AIBU to think this is very unfair. I don’t have children in private school.

Eton hasn’t spent anything on ‘dormitories’ - as they don’t have any.

Each pupil has their own room.

HTH.

So for me it’s the charitable status and what these schools do for the community.

Etom can’t be compared to smaller private schools - the fees are many times more than these schools and are much much larger.

Our local private schools do very little for the communtiy and don’t offer their services )pools, pitches) without paying for them. Eton does offer and doesn’t charge.

You aren’t comparing apples to apples here.

And no my kid doesn’t go to Eton and we have chosen to not send our kids to private but could have.

Would the red-brick universities look favourably on students who are coming to them straight from Elton's yellow-brick secondary school?

That’s how VAT works. A VAT registered business can reclaim input VAT. Those schools with high capital expenditure (including the likes of Eton) can reclaim more input VAT than smaller, cheaper schools with minimal capital expenditure. Many of us pointed this out long before the VAT was introduced on school fees. What a lot of people are also missing is that schools like Eton, where the fees are very high, have parents/grandparents etc who have been able to pre-pay years of fees, thus avoiding VAT. So we are in a position where the largest, most expensive, most well equipped schools, can reclaim large amounts of VAT but the wealthiest parents at those schools have avoided paying the output VAT. It was always going to be the smaller schools which suffer more with this policy.

It's not affecting children in state schools adversely. Numbers have been going down so essentially this is just filling a gap and helping some to remain viable where otherwise they might not have.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they were tipped off a few years ago about the planned changes so they could finish all their projects in time and claw back millions in tax.

This point makes no sense. They can reclaim input VAT going forward as well, not just on previous expenditure.

This law makes no sense given Eton are passing on the full 20% VAT payment to parents.

A lot of schools have increased fees by around 20% because their cost base has increased hugely because of business rate relief removal, NIC, living wage etc. It’s not just VAT which is having an impact.

They haven’t removed charitable status of independent schools. Unfortunately a number of people commenting on these threads about VAT don’t understand the basic legislation. To be fair, the Labour government haven’t helped with this misunderstanding because they’ve also conflated the issues in the past.

More private school pupils have switched to state than anticipated. They are now being educated at a cost to the taxpayer. Whilst younger age groups are seeing a fall in pupil numbers, this is not the case for many secondary year groups where the birth rate was high. Many LEAs have no space in certain school years.

One of the fundamental problems with the new policy. It’s a policy based on jealousy and because as you point out school like the one my 3 goes to (not quite Eton but same ilk) have ways of recouping the money through capital projects done in the last few years, they will be fine. Plus we all have deep pockets and will do what needs to be done. Smaller schools where parents are at the limit will crash and burn sending kids of parents ‘in the middle’ into the state system.

The rich won’t be affected in the way the silly labour class warriors hoped. In fact, all it’s gonna do is make sure our schools offer more so we carry on with how it’s gone for generations before whilst taking out options for bursaries and help.

I don’t favour private schools but I accept the right of parents to send children there. I think it would have been fairer to say any child already in the system would not pay vat but new enrolments would. Perhaps the vat system wouldn’t allow that. Parents of children at fee paying schools of secondary aged children apparently save the government £8200 per year which is the per capita cost of each child and that presumably doesn’t allow for children needing extra support.

This is simply not true. Why do you think that?

An influx of kids from private school into state schools, without a massive new injection of cash for state schools (which the government is not going to give), absolutely will affect state school kids adversely.

Anecdotally VAT on private schools is already is affecting state sixth form entry places and grade requirements this year as unexpected numbers of kids leave private secondaries. Or, if they stay in state sixth forms when they might have gone private for A levels before. Greater competition for A level places at the desirable sixth forms means less choice of places for any students with lower grades at GCSEs or who can’t afford to live in the leafiest catchments.

This law makes no sense given Eton are passing on the full 20% VAT payment to parents

^ This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what VAT actually is.

VAT on school fees isn't a cost to the school that they pass on to parents. It is a tax levied by the government which the school collects on behalf of HMRC by adding it to their invoices, and which the parents pay. The school is merely acting as tax collector.

They then put that figure on their quarterly VAT return as 'output' tax, and from that figure they deduct 'input' tax, which is all the VAT they have paid out on running costs and expenses such as electricity, stationery, IT costs etc. They then pay the difference to HMRC. VAT legislation allows any VAT registered entity to also recover VAT on capital expenditure, such as the case in the OP.

We've got double the usual number of private school kids in our state sixth form this year. Some have SEN.

It is not an imaginary problem, however, I doubt it's evenly spread because not every area has a range of schools/high pressure on places.

😂

There is a demographic issue yes- primary pupil numbers have been falling for several years now, but secondary numbers are not due to peak until 2027 as the bulge years move through.

It seems obvious that there are some rocky years coming in secondary education when an influx of privately educated kids come into state schools, and more well off kids now stay on in state schools, and the less well off clever kids are no longer able to go to private schools on a bursary or scholarship.

That situation is going to adversely impact particularly the kids who have the least resources among the kids in state schools. Why wouldn’t it? Private schools have been a sticking plaster over the lack of investment into state schooling for a long time and that plaster is now being ripped off with no replacement, basically.

For primary and secondary schools, parents of now ex-private kids, or kids whose parents won’t now send them private; will instead buy into the naice state school catchments, They fill up those places, meaning fewer good state school places for lower income kids.

A lot of those parents will spend on tutoring, creating a further divide within state schools. That then gets higher grades at exams and those grades then pushes up the academic entry requirements for the best state secondaries and sixth forms. That grade inflation through private tutoring in state schools then creates less (or no) choice of schools for then academically middle-achieving and low-achieving kids at state schools.

Same goes for kids in state grammar counties areas. Without kids leaving for selective private schools, academic but more moderately achieving state school kids can’t get into the state grammars because the tutored state kids plus the ex-private kids will take up those places.

Academic kids from low income families won’t be able to get bursaries and scholarships for academically selective private schools any more either, because the private schools are now cash-strapped or closing.

Plus the impact of the private school kids with SEN learning needs, social and sensory needs, whose needs were never met in state schools, who are now going back into the same mainstream state schools. Which are still unable to meet their needs, So that’s very bad for those kids themselves who could only manage in a much smaller class group. It’s also particularly bad for their peers with SEN at their state school who still need help. And all kids who need teacher attention and support. As their teachers and sencos who are trying to make extremely stretched resources cover more and more kids with higher needs in a bigger group. With no extra money.

As that fails there will be a hidden toll of some kids who can’t go to school at all. Then the local authority pays for individual home tutoring or alternative provision education with a high adult to child ratio which are very expensive to the tax payer for those kids. When before some of their parents would have taken on all the cost of private education themselves and saved the taxpayer paying anything to educate them. And without the huge distress and upheaval for thar child.

Basically if you’re moneyed and live somewhere with lots of naice school options and your kids don’t need any extra SEN support and they score highly in exams then this anti private school policy will probably work out absolutely fine for you. But it’s clearly going to be making things avoidably harder for a lot of other kids, So this is really bad to see from a Labour government.

By 'dormitories' do you mean the boarding house that was recently internally rebuilt or the new one that hasn't been built yet? How dilapidated are boarding houses (which accommodate children) allowed to get before you'd permit them to be refurbished? The previous swimming pool and indoor sports facilities were shit and old - should they have kept using them until they fell down?

I don’t think a lot of people realise how old some of the buildings at the older, public schools are!