Would you take the option of paying say £1000 pa to your 'state school' for smaller classes etc?

[ampere]

Purely a hypothetical, of course!- but if the option was there to make an up-front annual payment to your DC's school to 'improve' things like staff:pupil ratios, or greater small group learning opportunities and so forth, would you?

What about a means-testing of contribution? Please bear in mind this is a hypothetical! I am maybe imagining a Free School of the future which has legally been allowed to fly the governmental clutches in order to do this, say.

I know where I live I believe the reality is most parents could afford £1000, so if there are 60 DC in a year, and say 2/3 of parents pay that sum (or all pay less, whatever) you'd have enough cash to be able to reduce the class sizes to 3 of twenty DC, if not full-time, then much of it!

The only 'rule' I would like to impose is that before you explode at the unfairness and iniquity of this as not all parents can spare any money and that this can only benefit 'the wealthy' I want to ask how vocally you currently oppose private education (where he who pays wins) and grammar schools as they only benefit 'the clever'. Just a thought.

This has gone through my mind as I pay just about that per year to get DS2 tutored as it is!

some "voluntary" contributions are as much as this OP f

No. Absolutely not.

Absolutely NO NO and thrice NO
It's back-door privatisation and yet another Free School piece of madness
In any case it would be like getting blood out of a stone. I live in a well-off area and even here it's bad enough getting 'voluntary' contributions as it is
And yes I am anti-private and anti-grammar while I'm at it

Where's all the extra classrooms coming from?

It's a hypothetical free school though so they'd have taken the classroom issue into account.

I have thought about this sort of thing hypothetically too - it'd be like a private/ state school hybrid.

Erm, yes? (as I slink shamefully away) . Not to exclude pupils but to pay for a few extra staff, thus reducing class sizes.

As for the next bit - not keen on grammars (my lot would never get in!) as I don't support secondary moderns either and you have to have both.

Can't afford private and used to be really anti before I had kids but a good friend teaches in a lovely private school and I know that my kids would do really well there, so not really anti on principle - just a bit of those who can afford it!

Absolutely. If I have to pay for tutors, extra-curricular things, then I wish I could pay for additional improvements 'in-school'.

Alternatively, it would be nice if there were schools in England (like there are in France) which are private, small, but only charge a small amount of fees (around £3000 a year I think).

No I wouldn't. How divisive!

I'd get rid of all these "voluntary contributions" for trips too, plus payments for optional revision guides etc.

State schooling should be completely free.

No. I'd like the option of schools being properly financed through taxation, by a government that was committed to the public provision of public goods, rather than to a project of eroding the adequacy of state schools and providing back-door routes to privatisation of education.

No, but I do think the next time we have a labour Govt they should invest seriously to get class sizes in primary down closer to 20 pupils.

It's not divisive because everyone would benefit. I wouldn't do it because ds goes to private school. So that answers your second question. As for grammars I think going to a single sex grammar was one if the best things that ever happened to me.

No ,I'm against paying for education full stop .

Decent education should be available to all children , not just those who can afford to pay for it .

But even if you agreed with the ideology - it's not enough money to do anything meaningful.

The average English school already spends £360 000 on those 60 children a year, an extra £40 000 wouldn't be enough to create an extra class.

OneHandFlapping, I agree that ideally all 'voluntary contributions' were stopped, in addition, everyone got a free hot lunch and got the opportunity to go on all the trips and benefit from smaller class sizes. I'd be happy to pay an assessed contribution towards my school to make that happen and I'd be happy to pay more and for less financially well off people in the county to pay less.

We should be doing that already via the tax system.

So how would this work then?
It may be a free school but still has to work within LEA allocation framework. So, let's hypothetically say someone is allocated it and a £1k per annum price tag goes with it. So how do you enforce payment?! And how do you enfore means testing and, as a school, interrogating somebody's financial affairs when they may not even want to be there in the first bloody place?
My dc's primary and secondary schools politely ask for voluntary contributions for general use from parents but they're just not forthcoming - and I'm talking about a tiny fraction of £1k.
For good or bad, parents will:

• overstretch themselves to buy house next to desirable school
• sleep with the vicar to get a church school place
• live on rice and beans to send their dc's private
• work to pay for tutoring

... FOR THEIR OWN CHILD. But they won't pay for everyone to have the same benefit as their own dcs

Of course it's divisive! E.g. your child is in the class that can't 'afford' to pay but other years are luckier. How would that work?

I would. We all benefit in the long term.

I'd love to see state schools with 20 in a class. The we would realise it's not the panacea everyone thinks it is.

I also fail to see how going from 30 to 20 is going to make a blind bit of difference. Mind you, I don't have a huge issue with class size.

Decent education should be available to all children , not just those who can afford to pay for it .

Here Bloody Here.

No way man

I honestly believe that with the same excellent teacher a class of 20 has more opportunities for discussion, one-to-one attention and learning than a class or 30. How can they not?

"of 30" Doh!

Well, I would love to say it was a good idea. I would love to say it would be the answer to the problems but frankly, no, I would not pay additional money for my child to just be in a smaller class. I would want a guarentee that my DC would be in a class of well behaved children , free from behavioural problems and other issues. This is because in my experience its the kicking, spitting, biting and other distruptive behaviour that causes the problems not the size of the class. I know it is not PC to say it but it is in my view the answer.

If I could have such a guarentee of well behaved children etc. I might think it was a good deal!
I home educate my DS because we had to remove him from a class of disruptive , out of control children. It was a small school, but still they had problems.