Private Schools proposal for up to 10,000 free places each year

[Aussiejazz]

What do you think of this idea to offer up to 10,000 free places to lower income families each year?

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/12/09/government-serious-schools-work-everyone-will-jump-proposal/

haveyourselfamerry Yes, you've got it.

Finally !

Because schools fees are out of taxed income, you need to allocate around £25k of gross earnings to cover each years fees.

My ideal solution would be that private school fees should be capped. There are many professions which work very hard but will never earn enough to pay private school fees.

Nataleejah Fri 16-Dec-16 18:42:45 My ideal solution would be that private school fees should be capped.

And this will be an ideal solution to what exactly?

Nataleejah If you cap them at £5k, they can all be funded by the state and no private schools.
parents can then 'home school' in groups in one place and pay tutors to deliver lessons.

Most private schools make no profits at all and at least 70% of fees goes directly on teachers' pay so capping the fees is not going to help unless the teachers want to earn 50% what state school teachers earn. Some private schools are very cheap - I read about a muslim boarding school. www.jamiah.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016-2017-SCHOOL-YEAR.pdf But that will be because of donations from supporters £2400 a year boarding (a lot less than the few UK state boarding schools which charge for the boarding element but not the education/fees)

enormous
Schools with sod all curriculum can be cheap
www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/09/muslim-school-slammed-by-ofsted-as-former-pupil-says-the-college-was-utterly-cruel
Not sure its the best example of a private school ......

Oh and teachers tend to earn more in the state sector than at the majority of private schools ......
the big savings in private schools are the fact that they do not have to provide the pastoral support for kids who do not want to be there
and the learning support for those who will never pass exams

hence why special schools are eye wateringly expensive
DH was at one recently where all the kids are state funded and the fees are over £100,000 a year

More recent link about the very cheap private school ......
www.nottinghampost.com/muslim-school-in-nottingham-banned-from-having-new-pupils-over-extremism-fears/story-29816037-detail/story.html

Which is why asking for £5000 to go and spend on a DCs private education makes not sense.

Maybe.

But many people ignore the fact that parents of kids at private schools are saving the state money that would be spent on their kids education in the state sector. In costing any measure that taxes the private sector more, one should take into account that some parents would have to move their children back to the state sector, thus reducing the net income to the government of the new tax.

But many people ignore the fact that parents of kids at private schools are saving the state money that would be spent on their kids education in the state sector.

As are people who never have children - do they also deserve some kind of rebate on their tax?

The only practical reason for the state to subsidise private education would be to encourage more parents to pay for private education.

Maybe that will be government policy at some point, but then you would have to ask why.

Why on earth should there be a cap on private school fees? They are there to serve a market, and do so at different levels.

So what if some (probably most, actually) hard working professionals cannot afford fees? It isn't a right, or compulsory to send kids to private schools.

Many schools cater for the very wealthy, others less so. All will tailor what they offer, and at what price, to their market.

I see no more reason for the state to interfere with the pricing of a private sector. Should there be a cap on the cost of wedding dresses, or cars, or any other commodity?

We all benefit from state education. Instead of asking yourselves how much private educating parents save the state, ask how much those very parents would have to pay their employees if the employees had to cover the cost of private education. How their business model would need to change if there was no state health service and employers had to cover full medical insurance for each and every employee.

The benefits go way beyond the price of education to your individual child.

Parents do move between private and state sectors so if you want to encourage them to relieve the state of the state school cost you could give them a voucher worth less than a state school place to spend at private schools I suppose. Or you might think that schools where parents pay tend to provide better what is good for children if you think the private sector is usually better at things than the state (as plenty of us do) so having a voucher system might encourage better schools. Anyway there is no hope of that so I rather diverted us on to a pointless discussion.

And special schools cost more than any posh boarding school anyway ...

Instead of asking yourselves how much private educating parents save the state, ask how much those very parents would have to pay their employees if the employees had to cover the cost of private education.

You are making assumptions about private educating parents. Pretty erroneous assumption if you really think that most private educating parents run their own businesses.

In my DC's school are parents who are teachers, nurses and doctors, academics working for universities, civil servants or people working in local government. I.e. there are lots of public sector workers, many on not terrifically high salaries, who don't employ anybody and rely on two incomes to pay the fees.

Some people on rather moderate incomes choose to make sacrifices to their standard of living for their children to go to private schools. Others on rather higher incomes choose to use state schools, particularly when they are fortunate enough to live in catchments of high achieving schools.

This would be a good idea if they selected the worst performing and most challenging pupils. If they can turn around 10,000 of the most difficult children then they will save the country a lot of money.

Worst Performing
does not equal
Most challenging
and neither group needs
turning around
You've clearly never darkened the door of a special school - you know, the kids that private and selective schools pretend do not exist

I was one of the last to go through secondary on an assisted place, I started in 1994. I agree with the general comments about expensive trips and uniform. It was in many ways the bottom tier of private education - some parents were Doctors, solicitors etc and some business owners etc Some parents made sacrifices for their kids to go.

But it was still very isolating to be a poor kid in a rich school - spending the 12 week summer holiday not seeing my friends as they were off on multiple foreign holidays while I was in childcare while my Mum worked. Other than the other assisted place kids (who I could name without it ever being discussed) everyone had a horse or a boat or a holiday home or a swimming pool. I was a horrible brat for a long time, (because while everything isn't fair to a teenager, it just wasn't fair!!) and it took until sixth form for me to feel comfortable.

What I now know as well is that the education wasn't very good. If you take bright kids who want to learn you don't have to try very hard, and they didn't. We just got lectured or worked through text books. No pastoral care and no careers guidance other than the expectation that we would all take a very expensive GAP year travelling and then go to university. We were taught by two unqualified teachers in sixth form, one of whom just couldn't explain his PhD topic to sixth formers.

I know there are good and bad private schools, they have the same variety as state schools. I also know assisted places helped some people enormously, they just had to be different in personality to me. My biggest concern with giving any sort of state funding or vouchers system to the private sector is that there is so little supervision of the quality of teaching in private schools. So i think any funding in any way should include the schools submitting to some sort of proper inspection, and not being allowed to continue to inspect themselves.

vj32 I agree with you about the quality of teaching. The history teacher in my very expensive public boarding school used to spend the entire lesson with her back to us, writing stuff on the blackboard. We spent the whole lesson copying it down into our books. She often didn't actually speak, except to tell us to copy what was on the board! Absolute shite.

No inspections of course, so she got away with it.

vj, was yours a posh boarding school? It certainly does not seem like my chilren's day private schools where I and many of the other mothers have worked full time every summer except 1 or 2 weeks of holiday. Indeed my daughter's school had a 4 week holiday club to help the working parents with holiday childcare. The idea everyone is off for 8 weeks at their villas in France is just alien to me in the private schools we know. Obviousy,l you can get a few posh rich children in the posh comprehensives and posher private schools but that is not the norm in academic private day schools in most parts of the country.

Private schools are inspected and on the whole their teachers are more likely than in the state system to have a degree in their subject and to have gone to better universities. I am happy with the quality of teaching in my children's private schools . I think teenagers are sensitive to the incomes of others Eg one of my sons planned a trip to our gym with friends this week some of whom aren't members. They all decided the day guest pass was too expensive for the non member boys so they went to our local council's gym instead (which meant I had to pay rather than not but even so it was an example of the teenagers sorting things out sensibly between them based on their own budgets. I don't think anyone is particularly rich in that group at all).

EnormousTiger; I do not see how you can generalize about most parents in most private schools. I spend part of my working life engaging with a range of private (and state) schools and I can assure you that many of the private day schools have a very strong presence of wealthy parents. Not aristocracy and footballers , granted, but partners in city law and finance firms, consultants etc.

My DC are in a not-posh comprehensive and there are a few of the same kind of families, but of course they are wildly outnumbered by the full range of backgrounds (higher than national average FSM for example).

I do not think it fair or right that fee paying parents pick up an extra tab to enable private schools to take some responsibility for state schools. I don't think that should happen for other reasons, but I agree that in this whole fucked up proposal the fee paying parents should not bear the cost. Whether they are wealthy or just managing.

I am assuming suppermummy wasn't talking about children with Statements in her comment.

However my sister works in a pupil referral unit with very challenging teenagers. She is certain that many have some kind of undiagnosed issue such as autism, ADHD etc. They the ones who come in and generally settle well in a smaller environment but still pose challenges when their issues come to the fore. You would struggle to turn those children around without significant investment.

user7214743615 But many people ignore the fact that parents of kids at private schools are saving the state money that would be spent on their kids education in the state sector.

Are state schools better or worse off financially as a result of this?

Other than the other assisted place kids (who I could name without it ever being discussed) everyone
I often wonder how much confirmation bias plays a role in these discussions. If it was literally never discussed, you presumably don't know for sure that the kids who didn't have the expensive stuff were assisted places kids. If they look at lifestyles, the other children and parents at DC's school may well assume we have a bursary. We haven't; therefore, because I know to mistrust such impressions, I have no idea which children do.

Similarly, on the other thread going on recently, someone who claimed (though I doubt it) to work in university admissions made a generalisation about university students who come from private schools compared to those who come from state schools. However, someone who works in admissions is highly unlikely to know how the students admitted perform once they get there; and someone who teaches hundreds of students is highly unlikely to know what schools many of them came from. What they can easily do, though, is apply previous prejudice and assume that any child who is diligent, intelligent and modest must be from a state school while any who is lazy and arrogant with a posh accent must be from private school!

oops, accidental html