Private school fees

[studentandparent]

Labour will scrap charitable status on private school fees when next in Government. Anyone got any idea how much this will increase fees?

It certainly could be for me!

homeschooling would only make sense for us if all the good private schools near us closed. My children are much better served in private school with excellent teachers and a robust extracurricular programme than anything I could provide on my own. It also provides end to end care that allows me to work (and then pay fees); homeschooling would mean leaving work, which would also be a huge financial hit, especially over the long term.

not knocking homeschooling- different people make different calculations based on choices available, and many of those people are far more capable at teaching their children than I am!

My understanding is that the opposite is true in the UK - the existence of the grammar school/secondary modern system increases the use of private education. Firstly because it encourages parents to put their kids in prep schools to get them into the grammar schools; secondly because kids from well-off families who fail to get into grammar schools end up being sent to private schools, due to (understandable) concerns that secondary moderns will have a culture of low expectations and won’t be able to attract good teachers.

People living in nice areas with middle class families sharing similar educational values on nice streets with decent schools tend to be happy with a comprehensive system because neither teachers being too stretched or behaviour issues/gangs necessarily become a problem. Most people just want a decent and safe school where their kids don’t get into a bad peer group and are happy and motivated.

People living in deprived areas with lots of troubled families with low educational aspiration and unmet SEN needs for many children don’t necessarily want to send their DC to such a school serving such a catchment, even if the school itself is Ofsted Good. It is depressing for a bright motivated child to be surrounded by troubled kids and behaviour issues. In such areas, schools need to stream anyway. In such areas, fluid grammar streams are particularly important for bright poor children. They should never have gotten rid of gifted & talented especially for poorer kids.

The constant complaining about private education in the press is a very current British thing. Rates of privately educated kids have not gone up in percentage terms. Many European countries have a higher percentage of privately educated children and in some countries eg Germany the percentage rate has gone up significantly quite recently. I think probably because the one size fits all doesn’t work and perhaps education is less child led/bit old fashioned. The reason places like Finland do so well with a comprehensive model isn’t because that model inherently works best. What the Finnish do is huge amount of investment in child health and education in the very early years so the foundations are there and SEN is always supported. It is kind of the opposite of what the U.K. does.
Academisation under New Labour and abolition of grammar schools was in my option a disaster. Better funding of early years was good and better funding of schools as well. Trying to paint private schools as the black devil is just another Labour disaster waiting to happen. It is very obvious. The problem is that it will affect professional women paying high taxes disproportionately and people who have privatised their own child’s SEN needs. For many private education is just a safe option to provide extra curricular or smaller class sizes. PAYE incomes are already too highly taxed, house prices are too high etc- it is just going to hurt some young families. To increase tax take we need to tax wealth and housing wealth, not income. To be a productive country, we need to make sure it is worth everyone’s time to work extra hours and that includes early retirees.

In such areas, fluid grammar streams are particularly important for bright poor children. They should never have gotten rid of gifted & talented especially for poorer kids.

No. Bright poor kids overwhelmingly do not get into grammar schools. They mostly just end up in secondary moderns. The actual data on grammar school/secondary modern systems indicates very clearly that they are worse for the poorest kids.

"The net effect of grammar schools is to disadvantage poor children" (markpack.org.uk)

The term I used is grammar stream, that means streaming within a large comprehensive, typically. It is based on a combo of SATS and Cat type testing more frequently than not, not 11 plus testing which favours tutoring. In any event, my whole point is that teachers should identify bright poor kids from an early age and place them in a grammar stream.

The 11 plus process in U.K. was flawed. Even the uni process based on grades primarily in 3 subjects is flawed.

If you're talking about setting and streaming WITHIN schools, that's just "sets" and most schools do it already in England. Yes, it's very different from grammar/secondary modern systems (because there is movement between sets, because kids can be a high set for some subjects and a low one for others, which allows kids with spiky profiles to be accommodated, and because all kids will be in the same school with similar expectations, rules, pool of teachers and so on).

That's a partisan piece. Of course historically every town had a grammar school - even quite small places, quite different to now where even in grammar counties there still aren't that many.