VAT on private school fees

[user1486984759]

So I’m going to get crucified for this, BUT, let me get this straight:

• We pay 45% tax, thereby funding state schools
• We do not get any benefits, and those that do get priority when it comes to state school admissions
• We scrimp and save from what’s left after paying 45% tax to pay for our kids’ education
• And now the state is going to add 20% to our school fees to fund state schools
• So we pay the most to fund state schools, but when it comes to state school admissions, we are last in line

How is this fair?

It seems that in this country, the best places to be are (1) a non-dom billionaire, or (2) someone who doesn’t pay taxes, gets all the benefits, and gets priority in state school admissions. The hard working PAYE earners are screwed by parties from left, right and center.

I think pivitol is a bit of a stretch. Because inflation would eat that up. But should my school have a genuine £98 extra per pupil it would pay for 1 TA (across 6 classess) This could make a big difference if the TA was very targeted provision, using evidence based methods. We really miss the TA who used to do our nuture room and did lots of work on emotional regulation and social skills training. We could afford this until 3 years ago but each year it got harder and harder.

no doubt the middle class schools are overall still achieving better though and their classrooms and playground are more pleasant environment . As someone who attended both kinds and have worked in all kinds of schools one key thing that gives the “catchment” school a leg up is parental involvement and high expectations from parents in terms of behaviour and academic achievement.

It’s also why the children of some relevantly poor immigrant families do better educationally than their white English counterparts.

Even if not every parent is on board in the middle class school, the fact that many are will positively influence the minority who don’t come from such pro-education backgrounds be it in their neighbourhood or their family.

My childhood friend realised what a bad environment the local school had been for her and sent her daughter to a state all girls school about 20 miles out of town from where she lived. Her daughter absolutely thrived. Had she went to the local school we’re pretty sure she would have ended up more like my friend who admits she did make a mess of things and had very low aspirations.

She was aware she didn’t have all that was needed to pass on to her daughter so she made a smart move by sending her to a place where she’d be surrounded by kids who didn’t make learning or getting good grades a negative thing. Her daughter is now the first one in her entire family to go to university 🎉

You can keep throwing money at the state sector but until we do the deep work into the social ills which cause children to turn up to school hungry, distracted, angry and emotionally disturbed, as well as having little hope for their future you’ll only make a limited amount of progress

Famous right wingers like Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkin, Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart? People like John Mills?

Know much about UK politics?

I think this will be a definite issue.

DD's comp has a 6th form where there are enough places for only 1 in 4 of current Y11. They're asking for a minimum of 6 GCSEs at grades 9-7 and the over-subscription criteria is a ranking system of points from best 5 GCSE grades including subjects you wish to study at A Level. In 2019 they were only asking for 6 at grades 9-6 and ran other pathways alongside A levels for those with lower grades.

3 super-selective private schools in the area (2 days schools). Wouldn't take many of of their students moving to mean that current students don't have a hope of staying on for A levels if you can get at least five 9's at GCSE.

I have no objection to private schools, I can see the pros and cons of both sides of the argument have experience of both public and private education.

The VAT issue is very odd as some pubic education colleges - I think its FE and Sixth Forms have to pay VAT yet if they convert to an academy they don't have to pay VAT.

As far as the charitable status is concerned I don't believe that private schools should have charitable status but I do believe there should be a way that the schools/parents benefit so as not to see the cost of the education for parents does not go up to the full extent of the suggested rise.

Anothagoatthis sorry I had a typo in my last sentence - I meant to write “The difficulties faced by those schools are community based or expectations of education by the parents and pupils”. Yes parental involvement is key.

I presume you mean environment in terms of behaviour and attitude to learning? Better physical environment doesn’t seem to correlate with lack of deprivation. Nor are ‘better’ teachers necessarily drawn to areas where parents can be perceived as ‘pushy’.

A friend teaches in a deprived area; the main stumbling block is the lack of any perceived worth to education. It is multigenerational unemployment but a very tight community that people simply don’t leave - even to go Christmas shopping. Industry left and without anything on offer by way of good local employment the children see themselves following their families into unemployment. Throwing more money at school won’t change anything. The change needs to happen in the community.

would be an extra £100k for an average school. With ERNIC & pension contributions, I suspect thats x3.5 extra TAs for the whole school....

I can only speak for my school which is small. It would pay for 1 TA. Which would cover the nuture room and social skills. This would improve the learning environment in all 6 classes in the school.

But 3.5 TAs isn"t negligible even in a school of 1000. You need to target them at pinch points.

TAs arent the only use of funds in a school. I know schools that basically cant afford quality CPD for their staff, mainly because they can't supply to cover classess. Imagine the impact of upskilling you entire workforce if you could.

If 1.3% of private school children move to state due to VAT that would wiped out.

I totally understand the bigger picture that it might not raise any extra money. I already said that the reality was the money would be eaten up by inflation even it was raised.

But i was just illustrating that £98 extra per head isnt as negligible as you might first think as i think people were suggesting it was so little it wouldnt help. If it actually stood a chance of existing it would help

No it wouldn’t be completely wiped out, because state schools get paid per pupil in the school - the more pupils, the more money that school gets. Small schools are not economically viable. Large, full schools have economies of scale and have maximised their income. The money is only wiped out if Government pretends it has not reduced funding when it actually has, by reducing the money it pays a school per pupil that attends that school.

What would happen to sixth forms is another aspect that has potential to cause (costly?) problems for the state sector.

There are fewer pupils in Sixth Forms than during the CSA years. But of those that remain, 20% are in the independent sector. Now, if some pupils, capable of and interested in studying for A levels are leaving their private schools for cost reasons (it's a natural break point, so parents may hang on util then) or, in a few years time, did not after all go to private secondary, then what happens?

Can we actually afford to expand Sixth Form provision? If we can't, then some pupils will be squeezed out. And if schools prioritise existing pupils, then that's another incentive to leave the private sector. If they don't, who will be squeezed out when the places run out?

It would be brilliant if my DC's old school sixth form had an injection of new students. It's numbers are falling to dangerously low levels and there's talk of dropping subjects. Since the school would be paid for every new student too. It would be win win.
It's recovering from a period of special measures and management change and has suffered a demographic blip too.

Yeah I agree it’s not necessarily better teachers. Stick the private school teachers in a state school and and aside from the fact a lot of them would walk after one day, it won’t necessarily change the pupils.

It definitely is about not seeing the value of of education and some who do see the value struggle with gaining confidence as they’ve never seen anyone in their family achieve .

One of my childhood friends was always going on about she doesn’t want her kids to be stressed and I get that, but they’re not high achievers in the slightest or doing a lot of work.

She refused to push them even slightly in any thing except for sport. But as far as academics went she just left them to it. When her oldest said she was struggling in one GCSE subject she just said don’t worry about, it’s ok to fail exams. Whereas a parent who values education would’ve maybe spoke to the school or organised a tutor or group tuition class in that subject.

My friend works part time now but from ages 18-30 she was having babies and unemployed, her children would have seen some of that and likely think having babies on benefit is their route to independence after leaving school.

Obviously sixth form provision can be expanded where necessary. It all depends what those elected into Government choose to spend money on. It would be interesting to see if any political party were willing to say they could not actually afford to pay for the education of 16-18 year olds.

Imho, it is a damning indictment of a wealthy country to argue it cannot afford to educate all of its children without the help of private schools.

The thing is with state schools in Finland is that all the state schools are as good as each other. There's no incentive to provide any private schools as there's no advantage.

In this country it's a postcode lottery as to whether your state school is good or not. Some are excellent and some are awful.

I know Mumsnet have a real bee in their bonnet about private schools, but some of us work hard to send our kids to private as the state schools aren't very good.

The system we have here produces enormous variability. There are some astonishingly excellent state schools and some astonishingly crap ones. In the Finnish model there aren't really any crap ones but there aren't really any truly excellent ones either. They are all just fine, nothing wrong with them but nothing amazing so nothing to choose between them.

The vast majority of brilliantly performing state schools are in or very close to London. Out here in the sticks the absolute best performing state school achieves one or very occasionally two oxbridge entries, if it's a good year. Even the leafy suburb schools which manage to exclude the difficult kids using selection-by-house-price only get marginally better than average results. You can buy into that postcode for an extra £150,000 on the mortgage, or buy into private for a lot less than that (assuming just one kid) or accept that mediocre results are all you're allowed if you aren't in the golden catchments.

(But I am totally ok with VAT on school fees. My only beef is that labour are only proposing to put about a fifth of the proceeds into state schools and will divert the rest to other projects unrelated to education)

It’s also a damning indictment that there are so few good state schools in some towns and cities that parents will literally up sticks and move to certain areas to get in the catchment area despite having to get a huge mortgage.

The private school thing is a distraction IMO, they need to focus on the wider social & economic problems which are causing so many to struggle to see the value of education in state schools.

There are adults I know who were literally bullied every day for being studious in state schools and they have horrible memories of school despite being very successful now in their careers.

Your options shouldn’t be act like you hate education or get bullied.

I think adults need to understand the difference between their personal experience of bullying and state education. I agree, though, that there needs to be a far greater focus on the wider social and economic problems in society, rather than a pretence that schools can fix all of the problems. Schools largely reflect their local communities, they cannot single-handedly reinvent them.

Finland DOES have private schools. It also has the biggest gap in literacy between girls and boys with the high (but dropping) literacy just down to girls.

(I should add, private schools in Finland are more like Free Schools in the UK, in that the state pays but still technically private)

My understanding is that there a few international schools in Helsinki which are totally fee paying, but unsurprisingly, not a fraction of fees in the UK.

Not sure what you mean by that first sentence. People can get bullied in all kind of environments be it private or state school or workplaces, but the point was obviously that in MANY state schools studious kids are bullied, ridiculed or discouraged by their peers