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.

When I was bullied at my state comp the head told my mum it was 'character building'. When my mum referenced the school's shortcomings in public forum (at an open event at the school) she was asked to resign as parent governor. I hope things have changed since the 1990s....

Ah yes, that well known belief of modern teachers and headteachers that a bit of bullying builds character…

Are you suggesting I'm lying @Walkaround ? I can assure you I'm not.

Why they hell wouldn't I buy my kids a better experience than the one I had? Most of the kids at my secondary school were awful. Lazy, aggressive, unkind, unambitious.

I'm not even bothered about top universities or the Oxbridge obsession - I just don't want my kids to be miserable for those really important years, so I'm buying an experience that ensures they are not - and if the service provided is not good enough - I'll buy it elsewhere. The state system just can't deliver that.

@herethereandeverywhere - no I am not suggesting you are lying, I am suggesting you are talking about your personal, historical experience. I might just as well ponder whether boarding schools are still like Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or if private school teachers still tell parents they molly coddle their children when they go in to complain about their child being hit by a board rubber that the teacher threw at them (experience of family member).

And I think it's in the realms of fantasy to assume that after 13+ years of Tory rule and austerity, state schools will be filled with delightful motivated kids who want to learn and support each other, aided and educated by an adequately staffed team who are trying to do anything other than survive. Whilst historical, my experience was after a similar amount of Tory rule in a northern town left to dry on the vine. Plenty of parallels, just without the iPhones and social media.

To fund U.K. Plc, it needs every last penny from all it's residents.

It's not surprising she was asked to resign. That's innapropriate behaviour for a school governor.

The relative success of the "leafy" school is also due to their advantage in recruiting staff. Teachers choose where to work in much the same way that resourceful parents choose schools. They want to work somewhere with bright, motivated kids and supportive parents so they apply to schools that appear to be in that category. Many are parents themselves and take advantage of priority admissions. This inevitably gives leafy schools a better choice of applicants, and puts them at an advantage when there are teacher shortages, as now.

Labour want to use the proposed VAT money to pay for "more teachers" but instead they may need to "pay teachers more" and fix a lot of other problems to attract people into the profession.

Maybe teacher pay should have a challenge weighting, such that you get paid a lot more for working in a school with a challenging and demotivated intake with a lot of high scores on deprivation factors, and the nice cushy jobs at the leafy middle-class schools are relatively low paid?

The upshot would either be that the most skilled and inspirational teachers actively wanted to work in the difficult schools in order to advance their career, or that the leafy high-performing schools started doing more to actively recruit more disadvantaged students as part of a strategy to improve staff wages, which would be beneficial too.

Precisely why I agreed with the poster who said there needs to be a focus on the wider social and economic problems in society. As I already said, schools cannot transform society, they are largely a reflection of the society we live in and they have to work with that.

We really don’t need people making offensive, sweeping comments about an entire sector of schools, as that’s just counterproductive. It doesn’t play well to make a sweeping generalisation and then say you mean lots of people, not all clever people, or everyone, or a majority. It doesn’t play well to say you personally were bullied many years ago when you were at school and the school handled it badly, then to imply strongly that you think all state schools are like this. It aggravates people and sets them up against each other, which is precisely the problem most people recognise as major issue that needs tackling. We, as a society, need to take responsibility for decades of behaviour and decisions which have pushed a growing number of people into a position where they barely buy into the concept of a society at all.

They're not "nice cushy jobs". They bring their own challenges - sky high parental expectations, student grade anxiety, the constant pressure to meet ever more challenging targets with fewer and fewer resources, and the knowledge that Ofsted could sweep the school's reputation off the cliff if their ever changing requirements are not met, or if the lead inspector happens to have a bee in his bonnet about something, or needs to meet some tacit numerical target of his own for downgrading outstanding schools.

A change of leadership can make or break any school, but school leadership takes extraordinary resilience and stamina.

the nice cushy jobs at the leafy middle-class schools are relatively low paid

What a way to insult a hard working professional who has one of the most important jobs for society! Teaching the middle-class is far from 'cushy' - they still have the endless targets and red tape that comes from the government and ofsted via inspections and syllabus changes. They also have other demands which are not so prominent in lower performing schools.

Pupil premium and other funding exists to try reflect the fact that more resources are required for schools in deprived areas. It still does not scratch the surface of the problem and sadly the government don't appear to want to fix it, just paper over the cracks

Just disgusting that you think it is acceptable to downgrade a profession to try fix a societal issue. It will push even more out of the profession or into the private sector.

My comment was a reply to a pp who said that all the best teachers gravitate to the state schools with the most privileged intake, because these are a nicer working environment, thus making the inequality more and more pronounced. The word cushy was wrong, I accept that, but what I was trying to address was how to make teaching at the more deprived schools to be a more attractive option.

@skewwiff
Are you suggesting that the ills of the school be hushed up? That referring to bullying as character building is something that should remain behind closed doors?
Is it a parent governor's role to provide unfettered support regardless of circumstances?
How else to hold the SLT to account when you are being ignored?

She should have resigned before going public, not after.

Her role as a governor is to challenge from within, not publicly. If they had a code of conduct, she would have breached it.

Yes, when we reach the situation when all state schools are good, then I think demand for private schools will drop through the floor.

How do we reach that point?

(I can remember my DDad saying something similar back in the 1970s - the best way ahead is to make state schools so good that only a nit would choose different')

@Walkaround

I did not 'imply strongly that all [state] schools are like that'.
I implied that as a parent you have no control over it - unless you pay for education and, if necessary, change private providers.

My experience was not primarily about bullying, believe it or not - though the fashion to be lazy/ignorant not bright was a huge social pressure.
Teachers started every lesson reiterating what to do to get a grade C. Mixed ability classes where I always got paired with (held back by) the kid with the most pronounced learning difficulties - no classroom assistants in those days. I could have advanced 3x faster without that. Mediocrity ruled. Only one maths textbook per class so we spent half the lesson copying down the questions! I once got 100% in a science test and the teacher mockingly said she was making me teach the class that day - to the delight of the 29 others in the class (easier to keep the majority of your audience on side). Successions of supply teachers not knowing what the previous one had covered (my only GCSE B was in the subject where the teacher went in mat leave and we had 6 different supply teachers over the final 3 terms.) I see no evidence that I can guarantee to protect my kids from any or all of that.

And I stand by the premise that the 'pro state school' MC parents are happy with their lot when they have bought a house in the catchment of an outstanding or even good state, but far less comfortable with the idea of their child going to a failing state school in a socially deprived area.

In summary - don't berate or punish the parents buying the best education they can for their kids. State education absolutely needs massive investment, as does dealing with social deprivation and poverty. The answer is to tax real wealth and wealth accumulation (check out a list of Tory donors and peers as a start point). Pretending state is good enough and/or berating private school choices achieves neither.

The term 'relatively low paid' was also wrong. Why should any teachers be relatively low paid? They should be paid their worth as they are still doing an important job.

From speaking to friends in the profession, it is the leadership of a school that attracts them to it. Some will move to schools in 'leafy middle-class' areas because of the priority entrance for their own children but more move to a school because it has good leadership. And they are very happy to work in deprived areas with challenging behaviour if management is good. They usually move when this part breaks down.

@skewwiff what is wrong with challenging publicly?
Where is the incentive to challenge if you can't say anything critical unless you reign first?
I assure you my parents regularly reported their concerns but they were minimised or brushed away.

Is being a governor based on pretending everything is fine?
I'm concerned about the ethical implications of being forced to be 100% positive or step down. Being a parent governor is not a PR exercise.

@herethereandeverywhere

It's a fine line.... in maintained schools, bringing the school into disrepute is legally grounds for suspension as a governor.

Governors challenge internally, not publicly. They work with the senior leadership to improve the school. Good governors do not pretend "all is fine" unless they want to be rated inadequate by Ofsted.

Parent governors need to separate their parent hats from their governor hats. It can be a fine line, but it sounds like your parent had strayed a long way off it. She had the right to speak publicly as a parent, but not as a governor.

Being a parent governor is being part of the organisation which has responsibility and accountability for the school. If she thought the Governing Body was failing to hold the school to account, then she herself was part of that failure, because she had collective responsibility with the rest of the Governing Body, so of course she was required to resign from the collective first and speak out as an individual afterwards.

What the Governing Body should have done is ensure the school’s complaints procedure was robust and properly followed. That was her job as a governor, not to ignore school policies herself.

@herethereandeverywhere - fair enough if that is what you intended, although it didn’t come across that way to me. You are still referring back to personal, past experience and extrapolating from that to come to the conclusion that there is definitely a massively widespread problem. I don’t think the existence of a lot of private schools in a country where private education for the upper middle classes used to be the norm and any deviation from that automatically considered an aberration, is conclusive proof that the status quo with regard to private schools and their fee structures is essential and any change to it a guaranteed disaster. I get a stronger impression from posts like yours that there are more parents panicked about state schools in general than that there are parents who are avoiding specific state schools due to actual, up to date, lived experience of those schools.

That said, I think state schools currently are under more pressure than ever and that adding VAT to school fees is silly and just more scrabbling around for small change from a perceived easy target. If governments continue to do this, they will just drag more people under rather than pull more people back up to the surface. It is not evidence of positive change for the better, that’s for sure - just more of the same. So we sort of agree while disagreeing!

Hi OP, I am with you on this.
DH and I both work full time to afford DC fees. We could not go to the good state school because there isn't one in our catchment. Instead of buying a house into another catchment, we decided to go private. I feel really annoyed that on top of all the taxes we pay already, we might need to pay even more soon. We are not oligarchs, we are not rich. We are not seating on money. It is yet another policy which will make no different for the truly rich (although it might as private schools will become more elitist) but will really disrupt the education of MC children since many will have no choice but remove their DC. I have never in my life voted for Tories, but be sure KS, I am not voting for you!!