If you have kids in private education, what is your school planning to do re VAT?

[Ladychaise]

I have two kids at a London independent school and currently just about scrape the cost of fees. Labour’s intention to add 20percent on the fees would make it impossible to keep them there, if all that cost goes to us - it is a worrying time.

The school’s bursar is being lovely but it’s very much a ‘let’s cross that bridge when we come to it’ take on it! I get that we don’t know for certain if Labour will get in or how fast they will implement this - but surely schools should be planning for this and working out how much of the VAT, if any, will be ‘covered’ by the school?

Aware there is a lot of uncertainty but does anyone else’s school have a plan in place? Thanks so much

Ours have put fees up the last 2 years to compensate this already

VAT is not devolved, but education is - so the 6500 teachers figure is an England-only pledge.

Have they explicitly said it was for VAT that they put the fees up the last 2 years? I work in a (tiny) independent and we’ve had fee rises of about 7% the last 2 years, nothing to do with VAT. Electricity/gas prices have gone through the roof. State school teachers got a pay rise of 6.5% last year; in order to keep competitive and attract/keep good staff our school gave us close to this.

these fee rises were very unpopular with parents. I won’t go on about them struggling annd making sacrifices as that’s already been done to death on this thread - but sufice to say most do not have millions in the bank to pay fees with. Our numbers are already very very low for next year. I’m 90% sure we will close when the VAT increase comes in ☹️

@RespiceFinemKarma - one ‘good’ thing re friendships is that by sixth form they are more likely to continue existing friendships outside of school anyway. I saw it with my eldest (now at uni). She kept up with various friends who changed school at sixth form and all was fine.

Those talking about good state schools - certainly in London catchments are already tiny and this policy will make it worse. That excellent state school in Muswell Hill a poster mentioned is just over a mile from our house - we wouldn’t have a hope of getting in…

@modgepodge yes we've. Been told . That's really sad you think it will close

Yes, I think they will keep in touch - boarding friendships last a lifetime as they're all quite sisterly, which has been great for my dd as an only child.

I don't live in London and the commute there for work and general travel with the job is going to mean a career change for me. Locally the job market is poor but we are a grammar area at least. Traditionally the grammars are fuller at GCSE than A Level (their grades go down considerably at A Level and a lot of their brighter pupils go to the local privates, ironically, as they have better choices). I didn't send DD there initially because of lack of SEN provision, so it does feel as though those lucky enough not to be SEN will be the winners of this policy.

It's a bit patronising to say people voting for this don't understand it. I understand it, and I still support it.
Yes, some children in the independent sector have SEN. those with the most pronounced needs and an EHC plan will be exempt. Those receiving SEN support, will not, presumably, but it is false to portray all families with SEN children in the independent sector as struggling with fees. For some the SEN support may be incidental ie not the main reason why a child goes there, and for others, parents can comfortably afford fees. Yes, some will struggle and that is hard, I'm sorry for that but it is difficult to see how you could draw up a fair exemption for these pupils which didn't incentivise schools to suddenly start putting loads more children on the SEN register.

And the fee rises you've experienced to date are likely to be due to cost recovery in the case of charitable independent schools, or protecting the bottom line in the case of profit making ones. If they're levying increased fees on the basis of a policy to be implemented by a government yet to be elected that's a bit .... dodgy, isn't it?

I said that people don’t know what they are voting for because Labour’s figures about how much this will generate are already looking very shaky. It’s typical political misrepresentation just like the Brexit bus. With regards to SEN, very few pupils in private schools have ECHP’s because it offers no benefit - they don’t get local authority funding. Of course, some parents may need to apply for them if they want to move their DCs to a state school. Which will clog the already overloaded system further.

Have they definitely confirmed that it's students with EHCPs who will be exempt from the VAT? I know that they said they'd make provision for children with SEN who needed the independent place for that reason but I wasn't sure they'd confirmed the mechanism. EHCPs only apply in England but VAT is a UK issue so I am not sure how they are going to manage that. The system for applying and appealing is already overburdened. It doesn't sound like a great solution but I'm not sure what other alternatives would meet the policy.

Yes I'm aware of the figures and I'm not sure they're looking shaky. It's all a bit of an unknown, how many parents will in fact pull children out.

There are around 7,000 pupils in independent mainstream schools, and another 22,000 in independent special schools that have EHC plans so not "hardly any". And they certainly do offer benefit. If your child needs an EHC plan and you make the case to tribunal that they need to attend an independent mainstream then the local authority pays the fees. Yes, I know it is difficult to get an independent mainstream named but it is not impossible.

I wonder if the mechanism will be that LAs are able to reclaim the VAT paid rather than not pay it in the first place.

The IFS study that Labour like to quote estimated a 3-7% drop out rate. However, admissions are already down by 2.7% this year WITHOUT the policy even being introduced. If there’s a 10% reduction, it becomes a cost neutral policy (i.e.) it doesn’t raise any revenue. So, yes, the figures do look shaky.

Apparently they’ve said that those children with EHCPs funded by an LEA will be exempt. However, this raises the question of what will happen in Scotland where EHCPs don’t exist. This is just one reason why the policy is ridiculous. The Labour Party haven’t considered problems such as this.

If they do exempt those with EHCPs, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a surge in families applying for them. There are lots of pupils with SEN but without an EHCP.
https://inews.co.uk/news/private-schools-labour-tax-special-needs-catastrophe-3055874#:~:text=Labour%20is%20stressing%20that%20its,and%20Care%20Plans%20(EHCPs).

Re admission numbers falling, I've looked at the isc census (which only covers their member schools, circa 50% of indies) and I'm.not clear what the 2.7% fall is referring to. If it is reception admissions then that's actually a smaller drop than you'd expect given national pupil projections. Fewer kids in the system overall = less pressure and cost on the state system as well.

It covers “new admissions”. Pupils don’t just start in private at primary level and continue all the way through. Many join from state part way through primary, the start of secondary or in year 9 of secondary or for sixth form only. Given that the figures quoted by Labour were based on the number of pupils in private school at the time the report was created it doesn’t really matter at what stage the fall in admissions is because if pupil numbers are decreasing, it won’t generate the income Labour are saying it will.

The dropping birth rates might well be the saving grace.

It will still be a bad policy, since instead of there being the same amount of money to spend on a smaller number of pupils (ie more spending per child, or else a lower education budget leaving more money available for eg the NHS) if they hadn't introduced the policy, the government could end up with the same amount of money to spend on the same number of pupils. And far less education investment directly by parents out of their own taxed income.

But if it doesn't cause actual damage to the state education sector - only to a smaller number of individual children - then that won't be as bad as it could be.

It's still pretty bad though, since a period with lower birth rates should be a time when we invest more into our population, in order to increase UK productivity in 20-30 years time when that smaller cohort is having to create all the economic output to support the current working age population, who will be retired.

Instead that financial tax boost of having a smaller number of children to educate is being squandered for political point scoring.

You are ignoring immigration

A lower percentage of the population being of working age is due to demographic shifts: fewer children being born per person, and increased life expectancy.

Demographic shifts tend to be reflected in immigrant populations within a generation, since they're a result of external society factors which immigrants are subject to when they move to the country.

So expecting immigration to plug a change in demographic patterns is a huge ponzi scheme. Those immigrants (or their children) will themselves have fewer children and live longer, so you end up with the same distribution but a bigger population just a few short years down the line (which is even harder to manage)

You can use immigration for a dropping population, but that isn't what we have. We have a growing population with a less productive age distribution.

The only real solution is to increase productivity at a population level, so that when evened out across our society (allowing for redistribution from higher earning to lower earning, and allowing for uneven costs like health) the amount an individual produces in their lifetime is sufficient for what the individual consumes over their whole (longer now!) lifetime - counting all costs against the individual - including childhood costs like education, old-age costs like increased care and pension, and life-long costs like health, and one person's proportion of policing, defence, roads, government, arts subsidies, etc. That's what sets our standard of living within the UK.

That's why educational investment is so critical: to improve productivity. Because that's what sets our standard of living.

Doesn't matter how it's funded: whether by the state, or by individual parents, or by adults sharing knowledge and experience with young people for free.

And that's why it's completely crazy for the government to disincentivise parents from investing their own post-tax income into their childrens' education.

Where do you get the figure of 7,000 DC in private schools?
There are over 600,00 DC in private schools in UK and of those, circa 90,000 are SEN (with or without an EHCP).

She was referring to those with an EHCP

Again though, this isn't uniform.

Some schools don't fail to get many applicants, others struggle massively.

The ECT programme is now dearer for schools and the saving in salary costs between an ECT and a 3rd year teacher is negligible, when taking into account the extra costs that having an ECT brings.

Some subject areas and some schools struggle to get staff to even apply for jobs. I, not sure these are the schools that those used to working in a private school are going to be looking at.

One of the best teachers DD has is computer science, which she loves. The grammar has a terrible teacher who apparently is letting her parallel year do the bare minimum so not many will be taking it at GCSE. That's exactly why I am worried about moving her as she wants to take Comp Sci, Chem and Maths at the moment (for A Levels) and I don't think they even offer Comp Sci at the grammar. I think I said before, decent teachers can be earning a better wage working in the field than as a state school teacher.