20% vat on fees

[namechangedforthisone35]

IF Labour get in and IF the 20% does get added to fees, how many private school pupils will be moved to state? I have three kids (one not school aged yet) and in private school. One of many reasons because I didn't want them in a class of 30. I couldn't afford the vat increase so would have to move them but then that class of 30 becomes, what, 40?! In an already strained and unresourced system?!

Wwyd?

Y - I'd have to move kids to state
N - I'll pay the vat

@jgw1 sounds like we should be aiming to expand the private sector then and give more parents choice.

There are grammar schools that offer lots of extras almost like some private schools. For example, Skinners in Tunbridge Wells. That is because it is linked with one of the London livery companies, The Skinners, and in the same group as the expensive independent, Tonbridge School. There is now also an Academy in that umbrella of schools, doing really well. I think ethos and expectations work.
State Schools should be learning and benefitting from this type of set up, not the opposite. It should have nothing to do with games played by politicians to serve their own agenda.

What if it's a hung parliament?

Do you think that is likely?

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html

I literally don't know what will happen. Always of the opinion it's not over till the fat lady sings...

How much roughly would 20 pc be on the average current fees of 13k per annum?

It's Friday afternoon and freezing here. So roughly £3250 extra?

10% of 13 is 1.3.
20% is therefore 2x1.3.

Would a price increase be unmanageable for you? I'd imagine uniform, trips, extra-curriculars are quite an additional expense in private schools. Could you not cut back?

Send the kids to school naked? It’s an option I guess but I doubt the uptake will be huge.

Well @Charlie2121 some posters on this thread may believe “privaat” is all emperor’s new clothes. And deterring you is to protect you! From moral culpability.

Our local private school has second hand sales.

£2600. There aren’t many schools with fees of £13k a year though. The average is higher than that. £20k a year for secondary is on the lower end. That’s £4000 in VAT. It’s not unusual for parents to have more than one child in private school though. £8000 for 2 children just in tax is a lot of money.

Thank you @Another76543 . I agree 8K is a lot for 2 children. Sorry x

My dad's cousin pays 31k for her Yr 11 child.

State school rolls are forecast to drop by around a million or 12% over the next decade. The school population should decrease from 8.4 million to 7.4 million.
If that fall is spread evenly over all year groups, a typical class of 30 would contract to 26.4. Councils are planning school closures/mergers to cope with this.

The independent sector educates about 620,000 kids - about 7% on average though that's concentrated toward older pupils.
If VAT were added and a colossal exodus occurred from private schools leading their share of pupils to drop from 7% to 2% over 1 term of government (5 years), that would lead to about 90,000 extra pupils needing a state school place per year. But state school numbers are forecast to drop by more than that.

Overall the drop in pupil numbers over the next decade would allow the state sector to absorb all pupils in private schools with capacity to spare (1 million as opposed to 620,000).

So, even in the most extreme projections, the state system as a whole easily has capacity to absorb all pupils exiting the private system. It may even make things easier and more stable for state schools and councils since it will buffer them from the effects of falling rolls and birth rates.

Or state could use the opportunity to increase funding pp as fewer on the roll. If classes drop from 30 / 31 to 27 it’d be no bad thing. Our classes are quite large already

DFE are providing shortfall funding subject to criteria and you can look up what your council is doing about it. Some seem a little confused.

The problem is that forecasts are not equal to facts. What politicians should be doing is asking why young people feel they don’t want or can’t afford to have children anymore. What they should be doing is incentivising working people to have kids in the first place. That is help with childcare, tax deductions from Paye primarily for all including those at the top earning scale. It is in our interest that intelligent, hard working people have children. The big lie that is being sold is that high earners are all rich. They really are not. It is housing wealth and big pensions that make people rich. Most young people do not have that: the whole tax system and housing system needs a complete overhaul. Labour should have a vision to encourage the young and build hope for the future.

We know the answer to why people are having less children as it was clearly articulated at the NatC conference in the spring, endorsed by a number of Ministers and MPs from the government.

The answer is that girls are being educated too much and so don't want to stay at home and have babies.

Educated young women would be more likely to have children if childcare was fully tax deductible, as a starter. For each child that is not just 2. At the moment we have a situation were young educated women are in debt following uni, have worked really hard to get there, are still earning less than men and cannot afford good quality childcare as well as student debt/housing etc. All earners at the top and the bottom deserve good quality childcare and education.
It makes far more sense for society to let a woman on 150k a year deduct the cost of a nanny fully through a tax return so that she can earn that 150k in the first place. The nanny can also deduct if she has children etc
People on over 100k tend to be happy to fill in tax forms. If some high powered women are using private education as childcare then I think it should also be tax deductible. It should be tax deductible as a couple. Treat the higher earners like a company and actually try and figure out whether they are cash rich or not. PAYE is just a lazy way to pass the buck to employers. It is harmful to societal demographics as we are seeing now. It makes zero sense to have old people sitting on millions of housing equity, getting free NHS and squeeze the young. Of course the poor elderly should be taking care of, but those who are actually rich need to start paying. Rich is a combo of income and assets. It is not just income alone.

And I forgot to mention a cost of living quotient. Why should we in London keep paying for the rest of the country when our housing and cost of living is much higher. Should again be tax deductible. If renting a 3 bed house is x on average then in my personal company finances that should be taken account of. We now have sophisticated IT systems and conceptually this is actually workable. We have to get our head around it or we face a brain drain and a massive population decline. It is already happening and we need to act accordingly and think long term. Not just plug the government bank balance in a short termist fashion with a view to getting ourselves elected. There has to be a cross party effort looking at the fundamentals and systemic anomalies and coming up with real solutions.

If you voted Labour in the 1990s did you ever actually read their manifesto? Your views are chalk and cheese with Labour ideology.

Much more on the Right hand side of the Tory Party - are you in fact Liz Truss?

You didn’t have an actual source for this the last time you mentioned it, do you have one now?

The source is the NatC conference held last spring. Feel free to look it up.

@LittleBearPad - my cousin lives in a Swiss canton where the left party has been in power for years and that is exactly what they do tax wise, like I said, you need to get over trying to label people blue or red in this country. It is one of the main flaws of the system.