Private school parents - why don’t you take collective action?

[Rocketspam]

Lots of private school staff are striking.

Head teachers are enjoying extraordinary hikes in their salaries. And there appears to be some kind of arms race over who can spend the most on facilities. Even bursary programmes rarely assist children where families have below average income or who might be eligible for free school meals.

The VAT increases bother parents on MN, but why don’t you take collective action as fee payers and challenge the HMC, GSA, ISBA or ISA on where your money has gone up to this point? Are you comfortable with so many independent schools using ‘fire / rehire’ for example. Is the level of stress this incurs conducive to the wellbeing of your children?

What do you think is going on inside a school when you see that teachers are taking industrial action against their employer?

Swinging by this thread to remind OP that state schools are free

@swishswashswoosh Private school fee fixing scandal

@Rocketspam

But none of these schools actually followed through with it, did they? Pressure was put on them to offer alternatives, and they did. The GDST staff ended up with a pretty good deal in the end.

The reality is the GDST is a group of schools catering to middle class parents that charges low (comparatively) fees. They can't afford the TPS contributions anymore. Many schools can't. I was job hunting last academic year and I didn't find one independent school vacancy in London where I would get the TPS as a new starter. It won't be long before the TPS becomes the sole preserve of state schools, and then it will be in huge trouble.

Independent school teachers do have to be realistic. The cost of the TPS has become ridiculous - and not just for schools, but for a lot of teachers, too. My colleague in a top London indie where the TPS is being withdrawn from April has told me that most of her colleagues are actually relieved at the school offering an alternative pension that allows them to make lower contributions, because for many of them, the increase in TPS contributions is affecting their ability to pay their rent/mortgage. For many older teachers near retirement, the loss of the TPS is devastating, I can understand, but for many younger teachers, the increases in employee contributions have become unaffordable, and for those of us who joined in the past decade or so, we don't have the same final benefit schemes our older colleagues enjoy anyway. The TPS withdrawal doesn't affect all teachers equally, and so claiming that this is a disaster for everyone simply isn't true.

Again a group of prominent private schools, mainly Southern based.
Yet another reason to be happy that we live in the North!

@Rocketspam this isn’t happening at our school and no striking.

Indeed, the OP is just not able to grasp the fact that whatever it is they are trying to hammer home doesn't apply to all schools hence why some of us are sat here not worrying about, or raising our blood pressure over; the issue.

The response to the fee-fixing scandal was that a consultancy firm, offered to act as a third party.

Your school pay them to collect data from its community, and they then sell it back to you, benchmarked against the data of what it seems might be every independent school in the UK.

I have to go away now but can explain a bit more about ‘pass through’ and how it impacts your fees.

@Rocketspam can I ask why this is such a problem for you?

I could understand if your dcs were at a private school and lets say you were struggling to pay the fees due to VAT or the HT had seen his pay increased beyong what’s acceptable.

But it feels like you are calling for a general action with no link to yourself? More like ‘I dint get why you are not rebelling against this thing that doesn’t affect me at all’.
Im a bit at loss tbh.

Parents in most schools (state and private alike) barely communicate with each other at the best of times.

Also, to discuss affordability would be seen by at least half as irrelevant or gauche. Those who can afford the fees easily aren’t bothered even by VAT. Those who can’t don’t usually want to advertise that fact.

if there’s no sign of an issue at your children’s school, why would you expend time and energy on it?

Every independent school uses the consultancy and the consultancy has confidential financial data and quite a lot beyond (… you are very likely to have filled out an ‘affordability’ survey, for example).

They seem to say the same thing to everyone: pay the Head more, change the structure of the school day, raise pupil:teacher ratios, upgrade your facilities, spend more on marketing and development. A lot of this is expensive, rather than money-generating / money-saving—or isn’t the right strategy for your setting, and the costs have been passed on to the fee payer.

The data that they sell back to the school is never shared publicly (even when cited by the school as business rationale around pay and pension cuts).

The knotty problem of the TPS is not really about whether DB pensions are a relic, it is whether your school can afford its contractual obligations to its employees (TPS is usually contractual). They need to make a business case for this, and quite a lot of that information comes from this consultancy, and therefore staff can’t engage in meaningful consultation with the school (because it is all redacted). They are served a notice of redundancy (fire / rehire) and are left with no other recourse than to go to industrial action.

@BlueSkyBlueLife and @Validus

You don’t have to be self-interested to observe that something is wrong, do you?

Nothing you’ve mentioned is in any way out of the ordinary. Consultants are usually used to do wage/fee comparisons across multiple industries. Unaffordable pension schemes have to be stopped and if contractual this can mean fire/rehire if people won’t agree.

You think something is wrong. But nothing you’ve pointed to is out of the ordinary/ unexpected. TPS is not affordable and cannot continue in its current form. The contributions required from junior members are excessive and they won’t even see defined benefit. The junior end would likely be better off with a private pension into which their employer pays.

And no, I’m not going to get involved in some form of collective action that only relates to staff at a school my children don’t go to.

What? You said to PP ‘I knew you were from the Midlands!!! Something about your tone. East?’ - that’s pretty ad hominem..

Also despite me asking you, effectively 3 times now, you still haven’t said whether your child / children are / were privately educated.

It is pretty common—globally and historically—for parents to campaign around a particular issue in education @BlueSkyBlueLife

My suggestion is that, as private school parents anticipate the VAT and begin to shape their challenge to it (with some degree of national co-ordination, I expect) they should begin with their own school’s accounts and the knowledge that we may be moving away from:

what can we do to financially secure this excellent provision for current and future generations in our community?

to

how much can we get away with paying ourselves? How much can we get away with paying our staff? and how much can we get away with raising our fees?

No striking at our school.

The only collective action I can ever recall over fees was during the pandemic when lessons were online. A group of parents complained that other local schools were giving larger discounts and our school agreed to do the same.

To be honest, as selfish as this sounds, I've largely finished our school fees so it's someone else's problem. I do have a friend who's a bursar though and I know the pension issue is a pressing one.

This. It doesn't affect my daughter's secondary school.

VAT also won't affect us as she will be done with her GCSES by then and go state for sixth form.

So no action needed here 🤷‍♀️

So what are YOU proposing to do?
Any action you are taking and you’d want people to join?

@Rocketspam yes the ad hominem came from yourself saying you could tell that I came from the Midlands, East?

I have worked on campaigns in education for a very long time, in all phases and across both sectors, and I am working quite hard on this one @BlueSkyBlueLife (although not as a fee payer. Fee payers are underrepresented on the issue of ‘pass through’ to the consumer in the independent sector).

Mumsnet will usually offer a counter-argument. I rarely agree with it, but it is always useful to hear.

What’s wrong with the East Midlands?

Another large independent school in Newcastle is about to have a teachers’ strike the week after next unless the move to a DC scheme and 50% cut to pension contributions threat is withdrawn. The staff have been formally notified of fire and rehire with the reduced pension if they don’t accept the deal. This is a school that has stated to staff that they need to build up reserves to pay the first year’s VAT (to cushion the effect on parents) and continue with an expensive building programme.

This change makes the overall packages lower than the state sector.

So in effect the teachers are subsidising VAT, which may never happen, and buildings which, if the VAT does happen, might not be needed as the school is predicting from a (the one and only!) consultancy report, a significant double digit percentage drop in numbers if it is implemented.

This is also a school where some of the senior management recently had significant pay rises after they paid a well known consultancy to carry out a salary review. Pay rise details are readily available through the Charities Commission reports.

Just because people don’t know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Nothing at all but was YOU who stated: "I knew you were from the Midlands!!! Something about your tone. East?". Which gives off fairly patronising and derogatory vibes. Then you accuse others of ad hominem.

Ah ok. Now the way you are approaching things make much more sense!

I was born in South Shields and grew up in Derby. I don’t know what else to say to you @twistyizzy

@BigBananaBox if the package means it’s actually lower than state, then I’m expecting said teachers to move away! I mean teachers are in short supply. Theyll find something.

On the other hand, having good teachers, usually going with the fact they were well paid (and well trained) was one if the very positive side of private school.
Creating a situation where teachers are leaving, and teaching standards are going down, isn’t going to go well with the parents.
Sure where I live, the school has some sort of monopoly (very few private schools around) but it won’t stop people voting with their feet.