Vat Question????????

[Anoth]

Can I ask a silly question??
We have been given our school fees for 24/25 academic year now for the school my daughter attends.
My question is if labours policy comes in half way through an academic year will the schools be allowed to put the fees up for the remainder of that academic year? Eg if we start paying X amount on September and then labour get in and introduce the added vat in October. Will the fees go up in Jan of that academic year? Normally fees remain un changed for the whole of the academic year once fees have been published but I understand this is a strange situation!
Just wanted to know if I need to prepare to save more for 24/25 fees just in case or will these that are now published still remain until the end of July 25??.
Thanks!

And if the government takes too much, it gets to the point of just not being worthwhile.

As I said, if the school does reduce the fees (and hence the education they provide) to cover the extra money the government want, then the extra education being provided to our children goes down as a proportion of the tens of thousands of extra tax we pay in addition to the cost of the education itself.

It is an entirely pointless grab and people will adapt quite quickly into “state plus”
mode.

Lots of business opportunities here for creative ex private school teachers, if they want it. Tutoring, summer schools in Eg Oxford uni, overseas trips, French courses in French castles, boarding schools can host lots of events etc in the holidays. Lots of opportunity for overseas trips companies too. High quality outside school coaching etc. Just think creatively about what private schools currently provide and offer outside state school hours and in the holidays. My DC have done some amazing county orchestras in posh private schools, for example, subsidised by the Council.

It won’t lead to greater equality, people will just change their behaviour.

It's a shame, because a lot of the educational benefit does slot well into the school day.

So children will have a less good overall educational experience, even from the same amount being spent in total (by parents + by the state, ie all of us)

But of course every family counts the cost and benefit to their family, not the cost and benefit to the country, so it's a completely rational, normal thing for them to do.

Yes it is a shame @strawberrybubblegum

The state is currently failing in the provision of Modern Languages, almost completely. So that is a space occupied by private schools which will be filled by external private providers in the future. I recently found an amazing German exchange programme for one of my DC sponsored by the German Government. Stuff like this is out there and will grow. Other European countries will also be places for the ex UK private school model.

Tech and creative thinking is another space. I heard a friend talk about an online school provided for the employees of Space X to foster out of the box type thinking. This stuff will take off more and more internationally and you will be able to get online subscriptions. Good luck with attendance in state schools in that case.

The Red Wall can try and limit children’s opportunities across the board in this country OR they could be cleverer and try and use private schools to their advantage by working with them, as closely as possible. Pretty sure that these educational establishments who have been going since the 14th century sometimes know way more about how to educate children best into the 21st century.

With online technologies the world is moving very fast and successful people are incredibly mobile and all sorts of countries are vying for them and their offspring. But let’s just keep going backwards, more and more in the mid 1960s/70s type thinking. Both main parties are at fault here.
If anything we need to think about the future and how we as a small country will have citizens who are at the forefront of technological innovation and diplomacy and communication with neighbouring countries and work together. However, what is happening is the opposite. Some dinosaur politicians who are afraid of the future are taking us BACKWARDS!!

great post! The whole thing is so backward. For another take on why more, not less, family engagement is the answer, it's worth reading The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley.

Yes they do literally need to charge it. But they don't effectively need to charge it (or not all of it), as some have said they won't. Reducing the education they are providing is not the only way to drop their fees. They can cut bursaries and community work too.

That's true, they can cut bursaries and community work. But I'd expect that few schools would be spending 20% of fee income on that. Maybe the very old, wealthy ones, but they'd be using endowments rather than taking so much off fees.

For exactly the same reason that it would be a problem to drop fees by 20%: because that would be reducing the education they are providing the people actually paying for it (and who are also paying all that extra income tax) by a huge amount.

I certainly wouldn't be happy to have £3.4k of what I pay each year going on community work and bursaries, leaving only £13.6k being spent on my DD's education. Especially since 17k fees costs me an extra £13k income tax and NI, whereas £13.6 fees (if they charged for the education they were actually providing to DD) would only have cost me £9.5k extra income tax and NI.

That would seem pretty excessive: I work extra hours to earn £30k but only £13.6k of that actually going on educating my DD, £3.4k going to charity, and £13k going to the government?! I'd be pretty pissed off if the school was doing that!

(Then if the school stopped that charity spending to not charge the parents more as you suggest, the breakdown would change to £13.6k going on educating my DD and £16.4 going to the government . On top of the government not having to pay to educate DD. Pretty pissed off at that breakdown too)

£17k going on educating my DD and £13k going directly to the government - on top of the government not having to pay to educate DD, and the downstream tax @MisterChips has mentioned - is already a pretty sweet deal for the government.

That's the current situation without VAT and I've accepted that.

There's only so far parents will accept being squeezed by the government though.

I will put up with it - feeling pretty pissed off - at least to 6th form. But other parents will simply choose not to start down that route.

Exactly this.
If Labour think only a very small percentage of new parents are not going jump on the train , they are in for a shock.
This policy , after a year or two, will make the square root of FA.

‘On top of us already having paid tens of thousands of income tax for the extra hours we work to pay for education instead of the government paying.’

mmm, if only there was a solution to that 🤔

With all of your support of the VAT policy maybe look more closely at the leader of the Labour Party and the fact that Labour MPs consist of double the % of the national average for privately educated people. They are hypocrites especially Starmer. Happy to benefit from private education, happy for his children to benefit from private facilities, happy to pay 2 million for a house in the catchment area of an outstanding state school but doesn't want that option to be available to anyone else other than the ultra wealthy.

Well yes, there is an obvious solution. Some parents will put their kids in state education and work less (fewer hours and/or retire earlier).

The country will be poorer, both due to lower tax take now (and higher education costs, although that's less significant) and due to lower educational investment in the UK leading to less innovation and less effective working leading to lower tax take in 30 years time (across the whole country: no one says you have to be privately educated to be successful - just that more education makes each individual more effective than they would have been with less education).

But at least we'll all be worse off together.

But if they are charities and still want charitable status, which is another thing labour talked about changing but understand it’s been dropped, they have to have an an element of bursaries, community work etc. if not they’ll also be liable to corp tax on their surplus at 25% on top of the vat

Oh, hang on - we won't actually all be worse off together, since this will actually increase educational inequality. Not only in the private schools themselves, but by displacing kids whose families have less money from grammar schools and better comps.

Education is sufficient for something to be considered a charity. It only needs to educate its pupils, not other people.

And removing charity status from schools isn't viable. Or at least would cause so much destruction that even Labour thought better of it.

Oh, and many don't have a surplus. Not being for-profit businesses and all.

I’m not an expert but I have been involved in auditing public schools in the past and I distinctly remember it being brought it (possibly by the charities act about 20 odd years ago I will have to check technical details ) where all charities including schools had to demonstrate their public benefit, prior to this just education was enough but it all changed. Read any public schools accounts on the public record and you’ll see a paragraph on public benefit because they have to demonstrate this to retain their charitable status- education of fee paying children only is not enough.

i am also aware of what “not for profit” means. It means a school doesn’t make a profit for distribution to shareholders it doesn’t mean a school doesn’t make a surplus. Most schools have to make a surplus as they also have costs that don’t go to the profit and loss account it needs the funds to pay. Do for example it could build a new classroom which would be capital expenditure and not deductible for tax purposes if they weren’t a charity and had to pay corp tax, or if they had a loan from buying their building and had to make loan repayments they would need enough or a surplus to fund these but again not deductible for corp tax except interest

Nobody really knows how it will all pan out. The actual impact could be very minimal outside the sector. A lot will be able to afford the increase, some may leave the sector but it is likely to have a phasing element e.g. big decisions being made when a child is starting/ending a stage of education. There will be many private school DC who wouldn't pass grammar school exams as many private schools are not selective.

Ah, you could well be right. Well let's see how much destruction this policy brings before exploding another bomb shall we?

Certainly, not all private school kids would get into grammar. But their parents can buy into better catchment, exactly as many parents with kids in state schools (who are just as wealthy as private school parents) already do.

The numbers aren't big. But the consequences for individual children who are displaced from one school to another less good one/less suited to them (whether private or state) are significant.

And those negative consequences will continue into their adult lives as taxpayers (or not).

It all just makes things that little bit worse for everyone in the UK over the next 30 years. And much worse for a small number of people.

And that money will go into inflating house prices instead of being invested into education and also going into general taxation which can be used for any public services the government chooses.

And into people like me working less! Hey, why am I arguing against this??!

One of the nastier aspects of this debate is the glee about the risk of some sink school for private school kids. Tells us what we need to know about those on here that are committed to the tax.

Can one really make such sweeping assumptions about people's motivations? I haven't seen that aspect at all. I think a lot of people are not really invested in it, probably because the private sector is very small and they don't think it affects them directly.

There will be many private school DC who wouldn't pass grammar school exams as many private schools are not selective.

There will be many who do. Our non selective prep has a pretty much 100% pass rate in the grammar exams. It’s because the 11+ grammar exams are fairly easy to tutor for and many private schools do tutor for them. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if many private primaries/preps now market themselves by highlighting their success in grammar exams, which will be tempting for parents aiming to avoid the expense of private secondary.

It's quite odd, isn't it! I think people who suggest this don't really understand that the change will happen over time, at natural entry points.

I also get the impression that the people who back this policy don't actually value education. They don't see it as genuinely making a person better than they would have been otherwise. So they don't see that any investment in education - even a parent investing only in their own child - improves the country's future that little bit.

They see only competition for limited opportunities, and think the extra education is unfair. Instead of seeing that there isn't a fixed number of opportunities, a fixed amount of stuff to share out - either in the world or in the UK. The innovation and effective working which can come from investment in education benefits everyone: through brand new opportunities being created (eg new businesses, new technogies) and simply through improvements in how we all live (eg green technologies, new vaccines, etc.)