Request a state school place if you want it or not

[clarkkentsglasses]

This email is doing the rounds aimed at private school parents:

"The idea is to try to flood the Council with requests for urgent school places from September. If they get tens of thousands of emails like this we may see them under pressure."

Basically request a state school place if you want it or not.

We are talking about the impact on children, do you get that? State school children. Or do they just not count?

Education budgets are already running at a massive deficit in most la’s mainly due to high needs budgets, if they did get extra funding through the vat then it is unlikely that admissions staff will be the priority they will just make people wait. I don’t actually agree with vat on education by the way but I think it’s horrendous of some private school parents to think it’s ok to make people who have no say suffer just to prove a point. If kids are out of school it can have all sorts of implications as parents may end up losing jobs if they have to take time off work to look after children with no school even if it’s only a few months delay.

@Paradoxygen

"There are 20% in private education at sixth form level."

No, this is a misunderstanding. Private school children make up about 18% of students who are taking A Levels. This excludes all the 6th form/FE vocational courses, BTECs etc.

But there are so few private school children that them having their education disrupted and moved to state school won’t have any impact, or so we are told. And in any case it is exceedingly unlikely more than a handful of parents would do this.

Sadly, this is true. Our local LA admissions teams have been overwhelmed this week and the privilege and lack of understanding about this issue this week on Twitter has been vile. It’s despicable and as a NEU member-we are not terrified or supportive and will all still vote for Labour and the VAT.

The point they would be trying to prove would be that their children will suffer through the imposition of VAT despite it being unlikely that it will actually bring in much money and might cost money.

In terms of education budgets running at a deficit; isn’t it a good thing then that these parents are not incurring costs by paying for their children’s education themselves?

as a NEU member-we are not terrified or supportive and will all still vote for Labour and the VAT.

As an NEU member, i wouldn’t expect you to do otherwise.

In terms of harm to children, this protest is hardly comparable to the harm that would have been caused by the additional lockdowns NEU called for in Covid.

But who are you trying to prove the point to? The only people who will be aware if this is done are the people who it’s effects, ie, the children out of school and the la admin staff. no one in power will be bothered it prob won’t even get on their radar as the people effected are such a small number but for the effected people it can have a massive effect on their lives.

re your second point as I said I don’t agree with vat on education so I agree with your second point but not the way of proving the point.

So does that make it okay then?

We have no way of knowing what the impact will be yet. How can you be so sure that only a handful of parents would do this? Now you are having to acknowledge that such sabotage is actually being talked about by some private school parents, you are switching to minimising it to suit your own agenda. Predictable really as it is exactly what the other poster did.

Most private school parents can easily afford increases in fees. They might moan about having to pay it but, in the end they will just stump up the extra costs.

You’d have to be very bad at managing money if you decided to send your child to a fee paying school and had no wiggle room for increases.

Most parents do allow for a yearly increase but not 20% in one go. And this comes on top of big increases in household costs due to the cost of living crisis. Private school parents are not all immune to the cost of living crisis. Some parents put their children in private school out of desperation when the state system fails their children. These type of parents often have a lot less wriggle room.

Because pissing around with vexatious applications is a waste of schools' and councils' time and money in paying staff to deal with them, prevents children who genuinely need a place from accessing it promptly and in the event of them deciding to ghost the school on the first day, takes up essential time, money and resources in conducting investigations to establish that the child is safe and not at risk physically, mentally or of not being able to access education to the detriment of those children who are at risk.

Basically, if they ghost, they're deliberately interfering with the school and LA's attempts to protect children from FGM, radicalisation, county lines involvement, domestic abuse and neglect, as well as the right of actually vulnerable children to access an education.

All children count, obviously. Private school parents are being told “tough, suck it up, or move to state”. The Labour Party are telling us that there are plenty of state places for everyone and that the state system won’t be impacted. If that’s true, an increase in state applications shouldn’t be a problem. The Labour Party want people to move to state. They’ve already said they’d prefer private schools to be abolished. They can’t have it both ways.

Previous posters have said it wouldn’t be noticeable as a form of protest, that there are so few private school children that if they move to state then there would be no impact, that the applications would just be binned anyway. It is like Schrodingers cat.

Well I’m sure they have more wiggle room than most people. Why don’t they get a cheaper car or go without holidays?

Many already do.

Many do already. Everyone has finite resources. At some point, there are things which become unaffordable. Everyone has a different tipping point. For many, a 20% increase in a cost of a significant outgoing will make it unaffordable.

That’s just not my experience. Sorry if it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

Good to hear you have room to reduce your holidays and trade down from your Tesla. It seems you don’t want to hear others are not in the same situation.

You really thing you’ve being clever don’t you? My friend is a single mum and has her youngest in private school. I don’t remember her going on holiday in all the years that I have known her. Her car is old too. I have another friend who moved her child from state to private (because the state school wasn’t meating his needs) and one of the first things that she said to me after the move was that the parents at the state school had nicer cars.

In fact my DH’s car is 12 years old. We have hung onto it to try to save money but it is not ULEZ compliant so we are going to have to change it sooner rather than later. It’s valued at £2500 so I’ll think we’ll struggle to find anything cheaper that is also ULEZ compliant.

Yes, some people have fancy cars but not everyone. And there are lots of people who don’t have any holidays never mind expensive holidays.

I meant my experience of private school parents. But you knew that 😊

The parents you chum alongside at your private school do not represent all private school parents. Or do you mean you are not actually at a private school so don’t actually have first hand knowledge of the range of parents attending?

Look, you and others are not going to convince people that the majority who send their kids to private schools are just aspirational paupers who are now being discriminated against.

I am not going to qualify my viewpoint by giving away personal information about my family but I am in a position to understand the reality.

Let’s look at the fact that the private schools in my city, generally do not offer 30 hours per week of funded childcare for children over 3 in their nursery / reception provisions. Why don’t they do this? Well because the majority of their clients earn too much money to actually qualify for it in the first place.

The day nursery that I used for my DC doesn’t offer 30 free hours, neither do
most of the other day nurseries around here. It’s because the hours are not properly funded by the Government. Nothing to do with what the parents earn.