Phew! VAT outcome….

[EverythingAllatOnceAllTheTime]

To all those fellow private school parents worried about fees, on Friday our DC’s school advised they will be passing on 8%, with overseas students being liable to ‘differential pricing’, taking the pressure off UK based students.

This is a great result - fingers crossed others schools are able to manage the increase similarly.
Best of luck!

“I can't imagine why anyone would be against it except for selfish reasons.”

Because it is entirely anomalous world wide speaking.

“You won't be able to rejoin the EU as there won't be "the EU". It's already disintegrating, haven't you noticed?”

That’s not true. The EU will be fine ultimately. People are unsettled post Covid and are being manipulated by social media and are victims of it, but that will settle ultimately, once we are through the post Covid economic turmoil, Ultimately both democracy, choice and the free market will prevail.
Regardless of that, any Government we have has to understand the value of our Education sector as a whole, including universities. It’s absolutely key to GB success and sad that successive Governments are so short sighted about the investment required to maintain our strength in that regard. It will lead to more and more decline because Education is future investment personified.

We’re leaving private school this year (going to a state boarding 6th form), but we understand that the school has done similar - they can reclaim VAT via other school activities and looking to lower the fees so that the new fee with VAT is a 7-8% rise on last years fees at most.

It does mean that certain projects they’d planned for restoring buildings etc will be on hold for quite a few years, bit they’ve financially planned for the unexpected after the whole lockdown/reduce fees for online/hybrid learning.

A school near us has actually closed its doors as the impact of parents defecting, and the impact this would have on staff if pupil numbers lowered any more, meant they were no longer viable - but they had financial mismanagement issues, I understand.

https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/democracy-and-society/saving-the-eu-from-disintegration-6765/

Loads of research on this already.

100% agree with you on education.

@twistyizzy

We are lobbying MPs, government, Lords, media at every opportunity. The petition is going to parliament

Labour's majority plus SNP, LibDems, Plsid Cymru and the Greens means that you have zero chance of overturning this manifesto commitment.

Munira Wilson has repeatedly said that the Lib Debs are against VAT on private school fees.

Lib Dems oppose the policy and Greens don't support it. SNP know the issues around Edinburgh

Here we go ..'Tamara and her pony lessons'.

Got anything more original? 🙄

Who do you think will take all the vacant school places that the middle classes can’t afford anymore? Let’s give the best education to even more of those oligarchs kids, yeah?

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/britain-likely-to-lose-nearly-one-in-six-millionaires-by-2028,-report-says/83336596

People may still send their DCs back to the UK for elite boarding, but many many rich are leaving. It started with Brexit and the extra red tape that affects business and loses the EU market. We are all going to get a lot poorer if this new Government does not wake up to economic reality. Constantly giving in to populism and illiterate economic policies is not clever nor in the best interests’ of the poorest in society.
Take non dom- rather than scrap it all together they should have done a deal with the richest like some of the Swiss cantons do, so they pay some tax in UK. It is totally unrealistic to expect billionaires to sign up to UK inheritance tax at.40% - that is never going to happen. Dublin, Singapore, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland, Taiwan - money and investment is constantly leaving the UK and it not a good idea to encourage that to happen even more.
Middle class professionals already pay through their noses in tax too. They are less mobile than the internationally rich though. However, I think there is a tipping point there too if they have the option to work abroad and enjoy an easier life there with better education and healthcare for the whole family.

Don't the schools have to charge VAT on whatever their fees are? So they can't not "pass on" VAT, as that would be illegal. Their only route to mitigating impact is by reducing the headline fee rate on which VAT is charged. Is that right?

Yes, that’s exactly it.

Yes

I think the idea is that the top boarding schools charge eg 50k currently. So they could in future charge British tax payers 40k plus VAT (so 48k in total) and overseas tax payers 60k plus VAT (so 72k in total). It is pretty much what English unis do already across the board. English students pays around 10k for a medical degree, Chinese student pays 60k type thing. A lot of the top British boarding schools have kept overseas numbers down deliberately but may think they could get a lot more overseas rich students, especially from China. There are a ton of rich Chinese people who want to exit China and one way is to buy their kids an international education so at least their kids can go easily in the future.
All this means is that most of the top education in our country goes to an overseas market. Not sure what equality win that is for UK and if the displaced students enter the state English sector, as many will, it does not even lead to more tax take, rather less. But this is what most critics of this policy have been pointing out from the start. So clearly the will is for a policy that won’t make money but is there to make some sort of statement. Same with the non dom policy, it won’t make us richer. It is for show to the electorate.

In theory a school could discount their fees by the equivalent VAT, and then simply add the VAT element to maintain parity with the original fees.