Thread 2: VAT on school Fees- High court challenge

[EHCPerhaps]

Following on from thread 1
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5160565-vat-on-school-fees-high-court-challenge

Background to legal challenge (not yet a case):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13824931/amp/Single-mother-autistic-child-launches-High-Court-challenge-Labours-private-schools-VAT-raid-claiming-violates-daughters-right-education.html

Sorry to begin a new thread, OP, but your thread filled up very quickly!

Why aren’t the people here advocating for equity doing so properly?

Truly equitable education is abolishing all private and grammar schools with school places allocated by ballot.

All the current policy does is remove grammar places for children who don’t have parents with the resources to tutor intensely, and reduce catchments to the best state schools as wealthy parents “buy” access to better schools.

The worst bit about the VAT on private schools is the total lack of ambition. There are solutions if you want equality of opportunity and fairness but this isn’t going to do. A waste of political capital that doesn’t seem likely to raise that much money.

school places allocated by ballot.

I don’t see how that would work at a national level, particularly in more rural areas. LA transport costs would skyrocket, too.

What I find deeply offensive is people deliberately causing harm to children because all children being harmed equally is "fairer"

Especially when aimed at my own child.

I will never, ever forgive that.

Our city proposed this but even the parents in areas where the schools weren’t deemed particularly good weren’t in favour - sending your child to a school 3/4/5 miles away when they can walk to school or take a short bus ride really isn’t practical for many lower income families.

@remotecontrolowls ,

‘But the problem is when you don't have to deal with it, or even look at it, it stops becoming a political issue. So people vote according to tax rates, or Brexit, and pretend they don't but know that the terrible policies that have targeted the poorest in society don't affect them, whilst congratulating themselves on the amount of money they save the taxpayer and wanting gratitude. Their complacency costs a lot more.
I find the 'I pay for things I don't need so be grateful' attitude is deeply offensive. It's not how society works. Do you feel that way about the Health Service too?
Society works best if everyone has a vested interest in its systems. You can been sold a lie that you can buy your way out of it.’

Interesting how the same people didn’t object to raising taxes to bailout the finance sector and its supporting hangers in in 2008.

I often think it would be a really interesting thought experiment to wonder what would have happened without a bank bailout, which is how capitalism ought to work.

Well, a lot of private schools pupils would have been withdrawn and many by would have gone to the wall. And, at the same time, smaller leaner private schools would have been started, and some of those who thought they would never use the state sector would have to, and be taking a keen interest in how it worked.

And, at the same time, houses would have collapsed with many forced sales by bankers, city lawyers etc, but allowing teachers, ‘ordinary’ solicitors, young professionals to buy decent houses (as they once could).

And out of the depression (which I am not denying would have happened) would have come new opportunities to make wealth, but in different hands.

That is how capitalism is meant to work! The idea of the state taxing the poor and cutting up interred rates to zero to support the financiers and asset rich is a perversion of capitalism-crony capitalism, entrenching wealth in the same hands in perpetuity.

People’s attitude to the private and state school sector would be altered if everyone felt that they may end up in either one of them!

you could make those choices to pay your way out of those dire state schools, other people cannot.

I agree. That’s why I said that’s it’s a disgrace that services which the state should provide are often so dire. Not everyone has that choice.

But do you know what luxury those smaller classes also have? No poor kids. Apart from the 1% who are on 100% means tested benefits.

A far higher number than that are on full bursaries at our school. In addition, private school children do actually mix with others outside school, from a variety of backgrounds.

So your kids don't have the educated alongside those who are going to food banks, who are coming to school without breakfast, or in dirty clothes, or who have chaotic and dysfunctional lives.

I went to (state) school with pupils from exactly that sort of background and my children are fully aware of the issues which some children face.

I find the 'I pay for things I don't need so be grateful' attitude is deeply offensive. It's not how society works. Do you feel that way about the Health Service too?

At no point have I said anyone should be grateful for my choices. The fact remains though that my choices mean that the state education system saves money through my choices not to use it. It’s the same with healthcare and dentistry. I have stated that I’m happy to pay taxes for services which I don’t use, because a well educated and healthy society benefits everyone. What I do object to is paying a tax penalty for not using a system we have already contributed a huge amount of tax towards.

Trying to impose equity in areas such as schooling is totally false. There will always be limited resources and variability in who lives nearby which school - and like with healthcare provision, most people prioritise distance to the service (the school or clinic).
Plus there are inbuilt variables - a child with learning disability needs a different service to one who is average, and a child who is gifted at sport or ballet may need another model. How is the equity measured? Raw outcomes are meaningless when children don't start at the same level, don't have the same potential and don't have the same home environment. How do you equate for the negative impact of a single bullying child in your class? Or a very disruptive child with SEN? Does the child with SEN get more resource or the children whose education is being disrupted by them? Equity really is a myth here - you need to look at local needs and tailor schools to what their pupils need.

In rural areas, you may only have one or two schools to be allocated due to distance, in denser populations with more competition you’d have more. In many places - I live in one of them - there are 5/6 schools that I could send my kids to.

In reality, two are grammar, one is religious, and one has a tiny catchment which I’m not in despite being just over a mile and a half away. To buy a house in catchment you need to spend £1m +. It’s no better than paying school fees and widens the economic gap even further by keeping house prices inflated.

I agree that equity in education is false, it just seems to underpin this discussion more than it should when it’s clearly not the goal.

This is a policy to dig behind the sofa for some change and lean into the populist culture wars that have defined our politics for the last decade.

It isn’t going to make anything fairer or better.

Tailored education that suits the child should 100% be what the government is aspiring for - that’s the ambition I’d love to see. The whole system is broken and VAT on school fees isn’t going to fix it.

My DC1’s state grammar and has classes of 25 and my DC2’s private has classes of 22/23.

The fees that I pay to the private school cover bursaries and scholarships for other pupils, capital projects and TPS contributions. Whereas state schools get additional funding for these things above the £7k per child.

State schools can also reclaim input VAT which private schools cannot. Private schools which aren’t charities also have to pay full business rates.

Schools that allocate places by lottery wouldn’t have a distance criteria, so in rural areas DC could be allocated a school an unreasonable distance away.

Cambridge University prioritises the admission of lower ability applicants from state schools, to the point now that students from private schools are 1.4 times more likely to achieve firsts than students from comprehensive schools; and "academics" recommend that universities in general should "offer more strongly weighted preferential access to ... specifically non-private-school pupils."

Yet private schools, contrary to your Eton example, confer no statistically significant academic attainment advantage.

@Boohoo76 ,

‘The fees that I pay to the private school cover bursaries and scholarships for other pupils, capital projects and TPS contributions. Whereas state schools get additional funding for these things above the £7k per child.’

The vast majority of bursaries and scholarships don’t come from fees but gifts, and are a tiny proportion of the fees. If you can evidence that is not the case, I would love to see it,

Do you not think the state school budget covers the TPS? I assure you it does. And the £7,000 is a rough estimate if the total including capital projects, the basic is about £5,600/pupil.

@DoThePropeller "Why aren’t the people here advocating for equity doing so properly?"

I assume we all know the answer to that.

@Marchesman ,

‘Yet private schools, contrary to your Eton example, confer no statistically significant academic attainment advantage.’

Really? The smaller classes, personalised education etc confer no statistically significant attainment advantage? Do you have a link to research suggesting that?

Because every single private school will talk about its ‘added value’ in terms of results and, if they can’t confer a significant attainment advantage, they must be doing something wrong for all that money!

It is pretty clear that tax advisers have told the Government that they cannot have a value added tax that exempts the end user by virtue of having SEND. Because that is not how a value added tax works.

So they have decided to throw children with SEND under the bus whose schooling is not funded by the council via EHCP for a specific school.
That is a breach of the human rights act.
The human rights act necessitates that a child’s need is met in education. A child who has been failed in state education and has anything to back that up (NHS letters, emails to school SENCO, high absence rates etc) who then has gone to a private school instead, that is proof enough that the private school has then stepped in and met their need. At that point, it is illegal for the Government to interfere with that choice.

They cannot just try and make the value added tax work somehow at the expense of children with SEND! It is pretty outrageous what they are proposing.

Is some far left chat site down or something? The mental gymnastics on display here desperately trying to wrap an education tax up as some sort of moral act rather than self defeating backward spite is beyond ludicrous.

Why do you think you know better than me about my DC’s school. My DC’s school doesn’t have any endowments (which is not uncommon for a former all girls school - historically the endowments were bestowed upon boys schools) so I am absolutely correct that the scholarships and bursaries are taken from fee income.

And actually the Governent have covered the increased contributions to the TPS.

And additional funding is provided to state schools for capital projects.

@Boohoo76 ,

I don’t know about your DC’s school; how could I? But perhaps you would like to (honestly) share the percentage of fees going on scholarships and endowments? Nationally it is certainly miniscule.

I said gifts, not purely endowments. And plenty of parents and alumnae are generous.

‘And actually the Governent have covered the increased contributions to the TPS.’

The increase in TPS is massively different from what you claimed in your first post, the entire TPS!

‘And additional funding is provided to state schools for capital projects.’

As I already explained the £7,000 per pupil takes that into account, then actual base number is £5,600 per pupil.

Private schools have superficially advantageous staff/pupil ratios because the uptake of some subjects is very small, and sport, music, theatre etc also have to be taught and staffed. In the state sector if the school day ends at 3pm parents can and do pay for these things separately (with as far as I know, no expectation that they will attract VAT); in a private school the day may end at 6pm or 9pm and non-academic activities are included in the price.

Class size invariably figures in these discussions and it is irrelevant, . Minimal effort will show why.

Anecdotes are often unhelpful but in this case one is illustrative. My children went to a school where fees are around £50,000 pa after extras are included. In my sons' (top) GCSE maths and English sets there were/are 24-25 pupils, likewise in the second set. All of them would normally manage A stars. In the bottom two sets there were and are around 10. So in this instance 1) class size is inversely proportional to attainment 2) no one was ever seen outside the head's office demanding smaller classes.

No evidence has ever been shown for a class size effect in UK secondary education - although Green, for example, and the IFS would have you believe otherwise.

Private schools cost more in the main because they have much longer school days and higher staff costs.

Does "every single private school ... talk about its ‘added value’ in terms of results"? I don't recall ever seeing such a thing. Could you find me an example?

Exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission.

www.nature.com/articles/s41539-018-0019-8

@Marchesman ,

‘Exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission.’

That is the whole concept of added value, it is the difference between your expected result and what the school obtains.

@Marchesman ,

‘Anecdotes are often unhelpful but in this case one is illustrative. My children went to a school where fees are around £50,000 pa after extras are included. In my sons' (top) GCSE maths and English sets there were/are 24-25 pupils, likewise in the second set. All of them would normally manage A stars. In the bottom two sets there were and are around 10. So in this instance 1) class size is inversely proportional to attainment 2) no one was ever seen outside the head's office demanding smaller classes.

No evidence has ever been shown for a class size effect in UK secondary education - although Green, for example, and the IFS would have you believe otherwise.’

24/25 is still considerably smaller than 30, and many state schools are now beyond 30. I think anything above 24 is unacceptable and hard to teach, especially for those kind of fees but, ultimately, GCSEs are piss easy for those with aptitude, so it doesn’t really matter.

Clearly, top set pupils massively subsidise the bottom sets, who require more individual attention and, at A levels, any decent private schools will try to limit set size to 12 max. It doesn’t always work that way for a variety of reasons but A level sets above 12 aren’t easy to teach well either.

I can promise you as an ex teacher class size makes a huge difference. Of course those large top sets will get 7s to mostly 8s and 9s, because they should be, but that doesn’t mean the practicals will run brilliantly or just they will get the extra stretch and challenge and support that they could in a smaller set.