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!

@Moglet4 "There are 9 public schools in the UK - out of over 2,500 private schools. They are truly a world apart from your average day independent, as are the people who attend them. The VAT will make no difference on the types of families whose children attend them. Really, they should be treated as a separate category."

I can't speak for average independent day schools, but there are plenty of families who struggle to pay boarding fees for a couple of children, now in the region of £100,000 p.a. without VAT, at the historic Public Schools. Among them you will still find doctors, dentists, small businessmen, and families who pay nothing.

Each of these schools awards millions of pounds worth of means tested bursaries every year. And I would hazard a guess, which may be wrong, that there is a greater proportion of pupils with 100% fee remissions in these schools than in the sector as a whole. Labour's plan will affect most of these schools just as badly.

You do you. The question is so transparently ridiculous I am not engaging with it.

https://thecritic.co.uk/private-schools-are-a-waste-of-money/

@DadJoke - linked to this article just yesterday.

@Another76543- you can safely infer that the status quo is inciting you to spend on a house.
As for the university way, I hear degree apprenticeships leading to specific jobs are now the cheapest and best option for us middle class pushy parents.

Why pay tax and work your backside off if you don’t need to seems to be the way to go now.

@DadJoke "If people with money, power, influence and a sense of entitlement are invested in anything, it improves."

In general that is probably correct, in this case it is just another empty soundbite because it ignores the reality of the dog-eat-dog state sector and the numbers involved.

Progression to the top universities is a standard metric of educational mobility. The top quintile of comprehensive schools, which outnumber all private schools, are nearly twenty-five times more successful than the bottom quintile at this (and already just as good as private schools)

Do you really think families exiting private schools will seek out bottom quintile state schools?

You are looking at schools rather than pupils in terms of achievement. Look at the value-added statistics to see what a “good” school actually is.

www.theguardian.com/education/2008/feb/21/schools.uk

@EverythingAllatOnceAllTheTime
I don’t otherwise like your ‘sense of entitlement’ comment - it’s unnecessary.

I so agree and it comes up in every post by those opposed to private schools.
No doubt we’ll have “my dc went to top universities from the worst comp in the country and poshos kept asking them where they went to school. What weirdos..”

I don't think stats from more than 16 years ago are relevant to this discussion. Research on the 'London effect' - where the attainment gap between poorer and more well off pupils is narrower in London - suggests that a lot of it is down to there being more non-white pupils in London - so poorer white pupils are underperforming regardless of school characteristics. A lot seems to be down to parental expectations and engagement.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/937114/London_effect_report_-_final_20112020.pdf

@Dadjoke - in all of your musings, you seem to completely forget about what is in an individual child’s best interest and seem to completely ignore social & emotional factors. For most parents, grades are secondary and happiness comes first.
Academic notions of social utility are totally beyond us. We can’t all be Tony Benn, nor do we want to!

@Barbadossunset - they seem to forget that we care zero about Oxbridge now that it doesn’t even lead to jobs anymore anyway!

Funding is best aimed at poor pregnant women so that there is some hope that good nutrition and less stress switches on the best genes possible. Lots of academic achievement is indeed down to genetics.

However, a parent’s desire to make sure their DC has a happy and fulfilled time at school. That is good parenting in my books, always.
I really feel for anyone stuck in schools where DCs do not go in happily every day. How upsetting for them! Childhood is such a short and immensely important time. Those of us who understand mental health - we will always put our DCs happiness first. Mental health is the most important thing these days.

@DadJoke

You haven't answered my question and there are several problems with your citation.

These were "average" London schools, 80% of the parents were educated at least to degree level (the study was reported in 2008 and therefore the parents graduated much earlier while this was still exceptional) and 15% of the children went to Oxford or Cambridge!

Your study is consistent with what is known regarding geographical progression rates to Oxbridge, and of heritable effects on educational attainment. It does not mean that two decades later similar parents in London make the same choices. It certainly does not mean that families in less fortunate parts of the country, having previously avoided the state schools that were available to them, will now choose the worst for their children.

Although, from your response, I assume that you think that they will.

The fact that the State (which includes local authorities in anyone’s definition) is willing to throw the mental health of Alexis Quinn’s DC under the bus is in my books utterly despicable!

Of course her child absolutely deserves to be given a fair hearing and an education where there mental health is not destroyed. In fact, it is a great investment for us as the tax payer because her child may then work and be happy as an adult.

@Marchesman of course they’ll chose the highest performing schools in the best areas. My point still stands. Parents will do their best in every case. Money and privilege always have an effect. It’s vastly magnified by the UK’s system.

Feel free to provide any evidence at all to contradict the study, but again, you are confusing students and school performance.

Parents will do their best in every case.

Exactly, and that often includes parents choosing private school. They are doing the best they can. Any decent parent does the best they can with whatever resources they have.

@Dadjoke - you yourself are being anti elitist and anti privilege.

Perhaps parents choose schools were they believe their DCs won’t get bullied for being “posh” or high attaining?

We have a ton of new legislation protecting children from bullying. Every child has a right to not be bullied and for their mental health not to be destroyed.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/switzerland-high-intergenerational-income-mobility-despite-low-educational-mobility

This is far more relevant to us as a country now.

We need high inter generational income mobility. Forget about the rest! That is stuff of the past.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and award for achievement.

It is inevitably opposed to procedures that reveal differing levels of achievement.

I suppose that’s your real aim.

I have no problem with people choosing the state school they want for their child and so I have no idea what you are talking about. This is a systemic, structural issue, not an issue with parental choice.

That’s very big of you.

Well, if you are otherwise right, and private schooling will never cease to exist, you will only succeed in making it ever more elite and inaccessible.

Something of an own goal, I would say. Still,
at least you will be helping to provide a top
flight education for an increasing number of overseas students.

I'm not sure I follow the logic - if these former private school parents will choose the best state school - how is displacing other less wealthy kids in their best interest?

@DadJoke "I have no problem with people choosing the state school they want for their child."

You and every left-leaning commentator and politician. Which is why comprehensive schools are the most socially selective state schools in the country, why grammar schools are reviled and why educational mobility plummeted after their effective abolition.

As you said: "Money and privilege always have an effect. It’s vastly magnified by the UK’s system."

The point that you miss is that state schools, in which the vast majority of children are educated, are the problem. Fooling around with any other schools will logically not improve them.

I think posters better avoid engage with joke dad, such a waste of space. We shall discuss some strategies to organise a way forward, protest, lobbying, pull resources together.

I live in London and plenty of working class families choose different schools than middle class families, on purpose. I have seen this for years in our state primary. They don’t want to try for the grammar, they don’t want to go to certain schools that appear posh or pushy etc either. They also have very clear ideas as to what schools they like or do not like. The same applies to universities, further down the line.
Interestingly, more often than not, economic migrants think differently.

So perhaps the structural issue is the intellectual elite not listening to the working classes? Just pay them fairer and securer wages, create jobs and higher income mobility. That is the answer. Not everyone wants to go to a posh uni you know. Nor should they have to because some fuddy-duddy researcher who is solipsistic told them to.

And what if there are no suitable schools available? There is no academically selective school available for my child as we don’t live within catchment of grammar. My musical child wouldn’t even be able to do GCSE music because our catchment school doesn’t offer it. We need to eliminate the huge disparity across the state sector before attacking private schools which generally offer an excellent education. Disadvantage and disparity is a far bigger problem in the state system. Private schools are not the issue when it comes to education being unfair. Lots wouldn’t feel the need to use that system if the state offered them at least a half decent alternative.

@DadJoke "Feel free to provide any evidence at all to contradict the study."

Most kind, but why would I want to do that?

It was a tiny observational study twenty years ago that recruited highly selected subjects, and it showed exactly what I would expect.